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Scott's talked about how bad arguments can act as a kind of vaccine - people reject strong versions of an argument because they've heard, considered, and rejected the bad argument. The woman reminds me of several people I've known personally - quite a piece of work. But the basic issue behind the abortion debate is this: women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant. That's a massive imposition on their lives. It doesn't really matter whether you're doing it out of "hate" or honest conviction, they will see you as their enemy and won't want to associate with you.
I know a guy who's radicalization toward far-right conspiracytardism I can take credit for halting. So reaching out does occasionally work.
What was the nature of the conspiracies? Asking so I can have a rubric for my own views.
The usual crap conservatives started believing around 2021.
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Then it sounds like either they're specifically upset about the extremely rare cases of rape leading to pregnancy, or else they have an accountability problem.
I mean, it is a pretty reasonable expectation that whatever method of birth control used will just work. Unexpected pregnancies certainly exist outside of rape!
If a woman has sex, she might get pregnant. No one's forcing her -- outside of rape. So she either accepts the chance of getting pregnant or doesn't. That's a choice.
And I can promise you that the man in the situation isn't getting told "Golly that wasn't your fault, there's nothing you could have done, don't worry about the resulting human life, that would be asking too much." Because people understand that men, as adults, need to be held accountable.
I completely agree that the general support for abortion stems mostly from both men and women wanting pregnancies to be optional; I think calling this desire an "accountability problem" is a pointlessly obtuse way of framing the issue except that it attempts to build consensus. Fwiw, both of my children were from unexpected pregnancies (birth control ain't got shit on me) that we actively elected to keep, which seems far better than having unexpected pregnancies that we were forced to keep and never got to consider "wanted".
However, I think you dismissing the extremely rare cases too easily. Having your daughter/self forced to carry a child of rape is a completely horrific scenario that you can except essentially no chance of. Having your wife (or worse, mother of your children) die because they were forced to carry a life-threatening pregnancy is another absolute nightmare. These are things that, from my perspective, need to just have a zero probability.
Rape and extreme health risks with regards to abortion are some of the clearest examples of motte-and-bailey arguments I know of. The best way to spot a motte-and-bailey argument is to see if the person is satisfied if you were to grant them the motte. In this case, imagine abortion was 100% completely legal up to any point in the pregnancy for rape cases and for significantly higher health risk than usual pregnancies, and 100% illegal for family planning purposes. If necessary, imagine an omniscient arbiter were able to make sure no rape victim gets dismissed and no one could get away with falsely claiming rape just to get an abortion.
I think a majority of pro-life people would be overjoyed. Even though they might have preferred a full ban, what they want, to save what they percieve as life, is in accordance with the arguments they put forth, so any decrease is good. Pro-choice people would be almost uniformly against, because extreme cases like rape and risky pregnancies are not the reason they are pro-choice, family planning is (but it's a harder sell, especially to family and duty minded conservatives). So in that case, guaranteeing absolutely no rape victim or no risky pregnancy is forced to term is not worth giving up on family planning.
*EDIT: In fact, I suspect that they would be unhappy in ways they could not reasonably explain themselves if full right to abortion were granted to rape and high medical risk cases on top of current compromises. Truthfully because they could not then use these as a shield to expand family planning rights, but I can easily imagine half-assed excuses as to why the medical establishment (or the omniscient arbiter) has no right to judge whether a woman has really been raped, only she can know!
Where I live abortion is allowed as a blanket rule if the mother is under 18, the mother is married but the child is not her husband's, the child is a product of incest or rape, the pregnancy is a threat to the health of the mother, or the child has been identified to have a serious disability.
All other cases of abortion need to get past an ethics panel to be allowed.
I consider this to be a very good state of affairs and a very reasonable solution that everyone should be ok with. I admit not everyone agrees with me, on either side, but blanket statements about no one on the prochoice side being happy with reasonable compromises because they want a family planning card is just you strawmanning your opponents.
Not my opponents actually, I'm not on any side in this. But pro-choice is pretty much tautologically against the compromise I gave, because the "choice" in the name of their movement is the mother's, not a police officer's, a doctor's or an ethics panel's choice.
They might take a compromise on timing, but not on reasons, because those are no one's business than the mother's.
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Why, then, is it that so many abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape? Falsely claiming that one was raped to get an abortion is not something I hear of very often. It seems like nothing but red meat for pro-choice people.
There's a distinction being made here between getting everything we (anti-abortionists) want and whether we'd be in favor of legislation which achieves some but not all of that. But we would take the proposed deal in a heartbeat for the same reason that the anti-gun crowd will be happy for every incremental erosion even if it doesn't result in a full ban.
I do want an exception for (legit) maternal health concerns -- that's just weighing one life against another as is difficult but appropriate -- but not for rape. The reason is simple: The rape resulted in a human life. If someone was conceived in rape and is now two years old, you can see why killing the child doesn't make sense. The fault is that of the rapist; ending an innocent third-party human life doesn't improve the situation.
The thought of a woman (or girl) having to go through that pregnancy is indeed horrific. This is what makes rape so terrible! In a sense, the rape is not an event at that point so much as an ongoing process. But I think ending an innocent human life is much worse than nine months of pregnancy.
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I think the pro-life people, particularly the religious who form a majority of them, don't tend to view the question tactically. If a position was imposed that reduced abortion rates without bringing it to zero, they'd still be happy, but they cannot themselves argue for a mere reduction because if they did they imagine themselves being tormented in the afterlife by the ghosts of the unborn fruits of rapes asking them "Wasn't I also a precious human being worth fighting for?". So for them, it has to be a total ban. This might change in the future if the pro-life position gets taken up en-masse by people who have another basis than religion for it; after all, natalism is not inherently religious.
No, that's not right at all. We're not against it because we're worried about an afterlife of torment. We're against it because we consider it evil and wrong to kill babies. Indeed the whole concept that it's wrong to kill babies for the sake of convenience would seem to be a Christian one, since infanticide is otherwise a fairly common thing for humans to engage in.
The reason we're not arguing for middle-ground legislation which bans elective abortions but makes exceptions for rape is that there's zero political will on the other side to accept such a compromise, as you pointed out above. The only way to get any kind of restriction is to get enough power to enforce full restriction, so there's simply no game-theoretic reason we'd even try to do anything less.
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Only if you see pregnancy as a punishment for the crime of having sex they're "unfairly" trying to avoid.
No, I see it as an obvious direct consequence of their decisions. You're the one loading this completely-unobjectionable fact with emotional valence.
Crying that the natural consequence of one's decision is 'punishment' is childlike. And womanlike, I guess. As I said, they seem to have a problem with accountability.
ETA: Also, watch your quotation marks. I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth.
"But actually there's a simple technological solution or medical treatment that negates the negative consequences."
And then people are mad as though this person is dodging the correct cosmic punishment for their sins rather than suffering as they deserve. As thought a universal justice with built in punishments for the wicked is being subverted by technological and medication advances.
Your very best and most charitable framing of your opponents is that they are crying in a womanlike manner?
Within this context, no one is attempting to 'punish' people for sexual activities that do not result in the creation of human lives. However, when people choose to engage in the specific versions of those activities which may result in the creation of human lives, our perspective is that they have certain obligations to the resulting human lives and should be held accountable.
Frankly your post belies an unhinged, pathological antipathy toward people who believe in human purpose and absolute morality, but I'm not getting much else from it.
I think dodging accountability is a childlike and feminine trait, yes.
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No, I see it as an obvious direct consequence of their decisions. You're the one loading this completely-unobjectionable fact with emotional valence.
It's not a fact - abortion can avoid it, just as technology has allowed us to avoid many "obvious direct consequences" in the past 300 years. Yet only this one you take issue with. I wonder why.
You're not arguing in good faith here, having repeatedly attributed stances to me which I did not take and do not hold.
Say what you mean, coward. Maybe then we can have a real conversation.
I’m not thrilled about how AT is putting words in your mouth, but this sort of callout helps approximately never.
Be polite or refrain from responding at all. No one will think less of you for it.
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If I hit a hobo while driving drunk I can avoid the consequences of my actions by finishing him off with a brick to the head and hiding his body in the woods. Murder lets you get away from the consequences of all sorts of things, provided you can hide the evidence well enough. Fortunately for women, we've decided to make avoiding accountability for their decisions via murder legal in the case of pregnancy, and some segments of society even actively celebrate their right to murder to avoid accountability!
It's still begging the question.
The question here, really, is whether anti-abortionists are coming from a place of A) wishing punishment upon women for enjoying sex or B) concern for the resulting human lives.
Within this context the question of whether nascent humans should count as humans isn't being begged. It's established that this is the background belief of (almost all) anti-abortionists, which is what matters here.
Claiming that anti-abortionists just want to punish women is a weird sort of disbelief in the foreigner, I think. Indeed it seems to beg the question of whether we really care about the nascent lives involved, and it comes down on the side of 'no'.
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I think they have a problem with narcissism.
Most women go through their lives being the center of attention. Women Are Wonderful, and most relationships revolve around them and whatever it takes to keep them happy. After all, it's easy for them to replace the men in their lives who fail to live up to their standards.
To a point.
Having a kid takes all the attention they were getting, all the effort people were putting into keeping them happy, and steals it away from them. Now the kid is getting it. There is no comparison to being a man and becoming a father, because nobody gives a fuck about men in the first place. Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
It is broadly true, even controlling for age, etc.
I once saw a way of framing this that there is not a men vs women wage gap; there is instead a married men vs everyone else wage gap. That may be overstating it a bit.
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This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.
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Relevant tweet https://x.com/constantutional/status/1930247522401890634
This intuitively makes sense to me. Women see pregnancy as inherited devaluing, so maintaining control over it is of utmost importance.
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I'd push back because yes, the kids start drawing attention, but mom, as the arbiter of who gets to interact with the baby, also gets a lot of attention and, if the child appears to be doing well, accolades for raising them.
So to the non-narcissists who don't mind sharing the spotlight, this is a boon.
Indeed, this is probably the only way a woman can keep herself centered in attention in her thirties and forties, short of being a literal celebrity.
I mean, yes. But also, that requires a lower time preference than most narcissist are capable of. They don't want to give up attention now for more attention later. They want all the attention, right now, all the time. And especially their exact favorite type of attention, not a different type that's better in some ways and worse in others.
Unreasonably high time preference making life harder for everyone.
Many such cases.
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Family man is generally motivated to make sure he keeps a job and is less likely to jump ship so all things equal probably more valuable.
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Men and women famously had similar views on abortion until 2020. Framing this as men imposing on women doesn't reflect reality.
Never said it was men imposing it on women, pro-life activists are disproportionately middle-aged and elderly women.
I've been toying with the idea that anti-abortion is intrasexual competition - menopausal women want to see younger ones saddled with babies, preferably out of wedlock, so they'll be less attractive to 40-something men.
That makes no sense, because prolife activists are notably opposed for fornication.
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I'd assume in the ancestral environment the young women would be mostly daughters and nieces or otherwise related to the older women. So it wouldn't be competition, it would be trying to spread one's genes more.
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