Talk:Abortion in California

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Edit warring in the lead sentence[edit]

Recent edit warring has centered around a recent change to the lead which introduced a description of fetal viability into the the lead sentence. The user who added this is a good faith editor with eight previous good improvements to the article. There are three issues with this good-faith change:

it is unique information in the lead which is not mentioned in the body (section Abortion in California § Legislative history mentions fetal viability, but with different values, leading to an internal dispute about facts)
it is too much detail for the lead, and especially for the WP:LEADSENTENCE, given that "fetal viability" was already linked in that sentence; an interested reader could just click it. (The lead sentence of a article "tell[s] the nonspecialist reader what or who the subject is, ... Try to not overload the first sentence by describing everything notable about the subject.") Previous versions were briefer, better.
Finally, what caused the edit warring wasn't even anything to do with the details of viability, or where in the article it should be discussed; rather, it was the introduction of the phrase "pregnant person" into the lead sentence. This ignited the edit warring, and has now been mentioned at WP:ANI, due to a related issue with this wording at other articles. Previous versions were uncontentious.

For all of these reasons, I have restored the wording of the lead sentence from the preceding version:

Abortion in California is legal up to the point of fetal viability.

which has been stable since June. Alternatively, the version before that,

Abortion in California is legal.

was stable for two years since its addition in May 2019. Either of those two would be fine as the lead sentence in my opinion, with details left to the second sentence, or further down in the lead. This also has the benefit of removing the reason for the edit warring in the lead sentence (point 3), although it may recur in discussions about the body. If we can prevent edit warring going forward by avoiding either expression, that may be desirable; otherwise, details about contentious wording choices like the one between pregnant woman or pregnant person should be discussed here first. Mathglot (talk) 21:10, 25 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]