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Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
I've always thought that you can get agreement on abortion by addressing the root cause. What causes abortion? It's unplanned pregnancy. What causes unplanned pregnancy? It's sex. What can you do to prevent sex? Don't have sex unless you know the risks and you are both emotionally mature enough to partake in it, or, use contraception to lower your risk of an unplanned pregnancy. How do we get people to do both those things? Sexual education and free or reduced-cost contraception. As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%. Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.
Let me try to make the case that this isn't really getting to the heart of the matter and why these issues are difficult.
One, imagine that schools had a strictly materialist class about the proper ways to season and cook your dead pets and dead relatives to eat them, in times of war or famine or plane crashes in the Andes or even just economic depression. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper ways to use sex workers or to even perform as one yourself in a healthy way, if you happen to come from a moral culture that sees that as being reasonable. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper care and upkeep of your slaves to ensure they had good diet and exercise to perform their slaving duties effectively. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the most efficient way to operate a factory farm. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the healthiest ways to engage in sexual gratification with minors. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the current state of human biodiversity in different populations, and the appropriate ways to take advantage of those biological facts in constructing a functional society.
In each case, these classes would be controversial, regardless of whether the material was actually accurate and useful, because the move to a strictly materialist frame is already putting the activity in question into a category that some people would intensely disagree about in a metaphysical way. And just so with sex ed. Traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about abortion is downstream from traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about what sex IS, in some profound existential / spiritual sense, and, for that matter, what humans and families and mortality all are... just as in my hypothetical, the other classes would be offensive because they make assumptions about what a dead relative is, what so called "sex work" is (which is the entire point of the rebranding), what slavery is, and so on.
And two, the actual history of the 20th century and progressives championing of Sex Ed and abortion and planned parenthood and contraception and all the rest has had a significant undercurrent of them trying (from what they see as a civically responsible perspective) to get a bunch of other demographics to get their fertility rates under control... which has, of course, totally worked. It absolutely hasn't been just been some disinterested attempt to share some really interesting facts that they learned. You really don't have to read around much in history to see that this is true. I'm not even going to argue the morality or wisdom of this here; I'm just saying there is a history here. I'm also not saying that many people haven't also become convinced of the moral neutrality of a great deal of sexual stuff, or a bunch of the individual rights aspects of sexual liberation or whatever, either. But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics. And because of that history, there's no way to talk about "Hey, so, what about Sex Ed?" without it raising a bunch of controversy, especially with groups that have been on the receiving end of this all. It already absolutely hasn't been used in a neutral way.
Less of this, please.
Unsolicited writing advice is tempting but not usually productive.
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