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Re: [rain1 at airmail dot cc] Delete abortion joke


On May  6, 2018, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:

> (Part of why I have repeatedly refused to back my patch out is to
> stand for the principle that the GNU Project Leader _shouldn't_ have
> ex officio power to override a consensus decision of the active
> maintainers of a specific piece of software.  He should have to
> persuade us to change our minds, instead.)

Do you agree, however, that the consensus was only apparent, because
nobody else thought of asking him, and I, who was uncomfortable with the
change, decided to only speak up after consulting him?

> That's a big topic.  I will try to answer briefly.

Thanks for taking the time to put together all that information!  That's
appreciated.


> Now let's go back to the joke that we're arguing about.  In the
> description of the C library function named "abort," the manual has a
> box in which it warns that "proposed censorship regulations may
> prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of
> calling this function."  Put yourself in the shoes of someone who
> doesn't know about the USA's "gag rule", but does know that the
> English word for intentionally terminating a pregnancy is "abort",
> and that this is controversial in many places, and, perhaps, has had
> to struggle with a decision to do this or not do this herself.

Wait, is it only for intentional termination?  I was thinking
miscarriage throughout most of the entire conversation, and missed some
of the possibilities of trauma for that.

As for not knowing about the law, that's a shortcoming that's easy to
fix with more speech, not less.

We could have a note along these lines, sidestepping the humor, giving
more information and still clearly taking the anti-censorship stand:

  It is our belief that our providing information on how to call this
  function, or what it does, does not run afoul of the unjust US gag
  rule that punishes with financial strangling organizations that offer
  medical advice or information about the possibility of interrupting
  pregnancies.  If our understanding is found to be incorrect, we may be
  forced to remove this piece of documentation.  That would be
  unfortunate, but not as bad as being forced to withhold from patients
  information that could enable them to decide more intelligently about
  their own health and lives.


> Do you see that it can be read as _trivializing_ that decision, by
> comparing it to the actually-trivial decision that a programmer makes
> when they write code that calls abort()?

> Maybe even more importantly, do you see how this trivializes _the
> censorship_, by virtue of that same implicit comparison?

I think I do, and I hope the suggestion above addresses both points.


> Do you see how _merely bringing the topic up at all_ could be an
> unwelcome reminder for someone who had had a bad abortion-related
> experience in the past, whatever that was?

I do, but I also realize that the alternative would be to remove the
documentation for abort altogether.  Since nobody suggested us to do
that, I assume we're in consensus about documenting it regardless of the
fact that it is a reminder of such traumatic experiences.  Hopefully the
suggestion above will put it under an adequate light.


-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist|Red Hat Brasil GNU Toolchain Engineer


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