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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.
Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.
The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.
The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*
I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.
*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
I want add to your edit another falsehood I often see repeated: That the wider western world also has free abortion laws similar to what the american left wants. As it turns out, 12-15 week bans are the norm, and if I talk with women here about it they also feel strongly about it not becoming longer. The 20 weeks+ I often see from the american left (and unfortunately even our own left is starting to propagate it) is almost as extreme as the Evangelicals ban on abortion except for medical reasons.
All Western European abortion laws have late-term exceptions you can drive a truck through, and also, abortion is far more easily available in the first two trimesters.
For all the talk of European laws and how moderate they are, any Democrat in a red state who proposed them as a compromise would be called a baby killing radical all the same.
Atlantic article on it - (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/roe-overturned-europe-abortion-laws/670539/) - Use archive.is or whatever.
This is exactly what I'm talking about tbh. The spin in that article makes my head hurt.
I'm a german parent, I know german abortion law, I've talked with german doctors about the issue. By american conception, our abortion laws - both by law and in practice - would be considered at best center if not far-right, and is quite similar to what moderate GOP politicians are proposing. Abortion is strictly illegal here, punished with prison, except for four cases:
As a side note, I quote the purpose of the consultation by the literal text of the law: "Die Beratung dient dem Schutz des ungeborenen Lebens. Sie hat sich von dem Bemühen leiten zu lassen, die Frau zur Fortsetzung der Schwangerschaft zu ermutigen und ihr Perspektiven für ein Leben mit dem Kind zu eröffnen" (rough english translation: The consultation has the purpose of protecting the life of the unborn. It should strive to encourage the woman to continue the pregnancy and give her a perspective of life with a child.)
That's it. I don't doubt that there are some doctors somewhere who wink wink nod nod and spuriously claim medical emergencies and/or exceptional circumstances, but the average doctor takes this quite seriously. By the text of the law, the purpose of the fourth criteria is strictly to be used if the fetus shows signs of serious developmental issues that would preclude a fully realized adult life. Afaik it is also occasionally used for people who are not of sound mind, i.e. pregnant children and the mentally disabled. But strictly speaking this is not supported by the text of the law.
In both our pregnancies our doctor made very clear that she would not support late-term (in germany, late-term generally means the second trimester) abortions unless this criteria has been fulfilled beyond reasonable doubt ( which was actually a point of contention since we would have liked less strict criteria). A rough translation of a quote from her, concerning us asking for the more modern genetic testing for trisomy, as opposed to the traditional, more strict ultrasound testing: "If you can't see the trisomy (down syndrome) in the ultrasound, it usually is less bad. And even the disabled can lead a happy life."
I know enough people from other european countries - and have lived in one other for a while - to know that they generally have very similar laws, some slightly more strict, some slightly less.
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