Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

But here, I think we're looking at the government trying very hard to make sure nobody accidentally or unthinkingly uses a teratogen while pregnant, which is a different sort of thing than trying to make sure that nobody uses a teratogen to intentionally maim their own fetus, which is what criminalization would be for.

I do accept that there are people with very poor decision-making abilities, and addiction probably plays a large role in that. And we do, at some points, take people's control of their own bodies away from them when they seem really likely to damage themselves. We don't lock up smokers for their own good, but we do commit people to psychiatric care when they start making obvious suicide attempts. So I accept that there's a line of "a danger to yourself and others" that can be crossed, where a deliberate danger to a future kid you plan to give birth to can count as "others", but it seems like it would be a pretty high bar, and also it would include a lot of non-pregnant people of both sexes.