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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.
That is demonstrably untrue. Gay sex and lesbian sex carries no risk of pregnancy, and there are plenty of ways for cishet couples to have sex besides PIV which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy, such as oral or anal sex.
Based on the past success of a sex education focused on abstinence, I think that a sex education which focuses on anal sex would likely be more effective.
There are cases where reasonably proficiently used birth control methods lead to pregnancy, but I would wager that most unwanted pregnancies result from sexual encounters where birth control was either not used at all or used in obviously deficient ways as a result of a lack of advance planning or intoxication.
If you teach students
However, if you teach students
then my prediction is that the median student will not have any planned sexual contacts. As the sex drive is quite strong in late-teenage humans (selection pressure) and most people don't marry and have kids early, it is very likely that at some point -- typically under the influence of alcohol -- the sex drive wins against Jesus. A drunk makeout session after some party is not a good time to learn how to use a condom even if any of the participants had the foresight to bring some. The mixture of shame and booze will likely not help with acknowledging what happened and seeking a morning-after pill, and might also lead to denial about a pregnancy which will eventually either lead to a late-term abortion or an unwanted kid being born, neither of which I consider good outcomes.
Abstinence education treats the sex drive as a lake whose flooding can be prevented by a huge enough dam made out of fear and shame. I would treat it as a river which can't be blocked, but certainly can be channeled in a way in which it is least likely to cause harmful flooding.
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