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

[Rich Felker <dalias at libc dot org>]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 11:03:16PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The point of this joke is even more important now than it was when I
> first wrote it.  Please do not remove it.
> 
> GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is
> not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this.
> 
> Please ack.

I was one of the people involved in conversations leading up to this,
and while I strongly support a message of standing up for bodily and
reproductive autonomy, and specifically the right to abortion, I saw
the joke as highly out-of-place and harmful for reasons very close to
what Carlos already explained.

Abortion is a topic potentially connected to all sorts of personal
trauma -- being forced to become or stay pregnant against one's will,
having to terminate a wanted pregnancy out of medical necessity,
being/feeling forced to terminate by someone with power over you or by
other circumstances, etc. Users of glibc should not have their
attention drawn in such directions unexpectedly when they go to lookup
whether glibc documents any specific behavior for the abort()
function, and participants in the project should not feel like they're
required to be part in pushing that experience on others.

Rich