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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Scott Greer has an article about "simping" where he says this about abortion:

Conservatives uphold this attitude towards abortion. They insist the women who get abortion are blameless–it’s all the men’s fault. One pro-life leader recently said legalized abortion is “100%” the fault of men. “It’s a tool they use to cover up their crimes or neglect women & children they should take care of or have convinced some women they need in order to be ‘equal’ to them in the workplace,” exhorted Students for Life 39-year-old president Kristan Hawkins. She ended her post by emphasizing how her husband knows his place. This simp attitude is why Pro-Life Inc. was furious when Trump suggested in 2016 that women who get abortions may face criminal penalties. Only the (presumably male) doctors should be punished if abortion is illegal. This makes as much sense as not punishing a woman who hires a hitman to kill her husband. Such are the wages of simping.

https://www.highly-respected.com/p/the-simp-society

I would ask Greer whether pro-lifers were "simps" throughout America's history, when state laws almost exclusively targeted abortion doctors rather than women:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/04/donald-trump-abortion-wrong-punishing-women/

On the abortion issue, I bet there are a lot of people out there who don't really care about abortion but figure that pro-life is just going back to the situation in 1973. People like Trump, who remembers America in 1973, and figure that the illegality of abortion wasn't a big problem back then and won't be a big problem now. But pro-life in 2025 is not the same as pro-life in 1973. The thing about making hyperbolic, propagandistic statements (abortion is murder!) that are intended to be taken metaphorically is that some among your followers may take them literally. Radical feminists who proclaimed that "gender is a social construct" helped create the transgender movement that would later turn on them. What happens in twenty years when men who today read Scott Greer are sitting in state legislatures and writing bills that would punish women who get abortions with the death penalty?

I don't know where he picks up that the conservatives think the women are blameless. I think the reason the laws tend to target doctors rather than pregnant women is that the latter are in a situation where they are unlikely to be receptive to the disincentive of punishment, as they would usually percieve being forced to carry to term as an event on the same scale as the end of their current life, as enslavement to a burden they didn't want, etc... As such if you want the laws to actually dissuade the act, targetting the doctors seem like a more efficient path. The doctor has less to gain and more to lose.