3) The number of people in genealogy groups who are happy that our hobby and our employment opportunities in the field are being wiped out by an anti-intellectual right wing government will never cease to amaze me.

2) Even records made available through private companies are generally supported by government grants and contracts somewhere along the line.

Every time I request assistance from an archive, I ask them to let me know of any costs, so that they know up front that I’m open to compensating them.

Personal opinions are highly relevant. We aren’t machines. I edit a lot of genealogical work and regularly have to point out when genealogists expose their strong biases and lack of knowledge.

The word *should* is the important one. If a genealogist today wants to ban abortions, I assume they haven't learned the history, understood the context, and seen the human impact in records they should have knowledge about to compile a quality genealogy.

Just because we *can* analyze records for ourselves, we don't have the time to do that for every claim. We should be able to trust other people's work, and their political views cast doubt on their output.

All times. Healthy safe abortions have been conducted throughout documented human history. The only times they are unsafe is when laws are made to ban them.

That is correct. And the anti-abortion Republican does not understand or care that natural occurrences occur and are happy to put women in jail for having miscarriages.

I trust the current person infinitely less than the original record creator, since a trusted genealogist would have the experience in historical vital records to know why medical abortion is necessary for positive maternal health outcomes.