From Scott Aaronson's blog today: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6518
"Most obviously for me, the continued viability of Texas as a place for science, for research, for technology companies, is now in severe doubt. Already this year, our 50-member CS department at UT Austin has had faculty members leave, and faculty candidates turn us down, with abortion being the stated reason, and I expect that to accelerate."
I think if people turn down jobs in states because of restrictive abortion laws, it's because they have so much choice in desirable employers that they can select on issues that almost everyone else would live with, whether they personally approve or not.
And lastly, if anything is going to undermine Austin universities in terms of science research and education, it's the rampant devaluation of academic standards, excessive bureaucratization, grade inflation, and churning out of degrees in exchange for tuition money. Abortion will have little if anything to do with it.
a) I assume you're talking about the past, and not the future.
b) The issue is less that our laws are restrictive, and more that they're written in a capricious, illogical, incomplete, and ignorant way. What do you think is going to happen to people with emergency reproductive conditions (e.g. late stage ectopic pregnancies) when doctors have a prison sentence hanging over their heads if they accidentally terminate a viable pregnancy?
If I was a woman trying to get pregnant, I'd be getting the fuck out of these redstate shitholes because I don't want to die.
EDIT: You seem to have written a reply to this comment and then deleted it. I composed a counter-reply in my head on my walk home from the bar, before seeing that your reply had vanished. That counter-reply was: "Your flippant disregard for human life is as astonishing as it is disgusting."
This decision is going to kill real people with hopes and dreams and loved ones and people who depend on them. If you support it, or publish apologia for it, you are some combination of a moron and/or a monster.
It really is that bad.
The right have been emboldened.
Thomas is no longer afraid to say their goals out loud: they are coming for more rights.
I'm terrified. As a queer person I already feel targeted.
Dehumanization & equating all queer people to pedophiles is a Nazi tactic which allows people to delude & rationalize to themselves that they are actually doing the right thing whilst perpetrating their hate and violence.
Not even going to go on tangent about Thomas' wife. It's the same undeniable b.s. that they espouse at their confirmations: I don't bring my personal (wife's) opinions into rulings (marriage).
Below is my reply, which I am re-writing for context, and I will have to encroach on everyone's trust that what I write below completely represents the original. Whether I am a "moron and/or a monster" I will leave for you all to decide.
I will say, though, that for Americans, the abortion issue is out of the courts and in the purview of federal and state legislatures. We need to have these conversations sooner than later, if not now. There is a real concern about maternal health and freedom, just as there is one about rights to life and protection in utero.
___
I am speaking about the past and present. One should be skeptical of predictions about the future.
The motivation for the decision process you describe is fear. Fear or harm, fear of death. Fear itself is irrational (I do not mean this in a pejorative sense) but powerful emotion, but it is not one that I believe motivates people when they are trying to have children. Pregnancy can have many complications that can be debilitating or even fatal (depression, internal bleeding, sepsis, hormonal dysfunction, and so on), and lack of access to abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example, is only of many factors that would weight against a potential pregnancy. If lack of access over abortion is an overriding fear for women looking to have children, I suspect that fear could just as easily be replaced by other non-abortion-related dangers. Becoming a parent can be scary, and perhaps now isn't the right time. Maybe later.
Also, I want to stress the earlier point I made about living under laws, good or bad. Women bear children because they want them. I believe this to broadly be true, but the case is especially strong in societies where abortion and more importantly contraception are available. Women bear children because they want to raise them, watch them grow, and start families of their own. Should any complications arise from pregnancy, one adapts and lives with them. Despite the risks, which historically had been far graver until very recently, over 7 billion of us exist. I believe that red state or blue state, abortion or no, people will continue to have children, and they will do so in whatever state they are able to raise them. While it is certainly understandable for women, especially if sexually active, who don't yet want to have children to avoid moving to states with outright abortion bans rather than restrictions to the 1st trimester, I doubt it will be an important consideration for those who want to have them.
To your specific point, if laws are so poorly written that they endanger women's lives, such as in ectopic pregnancies, then I expect the laws will change in response to outrage over deaths. Laws that affect people's lives are unavoidable but can unfortunately cause that to happen (e.g. raising speed limits, drug testing requirements, etc.). However, I am not so pessimistic that to believe that no law can be written as a reasonable compromise. And I never would be so pessimistic so as to give up entirely on elected legislatures and instead choose to live under the fiat of judges in hope that their decisions are optimal. There is certainly precedent for courts to make (very recently, in many eyes) stupidly written, poorly reasoned decisions.
Strong arguments don't lead with transparent emotional projection. If it's important to you to imagine that I am "likely too angry for debate", you are likely already rationalizing an indefensible position you are attached to for whatever reason. Better to abandon it.
Sifting through the largely irrelevant (in the sense of the immediate context of this thread) mountain of words you've dumped here, it seems that the best you can do wrt. the actual substance of my original comment is that women will first have to die to generate "outrage" that will then somehow cause laws to change, to which I think my originally drafted reply suits just fine. Apologia for policy that will kill people is astonishing; it is disgusting; and it is what precisely you are engaging in here.
According to Wikipedia: "Most countries in the European Union allow abortion on demand during the first trimester, with Sweden and the Netherlands having more extended time limits." That's the same as what was once guaranteed in the US under Roe.
Still, 2nd trimester abortions are very uncommon to be legal in Europe. Is there any evidence to suggest that the liberal abortion laws in the US up until today attracted people from Europe to take jobs in the US instead of their home countries with more restrictive abortion laws?
And this decision is arguably the canary in the coal mine; note Thomas’s concurrence. Things could get very, very dark in the more right-wing US states.
