Even Disney is going to transport workers to abortion-legal states as needed as "health benefit".
It's certainly a perk and good on Google for this one, but we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company.
The jaded side of me wonders if some amount of companies figured it'd be cheaper to pay for an abortion than maternity leave and health insurance.
Duo you mean that women who undergo abortion wild not do that if they had access to healthcare and maternity leave?
We have access to both and still have abortions. About 220k per year, which is about 30% of all pregnancies.
Either we have a dumb population that did not know what contraception is (we have sex ed all the time), or there are deeper reasons for this action which is never fun for a woman.
You also have to keep in mind that the cost of onboarding a new developer is orders of magnitude more expensive than allowing a developer to relocate out of state or pay for a temporary trip there.
The cynical view is it might be better for them to keep up the supply of low skilled labor...
But we're already here. We are in that dark place now. It's reality that if you work for big tech you get a perk this perk, and if not, you don't.
Edit: point being that we aren't heading to a bad place. Maybe we are heading to a worse place, but this has put a ton of people in a very bad place already.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/17/apple-is-monitori...
If they're truly against these policies, gutting those states of thousands of high earning jobs and refusing to build any new offices is the most effective way to do it.
The Russian sanctions actually surprised me in that a lot of corporations actually pulled out and fast. I'll be even more surprised if they stay out for years to come.
They can't exactly be one to take principled stances can they...
Note that most contraceptives prevent implantation and IVF creates more embryos than needed. Both are no-no’s under the new regime. And miscarriages and stillbirths are going to be a legal minefield there.
This is part of the stated plan: “Josh Hawley says abortion ruling will push people to move states, strengthening the GOP” https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article2...
The sad thing is this comes right as remote work has the potential to do the opposite: bring Americans closer together by allowing more opportunity in states people have been leaving for decades in order to seek opportunity in tech and other industries.
Not saying I agree with either perspective, but I think it's very naive to assume WFH could unite the increasingly polarized american peoples.
Sounds a lot like “if she floats she’s a witch”
Do you have any examples of specific laws of in any states that would make contraception or IVF illegal?
Most pro-life people are very supportive of IVF as they are all about people having more babies. Many states with anti-abortion laws also have laws explicitly making surrogacy legal (which requires IVF).
These rights and others are directly questioned in the text of the SCOTUS concurrence today: "For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
Neal Katyal: “That's right to privacy, contraception, marriage equality,etc”
So like you said, the pro-life folks would force every single one to be kept.
Of course that doesn't matter when legislators are not required to not lie in legislation.
"The Industry" is an embarrassment. It is lazy, incompetent, and would be drowning if not for its oligopoly status. Companies who produce useful software will win out over the lackadaisical tech culture that exists today.
What the people bemoaning this decision should worry about is the regulatory backlash against technology--coming from the right--which they totally ignored and pretended was not possible. This decision is a precursor to that inevitability.
Interesting business decision.
The question I have, some states are going to call abortion murder and charge it as such. Is Google aiding and abetting a homicide?
But, you realize it's largely a question of axioms, right? Two sides are talking past each other because they take their axioms for granted as self-evident.
It's simply a question of a woman's reproductive rights if you take it as axiomatic that a fetus isn't a person.
I don't take it as axiomatic that personhood begins at conception, but if I did, it would all of a sudden be a question of balancing the rights of two people instead of just the woman's reproductive rights. We don't have a clean scientific definition of personhood. The fetus is genetically distinct and is essentially a parasitic larval human. Scientifically, it's just tissue, but so am I. The real question is if it's a person, and that's a legal and moral question that is largely axiomatic.
The reality is that very few of us have a problem with aborting an unviable fetus or early abortion in cases of rape, very few of us support aborting a perfectly healthy fetus minutes before birth, and hard science doesn't provide us many clear lines somewhere in the middle.
> Second, as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today’s decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel. May a State retroactively impose liability or punishment for an abortion that occurred before today’s decision takes effect? In my view, the answer is no based on the Due Process Clause or the Ex Post Facto Clause.
(Note: i'm for abortion rules based on sentience level - i think that sentience level of cats/dogs/pigs is where we shouldn't be able to end the life at will while say fish level is ok, chicken is still ok though feels a bit uneasy, and that means as far as i understand about 3, may be 4 months cut-off for abortion in my view (incest and serious genetic defects a bit more complicated, and i think it warrants somewhat later cut-off))
do you have an actual reason for thinking this will happen? this is detached from reality, both of these procedures are meant to create babies which are carried to term, which is the fundamental goal of pro-life policies
1. Going to your super cool tech job in California when you get out of college.
2. After that, you get older and want to buy a house and settle down, and not pay state income tax, and so you move out to a red state to work remote and turn it blue with all the love of diversity picked up in California.
Strict abortion laws might serve as somewhat of a barrier to this sort of cultural re-diffusion.
I joked about how woke CA and hate high taxes, but I don't want my life managed by head elected by religious believers/idealogues.
The answer is NO
No thanks. Stay in California, please.
I like Texas as it is. Texas will likely, eventually, end up passing some sort of abortion laws similar to what European nations have - no abortions after 12 weeks, abortions in case of incest / rape, etc.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see Congress get off their ass and do their job and work together on federal abortion laws, since that's... you know... their goddamn fucking job... to pass laws... but we all know it'll never happen because Nancy Pelosi can cry to her ultra-liberal base that, "We TRIED sooooo hard, but the mean ol' Republicans won't let us abort babies 7 seconds before they're born!" and Mitch McConnell can cry to his ultra-conservative base that, "We wanted to meet those baby killers halfway, but they want to abort babies when they're still 16-cell zygotes! Godless heathens!"
And then we end up right back to where we are now, with states deciding... all because we have Congressional leadership and members who are so cowardly they don't understand that their job isn't to get re-elected, it's to pass laws beneficial to the entire nation, with which, the entire nation can live.
Do NOT fund states that suppress our rights.
This is all about status and which states we view as beneath our own. Trying to do economic sanctions as a whole has not been effective in recent state-wide rights deprivation legislation, and I don't think it will do much here either.
We need to expand the court, have a civil war, or something like that. (I'm not sure if I'm kidding anymore, talking to relatives in red states shows a seething hatred of people with my beliefs that makes me think that at any moment all these people may take up arms like on Jan 6. It certainly seems like many have very violent thoughts and view the world as based on gun violence, and think that their blue state "enemies" will come for them wi try guns just as they fantasize about whipping out there own. It's truly sick)
I think something is already inconsolable in this country.
I'm empathetic to the sentiment, but I think we have to be a bit proportional about this kind of stuff, because 'our rights' is a really, really broad thing, and every issue is different.
For example, if this were more of a perfunctory argument about state vs. federal rights, and SCOTUS was really consistent about it, and this was a social issue that got caught up in a legal issue ... and otherwise 'pretty much most states had good rights' on this issue, well, then the whole thing would look different.
So it's hard to make blanket statements about 'rights' and even specific issues are just full of nuance.
It's probably a good decision by Google and they likely should apply some pragmatic pressure to help a resolution on this one.
After Trump/Jan 6/Ongoing investigations, BLM protests, COVID, and literally Russian invasion of a major country, I thought 'Black Swan' season was over! My god man, this is just too much. Yet another 'big fight'. Hey Zeus. It'd be nice to have some centrist consensus on a lot of this because ironically people are not remotely as divided as it seems from the headlines.
I think it's likely best of Bit Tech navigates these issues separately, with careful deliberation, 'doing the right thing' while not getting to populist about it ... because bigger question for Google, is 'what to do next'?.
It'd be nice to be able to vote with my feet on some of these things. If course, most large employers are also overtly against this new decision and doing things like directly funding abortions, so now I have that whole aspect to consider.
Maybe we can work on making it easier for small and medium sized business to offer interstate remote work arrangements? Seems like megacorps have an unfair advantage in dealing with the red tape hiring employees who reside in N different states.
[1] Yes, reasonable people can disagree about when personhood is viable. And yes, I support bodily autonomy when other people aren't involved, including most drug legalization, etc.
Are you worried you'll accidentally have an abortion if you live where it's legal? Or do you just prefer to be physically farther away when other people do it?
At the same time easy abortion makes hookup culture more prevalent which can lead to other problems with societies.
Abortion rights might be good for business.
This is a serious issue and these articles are important. If anything they put pressure on more companies.
Abortion is an important issue but hardly the only one.
