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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Apparently, the UKGBNI is set to completely decriminalize abortion in England and Wales when performed by the woman (not when performed by a doctor). According to Reuters and BBC, under existing law abortion by a doctor is legal up to 24 weeks and a woman can perform an abortion on herself with prescribed pills up to 10 weeks. In contrast, the new law—approved by 73 percent of the House of Commons—appears to permit abortion right up to the point of birth when it is performed by the woman.

Text of the law (on pages 108–109 of the PDF; part of a much larger bill):

Tonia Antoniazzi, NC1

To move the following Clause—

Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion

For the purposes of the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.

Member's explanatory statement

This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to abortion from women acting in relation to her own pregnancy at any gestation, removing the threat of investigation, arrest, prosecution, or imprisonment. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, telemedicine, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.

If you've gone through having a kid and followed along as they do ultrasounds, you'll find it really hard to be okay with abortion after 24 weeks except in really extreme circumstances. A 24 week old fetus is very intuitively and emotionally a real baby.

Nobody has ever called a wanted 8 week old fetus anything other than a baby, unless it already had a nickname.

I read about a case of a woman who got a late-term abortion because her husband committed suicide. Do pro-lifers have any sympathy for her?

  • -10

Sympathy is just another word for bad public policy. People who are sympathetic are mostly just weights to be borne by the people. The less sympathetic a state is, the more functional it will be, holding all other things equal.

A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.

Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?

Yes, if she really believed that the fetus wasn't really a person yet and no harm would occur by aborting it.

What does 'person' mean here?

I am using person to mean the general fuzzy concept of personhood and the rights associated with it. Most of us would agree that a single cell fertilized egg is not a person yet. The concept is fuzzy so you can't really draw a line on at what point the fertilized egg becomes a person.

What is the point of even introducing this personhood concept in the first place? The concept of "personhood" here has no applications other than justifying abortion (or maybe killing people like Terri Schiavo) and is completely independent of the rest of most pro-choicers' moral system. Why introduce an ad-hoc moral concept just for this one purpose? And why should pro-lifers like me find this convincing?

Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life. Everyone has a concept of personhood. I wouldn't consider it an ad-hoc moral concept. For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives. In the case of a fetus, the concept is fuzzy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think many people (and pro-lifers) consider late-term unborn fetuses to be people, which is why they find killing them horrifying, so I wouldn't say that it's not a convincing argument. I can see why others may believe otherwise, just like how people wouldn't consider a single-cell fertilized egg to be a person (although they may believe it still has enough moral worth that it should not be killed because it may eventually become a person, which is also valid).

Thanks for the response! I disagree with you that this makes a case for personhood (as a distinct concept from "being a human organism").

Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life.

I don't agree. in my moral system the only relevant factor is whether it's a human being or not. I can't think of any non-abortion/consistent life ethic issues in which not making this distinction would lead to a conclusion that you'd disagree with.

For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives

This issue can be resolved by just deciding axiomatically that human lives are important and animal lives are not. This is what I do in my moral system. There's no need to introduce a concept of personhood separate from being a human organism to resolve this issue normally. Moreover, I think even among animal rights people, the unironic belief that "animals are people too" is pretty fringe.

I'm aware that lots of people use the concept of "personhood" to talk about abortion, including some pro-lifers. I'm just not sure what it gets you outside of the context of the abortion debate, which is what I mean when I say it's an ad-hoc concept. I think you can recover the entirety of most pro-choicers' morality, aside from abortion/consistent life ethic stuff, by just defining "person" to mean the same thing as human organism. I don't even think this runs afoul of what most people who believe in animal rights think. But pro-choicers introduce this extra "personhood" concept that doesn't play any role in their other beliefs to resolve this one issue, rather than taking the simpler route of just defining everything in terms of being a human organism.

I'm not saying the pro-choice position is inconsistent. I'm saying that it requires introducing extra complexity to your moral system that isn't used for anything else. Is there any issue, aside from consistent life ethic/abortion stuff, in which you must appeal to personhood as distinct from being a human being in order to arrive at the normal position?

I think 'personhood' in this context is mostly nonsense and everything gets circular fast.

Comes down to something like "It's okay to kill him because he's not a person, and he's not a person because it's okay to kill him."

Yeah, I can understand that. It's very subjective as people mostly go off of their moral instincts.

Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?

Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?

More comments

A "late term" abortion is "aborting" a fetus that would otherwise survive outside the womb. That's a premie baby and this is baby murder. Accepting that it is baby murder, there'd better be a damned good reason such as the kid was going to die anyways and also kill the mom. Something better than the dad committed suicide.

Sympathy for her terrible situation, sure, and it suggests there's more to the story if the husband doesn't want to live long enough to see his baby. But that doesn't mean that she should have done it. Was she suddenly worried the baby was going to inherit whatever its father was committing suicide over or something?

That she personally made sure to kill off the last remnant of her late husband? No, I don't.

From a game-theoretic standpoint it probably increases her reproductive potential. She's much more likely to find a new mate (and get more kids in better conditions) than if she were a single mother.

Putting the kid up for adoption would also prevent single-motherhood, and my understanding is that the child would have an excellent chance of being adopted more or less immediately.

I was coming from more of a subconscious, evo-psych angle rather than anything rational, but yes what you say is true.

It seems fairly clear to me that the psych construct underlying the median abortion is closure. The psychic goal of abortion appears to be to avoid not only being a mother, but also having been a mother.

With regard to the willful destruction of a viable human infant, no, I don't. Why should I? Do you have sympathy for mothers spurred by tragedy to murder their birthed children in other contexts? Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?

Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?

The voluntary form is something I can appreciate, if not endorse. Reactionary on deep love, and all.

The involuntary form can fuck off. Murder is bad, news at 11.

Now, I am pro-choice and also one of these much hated Singerians who think that babies do not have more of an intrinsic right to life than other mammals of similar cognitive capabilities.

However, I also recognize that society really values babies, to the point where having surplus babies which nobody can be arsed to take care of is not a thing in the Western world. Thus babies have a large instrumental value.

I think if you have a fetus gestated to the point where it is viable outside the womb, with a skull and everything, then there is no way to get rid of it without giving birth to it or some surgical intervention. Killing it will not change the fact. Thus, it seems reasonable that society would ask a woman that she does not kill her pregnancy at this point.

Singerians who think that babies do not have more of an intrinsic right to life than other mammals of similar cognitive capabilities.

seems like a very short term view to have. maybe you can argue that a baby is currently as cognitively capable as a gorilla, but within a year or two there is no comparison, a toddler that babbles dwarfs the gorilla in this realm. do you / singer not take this into account?

does peter singer even believe in intrinsic rights? utilitarianism is not really a rights based philosophy. if singer can be summed up as "actions should be judged by their consequences in terms of maximizing the satisfaction of interests and minimizing suffering", its not immideatly clear why or how rights are needed except for expediency.

even the idea of an "intrinsic right" is somewhat of an oxymoron. a "right" is a human construct. how can a human construct be intrinsic?

The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.

If two people (of suitable fertility and biological sexes) have PIV sex, then in the ancestral environment, this has some probability of setting a chain in motion which will result in the creation of a person -- a being with the cognitive capabilities typical of a human. If instead they use some form of birth control, this will drastically lower that probability, so from the point of preventing a person to come into existence, it will be fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide. (Being anti-birth control is still a position some people hold, but it is mostly more about being anti-sex.)

But we do not even have to stop there, because people having PIV sex does not just happen randomly. If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)

The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.

I enjoy the cocktail party version of this argument: the logical conclusion of the "potential persons" line is that men don't have the right to refuse consent to potentially fertile women. Women, of course, have a limited number of possible pregnancies and as such can maintain some right to choose their partners. But men are capable of impregnating at least once a day, so unless he's saving it for someone else when a man is offered sex by a potentially fertile woman he is obligated to accept, as otherwise he is destroying the potential for human life.

I mean, I would bite this bullet. Sex should result in children. People who disagree are discordant.

The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.

I do not have a high opinion of NEET Otakus(which is what I consider warhammer fans to be, regardless of the japanese-ness of warhammer- it's nerd shit and that's that). Otherwise eligible men who are too busy with videogames should quit the gaming and start dating seriously. Married couples should be having regular sex unless medically contraindicated.

Religious and clergy are different, of course, but every society in history has had to deal with a class of men that would prefer cheap sexual vices(in our case, porn), gambling(on sports in our case), and entertainment(mostly videogames today) to marriage. The RCC has not, historically, had a high opinion of this class, and most societies in history have attempted to discourage it.

I think that my argument, which was clearly meant to highlight the absurdity of treating potential persons the same as actual persons, rhymes with beliefs of the pro-natalist crowd (which you hold for other reasons than wanting to maximize future persons). One man's modus tollens being another man's modus ponens and all that.

Let me rephrase my argument a bit. Our premise is that baby-killing is wrong because it denies the existence of a future person. As far as that reason is concerned, anything else which denies the existence of a future person should be just as wrong.

Take the perspective of a healthy female person, which turns out to be a bottleneck for making new homo sapiens persons. When she optimizes for the number of persons produced during her fertile life span, she can probably get pregnant 15 times or so, and given medical advances in treating underweight newborns I would assume that having twins each time (not hard to do with IVF) might give the highest expected value of babies which will live to personhood age, perhaps 28 kids or so.

So while both the conservative natalist and the future-persons-maximizer agree that a woman who decides not to have kids for personal reasons is wrong, their assessment of a woman who marries at age 25 and then proceeds to have six children would be very different. I am assuming that from a conservative perspective, that woman would be a role model. The future persons-maximizer would still consider her rather horrible. She wasted her first fertile decade, for one thing. "So you just did the equivalent of murdering 22 potential persons instead of 28. Do you want a medal for that?"

The utopia of the future-persons-maximizer is the repugnant conclusion, a world so overcrowded with human persons (and their babies) that their lives are barely worth living.

This is entirely fair- I do think unborn babies are people and not potential people. You caught me, my opposition to abortion is not about maximizing future population.

You're defining "potential" very oddly here. Babies have the potential for sapience in the sense that, if things run their natural course, they will soon become sapient. There is no reference to probabilities or odds here--a baby in a very dangerous environment, with a 90% chance of getting killed before they turn 1, still has just as much "potential" for sapience as a safer baby. Similarly, someone under anesthesia has the same personhood no matter the caliber of the doctor operating on them.

I think his point here is that repeatedly having sex, if left to run it's natural course, will result in a baby.

So repeatedly having sex and always using birth control means you've deviated from the natural course in a way that prevents a baby from growing up

It doesn't prevent a baby from growing up though, it prevents a baby from being created in the first place.

"Natural course" is shorthand for a very complex concept I'll admit I can't rigorously define. But I do think it's intuitive that sex and embryos don't lead to babies in the same way. It's not just a question of progress, embryos being further along.

The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.

This is what I take issue with. "Potential" of personhood, as commonly used, does not start before conception.

Yeah fair enough, it's not the greatest argument

I was mostly playing devil's advocate because I found his line of thinking interesting and kind of a funny way to run an idea out to the extreme end

If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)

Eh, this is a misrepresentation. The RCC views abstinence outside of marriage as not only praiseworthy but necessary - all sex outside of marriage is sinful. But, regarding "not asking someone out on a date", the whole idea is that God has an individual level plan for everyone to use their gifts - we need not all follow the same path. The point is to actively follow the path God has set before you and to do so faithfully. Perhaps you aren't meant to ask someone out, marry them, and procreate. Perhaps your role is more monkish. If you're playing too much Warhammer, you have to ask yourself if you're being slothful, negligent in your duties, or complacent and self-indulgent. I think you might be right that God isn't pleased with incels - who stew in their imagined slights by imagined women. But he isn't displeased with those who have actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise) - so long as its done with care, intent, and intention.

As an aside, I really do like your deconstruction of birth control as "fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide."

actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise)

My understanding of Catholic (and even more so Orthodox) teaching is that everyone is either called to marriage and family or to a religious life. "Religious life" includes lay and clerical members of religious orders (monks are only ordained if their work as a monk includes ministering the sacraments, and nuns are obviously never ordained) as well as the (for Catholics only) celibate parochial clergy.

In the RCC, You can live a consecrated single life that isn't religious. It takes discernment and represents a real commitment. If one doesn't go that route, doesn't join a religious order, and also doesn't have a family, I don't believe this is seen as inherently sinful, but the person should be honest with themselves about selfishness, laziness etc. As far as I can tell, discerning one's vocation should be very intentional and not accidental or emergent happenstance. If you know what you're doing and do it with good intention, there are many, many good ways to live.

This entire line of argument relies heavily on some very specific definition of 'personhood' that I can't tease out from context. Would you mind?

Sure. Here is Practical Ethics (That PDF is kinda terrible, but it appears that libgen is down.).

On page 85 (pdf page: 98), Singer argues that people mean different things when they say human being. One meaning is

It is possible to give 'human being' a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to 'member of the species Homo sapiens'. The other is There is another use of the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a Protestant theologian and a prolific writer on ethical issues. Fletcher has compiled a list of what he calls 'indicators of humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past,the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity.

Then he goes (p.87):

For the first sense, the biological sense, I shall simply use the cumbersome but precise expression 'member of the species Homo sapiens' while for the second sense I shall use the term 'person'.

In the following pages, he goes on about why being a person makes a difference for involuntary killing.

In the context of the original comment, I am going to point out that a baby is not a potential person. A baby is a person. A gorilla will never be a person, and it will never be a potential person. But otherwise nice thanks, a pretty good way to take it into account.

a "right" is a human construct.

The United States is based on the idea that rights are bestowed by our Creator, but then I suppose Singer probably doesn't subscribe to that model.

The US is based on this idea yes. But the idea "rights are bestowed by our Creator" is not correct on its own terms. If those rights were bestowed by our Creator, then they would have had those rights. But they didn't. So they fought a war to get those rights. Saying "we actually have these rights, King George is just going against God" or whatever is unfalsifiable. Those rights didn't exist in a material, verifiable, empirical sense in 1770. And if the war was not fought, then those rights would not exist in a material, verifiable, empirical sense.

Hence the position that "right" is a human construct. It exists not as intrinsic, regardless of the claim, but because humans make it exist.

Ah, yes, the "unalienable rights." Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What "right" to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What "right" to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of "right"? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is "unalienable"? And is it "right"? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third "right"? - the "pursuit of happiness"? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can "pursue happiness" as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

  • Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

I just commented on this. A man drowning in the Pacific has the right to life in the sense that he should live. In this sense we have rights even if they are not respected, upheld, or even known of by anyone.

Its a beautiful book, isn't it?

https://www.themotte.org/post/1208/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/259175?context=8#context

One of my favorites, my only complaint is his hard on for boot camp that makes it take up so much of the book (and after that's done he decides to go to OCS for even more training!).

The word "right" is confusing because it refers to

  1. Things people deserve and should have. E.g. if I have the right to free speech, that means I should have free speech. This is unalienable and arguably bestowed by our Creator.
  2. The realization of #1. E.g. in this sense I only have the "right" to free speech if the government recognizes that right. This is the kind of "right" that people fight for and the kind they're referring to when they say they want rights.

We can argue about whether category #1 actually exists, or is just something that people define into existence, but the discussion will be hopelessly confused without this distinction.

The United States is based on the idea that rights are bestowed by our Creator

I believe that only applies to certain inalienable rights.

TIL that "convict a woman of a crime carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison" is a synonym of the word "ask."

I think that you will find that "to ask" is frequently used in situations where it is clear that non-compliance with the demand will have adverse consequences. For example, if someone makes a fuss in a restaurant, they might be asked to leave. If they then refuse to leave, that is not the end of the story, instead, the restaurant will typically escalate to more coercive measures.

I do not think life in prison is a reasonable maximum sentence here, though. I am sure the judicial system can come up with disincentives which are less severe than "we lock you up forever" and more severe than "we politely asked".

For example, the punishment should be a lot more lenient than if someone killed the fetus against the will of the pregnant woman (to avoid having to pay child support or for inheritance reasons or whatever).

I agree it's not the best usage of "ask", but I feel like it's not as unreasonable as you're implying either. One might also say "we ask people not to murder", even though that is also a crime punishable by life in prison.

I would object to that usage too! Rather say, the state commands people not to murder on pain of prison.

Okay. The state commands people to not murder on pain of prison. Problem solved?

Yes.

Have any women been charged under late term abortion laws?

Even if none had been it is good to get rid of laws whose application would be unjust.

Several are described in the debate transcript.

Now, I am pro-choice and also one of these much hated Singerians who think that babies do not have more of an intrinsic right to life than other mammals of similar cognitive capabilities.

Do you consider sleeping adults morally valuable? They have arguably worse cognitive capabilities than babies.

I've participated in some dynamic, interesting stories while dreaming. I've threatened imagined entities with destruction if I choose to wake.

Nevertheless I agree with your main point that cognitive ability at any given point in time is not the sole criteria for judging right to life. Many are capable but evil and should be killed.

Your brain is not deactivated whilst sleeping. It is quite busy.

I take your point if applied to sci fi suspended animation or something very unlike sleep.

Busy is not the same as capable of thought. Whales' brains, for example, have much more total cognitive activity than our waking brains, but are less capable of thought.

We have some level of thought while sleeping too--I can remember reasoning some things out in dreams--but dreams/REM are the most mentally active part of sleep, and I'm not sure most of us are smarter than babies even in REM.

Their capability isn't worse though, they just aren't utilizing it.

Well, no, as soon as they are utilizing it they're awake. A sleeping human does not have the capacity to think at all, they have the capacity to wake up. Some, like people in comas or under anesthesia, don't even have that. It's not that they aren't using their capacity for thought, it's that they literally can't use it, and therefore do not have any capacity for thought.

"Cognitive capabilities" sounds like a solid, principled way to define moral worth, but it hides endless moral complexity under the hood.

Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?

The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.

The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.

What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.

The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately

I'm not actually sure whether this is a nitpick or not, but when a baby dies after more than 20 weeks of gestation, it's no longer a "miscarriage," but a "stillbirth." By definition, you can't have a "criminal investigation" into a miscarriage after 20 weeks. You could still, in theory, have a criminal investigation into a stillbirth--hence possible nitpick--but the distinction is important in part because miscarriages, especially early miscarriages, are both physically and emotionally distinct from stillbirth, not only for pregnant women but also in public perception.

It is partially a useful correction - the real cases which provoked the legislation involved illegal post-viability abortions (legal viability is 24 weeks in the UK, not 20) or reasonable suspicion thereof, so an analogous natural pregnancy loss would be a stillbirth.

But the version of the story being pushed by British feminists is that it is about women suspected of using grey-market online abortion pills (as opposed to abortion pills prescribed by a doctor), so as a description of what was being said in public "miscarriage" is correct.

I preface this by saying it is entirely devil’s advocacy, but it seems like this sort of legislation would be logically coherent under the ‘libertarian violinist’ pro-abortion argument. It’s the woman who is inconvenienced by having another person strapped to her circulatory system, so she has an excuse to get away with murder. No-one violated the NAP on the doctor, so he doesn’t have an excuse.

It’s the woman who is inconvenienced by having another person strapped to her circulatory system, so she has an excuse to get away with murder.

You mean after she (in 99.5% of cases) voluntarily did the one specific thing that creates people?

As I said, it was devil’s advocacy. I agree that one should be required to reap what they’ve sown, and if she didn’t want a baby, she should have kept it in her pants.

In non-devils-advocacy, I think that the negative externalities of an unwanted child and a resentful mother are sufficiently bad for society that my desire to profit society exceeds my desire to force people to eat their just desserts, so on balance I come down grudgingly pro-choice in the end. And I wouldn’t prosecute doctor or mother for straight-up infanticide, let alone late-term abortion. The UK’s new legislation moves us closer to that.

I am reluctant to laud it though, because it’s pretty transparent that British lawmakers’ motivations are, as @Southkraut speculates, “Women can do no wrong”, which means we have good law (or at least lesser-evil law) for bad motives.

That might create people.

If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?

I agree that, ceteris paribus, habitual risky-sex-havers more deserve to be denied abortions than “I used three different prophylactics but somehow they all failed at the same time” neurotics deserve it. But given that you can’t fractionally abort a baby like you can fractionally vary a fine or a prison sentence, there is alas no room for a sliding scale here.

There is also the issue of verification; even if you agree that women whose birth control failed are more deserving of an abortion than women who are chose to take the risk, how the fuck do you check that a pregnant woman was habitually using birth control? If you just take them at their word, then any woman who wants an abortion will just claim that they were using condoms they bought in cash at the gas station.

The only way to split this baby is probabilistically; say that a woman who has sex with birth control is accepting a 1% chance (or whatever the failure rate is) of getting pregnant, and if she happens to lose that gamble, sucks to be her. But she knew what she was getting into, and only 1% of conscientious women will be affected, so our policy of not allowing abortions for anyone is 99% similar to a policy of allowing women whose birth control failed to have abortions; good enough.

Since an accident is the equivalent of pregnancy in this analogy, yes I absolutely think both should be held to the same standard. i.e. both a reckless and responsible person have to deal with the pregnancy.

I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.

Notably, this was not part of the original violinist argument. It was pretty clear from the original violinist argument that they were positing a cabal of music fans kidnapping someone in the middle of the night and attaching them without consent. This version is getting close to my preferred analogy - rock climbing.

When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope.

More generally, the idea of prospective consent exists elsewhere in the consent literature. The classic example is Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast. It would normally be objectionable for his men to tie him to the mast (or to keep him tied) against his objection. He had reason to believe that his future self would protest profusely, demanding to be untied, but we respect his original consent to overcome his later objections. A related example is the skydiver example. A new skydiver might know that they have a fear reaction to actually jumping out of a plane. It is normally not allowed for someone to just strap their bodies together and throw them out of the plane. But the new skydiver can prospectively consent, saying, "I know that I'm going to protest when we're standing on the edge, but I still want you to pull me off the plane with you."

Nearly all of contract law is an attempt to enforce prospective consent to things that you might not want to do at a future time. Even the most basic, "You give me stuff now, and I'll pay you money later," when at a later time, after having received the stuff, one might protest and want to withdraw their consent to paying the money. But there are clear responsibility laws/rules/norms in gobs of different situations. Commercial passenger pilots, for example, are known to have taken on a responsibility to stay in their airplane and try to save it and the lives of their passengers, even when they might want to just grab a parachute and leave the passengers to somehow save themselves. I think many people would also consider that to be literal murder.

"even if someone gives fully informed consent...they have the right to [revoke it]"

Heading off on a bit of a tangent, I've seen arguments like that a few times. They never quite sit right with me, or at least they feel incomplete.

When I see that argument, I imagine a hierarchy of agreements: at the bottom are mundane ones that anyone can agree to. In the middle are serious agreements that are restricted to adults of sound mind (legal contracts, etc.) because children can't fathom the consequences of signing. At the top are super serious ones that no living human could be expected to follow through on (e.g. that take on the violinist) because adults can't fathom the consequences of signing.

With that in mind, the fully-consenting-violinist arguments says that (by analogy) motherhood is a superhuman commitment that no adult should be held to, regardless of any indications they might make otherwise.

What I always wanted to know is, having bitten that bullet, how do they justify not biting the bullet on infanticide, or extermination of the non-self-sufficient.

Same way you bite the bullet when you don't give food to the homeless.

There are no homeless people starving to death in the USA(source- look at their waistlines). There are probably some who freeze to death from lack of shelter, or die of ordinarily quite preventable diseases due to poor hygiene, or..., but not as many as simply die from drug overdoses.

Seems like it's closer to the bullet people bite when they pass out cokes spiked with antifreeze to the homeless.

The homeless with a profusion of free money, food, shelter, education, healthcare, goods, and services available to them, paid for by my taxes? The ones that I have, on multiple occasions, witnessed throwing away food given to them because despite what their cardboard sign claimed it's not what they actually wanted? Those homeless?

Not quite. When I don't give food to the homeless, I just don't give them food. Maybe someone else does, maybe they go to a church-run soup kitchen, but I don't put a bullet in their head.

So no, the comparison fails, and once more I wonder how the Elite Human Capital had the hubris to unironically use the name.

Those, or even undesirables in general.

The pro-life side will probably happily point you to the apparently slippery slope of MAID in Canada (and elsewhere): have you considered euthanasia as a treatment for PTSD?

America had legal abortion from 1973 to 2022 and no such slippery slope was encountered.

I'd actually say we've seen America do nothing but slide down the slippery slopes since the 70s. It may not have taken the exact same form at the exact same pace as Canada, but it's still tumbling down.

The transcript of the debate appears to support your uncharitable description. Antoniazzi:

Although abortion is available in England and Wales under conditions set by the Abortion Act 1967, the law underpinning it, which dates back to 1861—the Offences Against the Person Act—means that outside those conditions, abortion remains a criminal offence carrying a maximum life sentence. Originally passed by an all-male Parliament elected by men alone, this Victorian law is increasingly used against vulnerable women and girls. Since 2020, more than 100 women have been criminally investigated, six have faced court, and one has been sent to prison. The women affected are often acutely vulnerable. Victims of domestic abuse and violence, human trafficking and sexual exploitation; girls under the age of 18; and women who have suffered miscarriage or stillbirth, or have given birth prematurely, have faced invasive and prolonged criminal investigations that cause long-term harm.

The fact is that new clause 1 would take women out of the criminal justice system, and that is what has to happen and has to change now. There is no way that these women should be facing what they are facing.

I implore colleagues not to lose sight of the moral imperative here: namely, vulnerable women being dragged from hospital bed to police cell on suspicion of ending their own pregnancies. This is urgent. We know that multiple women are still in the system awaiting a decision, accused of breaking this law. They cannot afford to wait.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put an end to this in a simple and secure manner. This is the right change at the right time, so I implore colleagues who want to protect women and abortion services to vote for new clause 1. Let us ensure that not a single desperate woman is ever again subject to traumatic criminal investigation at the worst moments of their lives.

"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.

You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?

(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)

"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript.

It's a harsh reading, but a fair one of Tonia Antoniazzi's rhetoric.

Originally passed by an all-male Parliament elected by men alone, this Victorian law is increasingly used against vulnerable women and girls.

New clause 1 will only take women out of the criminal justice system because they are vulnerable and they need our help.

As Members will know, much of the work that I do is driven by the plight of highly vulnerable women and by sex-based rights, which is why I tabled new clause 1.

While my hon. Friend and I share an interest in removing women from the criminal law relating to abortion,

The fact is that new clause 1 would take women out of the criminal justice system, and that is what has to happen and has to change now.

However, all that this new clause seeks to do is take women out of the criminal justice system now, and give them the support and help they need.

You can argue about whether her proposed amendment actually reflects this, but her rhetoric absolutely does.

You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately.

And nothing about the argument strikes you as the slightest bit odd? Murder is illegal, does every death result in a murder investigation? Would the police force that spent the last couple of decades sweeping Muslim rape gangs under the rug go full-crackdown on miscarriages? Please.

I live in Texas, with probably the strictest abortion laws among high income countries(maybe Liechtenstein?). No prosecutions for miscarriage have happened here- and 40% of the childbearing aged women without elective abortion in the U.S. live here.

More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong. Relatively recently, in Louisiana, there was a case of a young woman who wanted to keep her pregnancy and was deceived by her mother into taking an abortion pill ordered from out of state. The pro-choice crowd did not seem to respect this young lady’s choice to keep her baby- including the governor of New York, from which this abortion pill came.

More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong. Relatively recently, in Louisiana, there was a case of a young woman who wanted to keep her pregnancy and was deceived by her mother into taking an abortion pill ordered from out of state. The pro-choice crowd did not seem to respect this young lady’s choice to keep her baby- including the governor of New York, from which this abortion pill came.

This is like trying to hold a gun store owner responsible when someone buys a gun and uses it to commit a crime. Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.

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Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.

Avoid consensus-building phrases like "everyone knows," as well as presuming you know the other person's motives. You are probably correct that @hydroacetylene does not want anyone getting abortion pills, but you need to actually engage with him ("Are you saying...?" or "I think your actual agenda is...") rather than simply asserting it in this antagonistic fashion. This is a pattern you're unfortunately engaging in a lot. I hate to see it, because here you are a leftie on a mostly anti-left forum (you aren't wrong about that, though you are wrong about "far right"), and you are of course being heavily downvoted and reported for having unpopular opinions. The usual failure mode from here is you get more and more frustrated and antagonized by everyone telling you off, and eventually the warnings accumulate and you get banned. I realize this is a hard pattern to break out of, and maybe it's not entirely fair, but I will tell you that rightie posters that start taking the same attitude you do to all comers who argue with them also wind up getting banned because they just can't stay calm and gracious enough while arguing with people whose opinions they clearly do not respect.

Everyone knows

Consensus building

the real agenda here is that you don't want

So you're a mind-reader? You're not going to engage with the argument being made, but only with what you think the "real" position is?

Plainly uncharitable.

I understand that you probably don’t want a poor black teenager to keep her baby either. But it is utterly uncontroversial that gun store owners taking advantage of differing state laws to fetch a premium for some light law breaking are treated as professional criminals, which is the actual equivalency. A California resident can drive to Nevada, buy illegally-full-size magazines, and probably get away with it when he drives back with them. A Nevada gun store owner who sells such magazines by mail to Californians is committing a crime.

Glad we agree the underlying issue is that you don't want anyone in Louisiana to have access to abortion pills and I do. The governor of NY agrees with me, thus she is not extraditing the doctor, as is her right.

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That's a pretty misleading description of what's going on. Most of the outrage seems focused on the attempt to prosecute the doctor, which requires that New York extradite her to Louisiana. The rest of it centers around the hypocrisy that Louisiana had a pre-Dobbs parental consent law, which would suggest that parents have the authority to determine whether their children carry a child to term. If a parent can veto the decision to abort, they would presumable also be able to veto the decision to have the baby. I haven't seen any commentary suggesting that the mother was right to surrepetitiously abort the fetus.

If a parent can veto the decision to abort, they would presumable also be able to veto the decision to have the baby.

That is certainly not true. That authority to forbid is not the authority to require.

Forbidding one thing necessarily means requiring something else. One can just say that parents should have the ability to forbid their children from having their own children.

Your logic is confused.

The majority of US states are (still) allowing underage marriage (age 16 or 17) if a parent or other legal guardian consents, but that doesn’t mean that parents can legally force a marriage against the will of their child.

Or if in a restraining order a judge forbids you to get near someone, that doesn’t give the judge the power of an “anti-restraining order” where you must stalk someone.

There are many (state) law exemptions making underage drinking legal when provided or in the presence of a family member. But that doesn’t mean your parents can legally force you to get black out drunk.

If my rent contract specifies that I am not allowed to paint walls black, that doesn’t mean my landlord can force me to paint the walls white. That would need to be another term in the contract.

Paleoconservatives never say "I disagree with X, but my values require me to respect their right to do it." Their "freedom" and "federalism" and "common law" always ends up only applying to actions they approve of. Ditto with the liberals. Big Tech has the right to censor you because "muh private company" but they never say "I wish company X wouldn't do what they're doing but they're a private company so doing it is their right."

One can just say that parents should have...

Is your "should" borne out as a matter of fact? I don't think so.

You can argue that the asymmetry is unjust, but that's not the same as stating the asymmetry doesn't exist.

More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong.

I mean, I know - I'm one of them! The case you describe still does sound morally wrong to me, in the same way in which drugging your daughter and submitting her to a cosmetic surgery would be. This is still not "women can do no wrong" - it's interesting how culture warriors on both sides refuse to believe that the other side could actually disagree with them on the moral status of fetuses, and think it must actually all be about women (blue: "red just wants to punish women for recreational sex" - red: "blue thinks women can do no wrong").

(Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely different for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered, and it's not just a case of the real principle being rationalised by a loftier one like when people always remember international law when their enemies break it. It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.)

Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely difficult (sic) for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered

Im surprised by this. There are lots of pro-life people. How many of them would have to be just rationalising before the number of genuine believers reaches lizardman levels? It seems pretty clear that theres a line of thought there thats compelling to a significant number of people (though I sometimes feel it should be the left that its compelling to)

In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)

I would guess they also genuinely believe that its different when we do it. Most people are unable to take anything as literally as they would need to to see the symmerty there. (This is in part why I was surprised. I have strongly internalised that people are crazy, much crazier than being against abortion, and I would have thought you have too) I suppose you could say that they are therefore unable to really believe anything, but that doesnt seem productive.

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The view I’m putting in (some of)my opponents’ mouths is not ‘women can do no wrong’. It’s ’there is no such thing as an abortion which is morally wrong’. Aka the occasional pro-life canard that ‘freedom of choice only applies to one choice’.

I don’t think the pro-abortion side not taking the time to say ‘it’s a tragedy what happened to this young woman’ is because the person who deceived her into an abortion was a woman. I think it’s because some of them genuinely don’t think an unwanted abortion is a tragedy and the rest are afraid of offending those handful.

and think it must actually all be about women

That's because it is- more specifically, it's about power.

Abortion rights are, at the end of the day, a sex worker protection law. Babies are a service sex workers provide on contract, they're taking a lot of risk to provide one (especially true pre-medicine, but it's an obligation that normally consumes your entire adult life) and as such it makes sense that if that contract goes badly they should have an out. This includes things like "birth control doesn't work", "contract falls through" [husband leaves- progressives agree with traditionalists that a penis entering a vagina carries the same contractual obligations], "this service was stolen by physical force", and "this service offered violated other sex worker labor laws" [age of consent violations, casting couch, etc.].

This is why [the group of women who resent being sex workers, realize that they are sex workers, but have nothing to offer anyone beyond sex work] are most fiercely in favor of these, and related, laws. The average pro-abortionist is a #metoo and #fightfor25 proponent for this reason.

Traditionalists don't really have a problem with women being sex workers- rape could not be a property crime against fathers if it wasn't- but they strongly believe that a binding contract needs to be signed before sex work of this nature can occur as the primary form of worker protection. So, the fact that being 'forced' (in the presence of trivial alternatives) to carry to term when they have sex outside of that contract is good, proper, natural.

The thing they're missing is that the social infrastructure that once existed to punish this kind of contract violation has been destroyed (age of consent laws are the only compromise still standing, and is part of why traditionalists are very worried that progressives will erase them too). But they're also generally unwilling to build any new social infrastructure and just use what power they have to complain about this, just like progressives are- in fact, progressives would rather destroy traditionalist organizations that exist to support pregnant women in marginal cases than fix the problem; traditionalists do the same thing to conception-prevention organizations when they get the chance (and this should be a sufficient explanation as to why).

The personhood of a fetus, existing or not, really doesn't matter here for either group (traditionalists tend to more strongly believe that their property rights extend to their children; progressives are a lot more redistributionist about that, but they still believe it). Yes, it is convenient that it's alive for the pro-life side; but that's all it is- I have no evidence to believe this would be different were the matter of facts swapped (and is why progressives fight to prove the fetus isn't alive).

Yes, it's unpleasant to acknowledge that the occasional 10 year old will get pregnant, or that some women will die because of this, or that unborn children are killed- but they die because [we believe, and perhaps correctly] our contract law is more important, in the same way school shootings are [the right to defend oneself is a part of the social contract certain societies make with the expendable gender, in return for that expendability- when classical liberals say guns are the left's abortion, this is what they actually mean].

It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.

Yeah, but they're just the spear counterpart to the group of women I described earlier (existential anxiety of men about what they are). If they do that task well, they'll be rewarded; that is one of the earliest contracts.

Many "traditional" societies were fine with abortion. In the Greco-Roman world infanticide was allowed. Now, it's true that authority was (theoretically) in the hands of the paterfamilias rather than the woman. But it was not prohibited by the state, Romans would have responded to a pro-life march with "mind your own d*** business."

You're also wrong about age of consent laws. Before 1900 most states set the age of consent at 10-12. Higher age of consent laws are a modern invention.

You strike me as a secular right-winger who's grasping for straws to justify why the church lady anti-abortion crusade is actually rational and BASED. With that motivation and an inaccurate view of history, you've created this theory. Anything other than accept that maybe the hated liburals are right about a single subject.

This is a perfect explanation for the semi-rhetorical question later posed by @hydroacetylene here- as a response to you, in fact- the reason "liburals" (I prefer "progressives" for this group- progressives are not classical liberals so I don't call them that) don't take traditionalists seriously about decreasing baby murder is that decreasing baby murder is obviously not a terminal value for them and it's just a fight over aesthetics (because if it was, traditionalist organizations would be handing out as many free IUDs and Nexplanon as humanly possible; since they oppose this, they're obviously not serious about solving the problem as long as it's not their way).

You're also wrong about age of consent laws. Before 1900 most states set the age of consent at 10-12. Higher age of consent laws are a modern invention.

No, you're proving my point. Gynosupremacy/feminism pushed for high age of consent laws coincident with their emergence as a viable political force, which itself follows socioeconomic effects (gender equality following the decoupling of physical strength from production of goods) in industrial societies; I'm explaining why they did that. I can't link to the original post(s) here more fully explaining this because the person who made them has their account set to private (and they're banned, or at least their alt is).

In the Greco-Roman world infanticide was allowed.

Yes, obviously. Children are property of those who make them, and it is their right to dispose of them as they wish coincident with the child's ability to resist it as dictated by market conditions (usually a society's age of majority, though less than that due to the fact an age of majority results in market distortions so it's usually higher than it actually is).

What, you weren't told "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it" as a child? That was a Cosby show thing, I believe.

You strike me as a secular right-winger who's grasping for straws to justify why the church lady anti-abortion crusade is actually rational and BASED, anything other than accept that maybe the hated liburals are right about a single subject.

You really haven't read enough of me.

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That is a very noncentral use of the term "sex worker".

Sure, but it's also perfectly accurate; the problem comes from outdated notions of attaching a moral valence to it. It's just what each partner in a relationship has a high statistical probability of bringing to the table (or the opposite partner have a high statistical probability of attaching outsized value to) when negotiating how to live together- nothing more, nothing less. It and [love for one's partner] remain compatible with this view; indeed, love is the notion of long-term investment/convergence backstopping these negotiations.

Without that framing, the dynamics around the argument aren't comprehensible. You even get comment chains like this that show the people making these arguments are so incredibly close to completely understanding it, but are lacking that one final piece/self-honesty... or they're just burying it.

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It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.

Why is this hard? If anything, their consistency should reinforce your belief in their integrity.

In what way is this integrity? If this is actually what is going on, it's more like motte ("abortion is murder, I want to stop murder") and bailey ("nothing to force hoes to become housewives like saddling them with a baby").

Their belief is that the wicked actions of women are corrupting them, and they're consistent on this. Of course a lifestyle that embraces infanticide is also self-destructive and corrosive to society more broadly.

I live in Texas, with probably the strictest abortion laws among high income countries(maybe Liechtenstein?).

Come now, there are countries that don't even make rape exceptions.

Texas does not make rape exceptions. The standards for Texas abortion exceptions have been posted here before; no exceptions for rape, no exceptions for fetal non viability, maternal health exceptions are narrow and strictly defined.

Hot damn, that is indeed too spicy even for my tastes.

Greg Abbott literally let the Texas Catholic bishops write the exactitudes of clarifying the state's maternal health exceptions- just like in Andorra, where the local bishop as co-president prevents any liberalization of abortion, the threat of excommunicating Greg Abbott prevents any abortion loophole-abuse in Texas.

I'm told that some extremely-conservative states don't even have exceptions for killing two-year olds conceived by rape. In 2025! Even during Pride Month!

Fair points.

A brilliant stratagem in the culture war - if your hand is worth playing, then is it worth overplaying and then you look like a surprised pikachu when the pendulum start swinging in the other direction.

Can you really call this measure "overplaying one's hand" when it passed with literally 73 percent of Parliament's lower house in favor? Surely, such a gigantic supermajority must reflect the will of the voters.

(A bunch of Labour MPs voted against it, too. It was 291–25 for Labour, 8–96 for the Conservatives, 63–2 for the Liberal Democrats.)

Surely, such a gigantic supermajority must reflect the will of the voters.

I'm sure you're aware, but Labour only got a third of the vote. Their supermajority of seats is an artefact of a bad electoral system, not a mandate from the people. And I'm pretty sure making nine-month abortions legal wasn't in the manifesto.

We don't need to speculate about what the public thinks about this amendment. We know what they think because they (at least the female half) have been asked directly. Only 3% of British women think abortion up to the point of birth should be legal.

Many blue states have passed laws making abortions legal at any point in pregnancy. I see no evidence of any backlash to that.

2024 Election?

Abortion legalization referendums won in Montana and Missouri. Won in some blue states too, which wasn't news since not even pro-lifers thought they could win there.

That's not a very Elite Human Capital take. Suffice to say, Europe is not America, and if you try transferring American cultural mores there (which is exactly what this policy is), you're might have a bad time (though it's also not guaranteed).

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