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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:

Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?

It didn't change my position on abortion, but it did coincide with a shift in my attitude towards American culture generally. I now see both sides as explicitly anti-sex, anti-life and anti-humanity. For example, a conservative might say that "unrestricted abortion allows for consequence-free sex." The implication of this statement is that sex is a vice and babies are a consequence. This anti-human view is pervasive on both sides and throughout American society. I thank God every day that I don't live in that country anymore.

I've always believed that personhood and potential personhood are qualitativly different and sans any eviedence that fetuses are persons have been pro-abortion (among other arguements such as right to procreate or not, right to privacy, right to bodily autonomy, freedom from religion, etc).

My normal position was that, in an abundance of caution and as a practical concession to the emotionally sensitive pro-life position, abortion should be restricted after the second trimester except in cases of rape, incest, abnormal risk to the health or life of the woman or in case of sever conditions of the fetus.

Now I am firmly in the camp that abortion is morally just in Western societies up until 6 mos after birth. I'm willing to go up to 2 years old. They aren't people people. Make abortion legal agian and I'll accept the arguement that you don't need to throw babies in the dumpster.

In short my compromise position has changed. It should now be legal to throw babies into dumpsters. They are not people.

I'm still pro availability-of-abortion, fairly neutral on frequency-of-abortion (i.e. I care about "legal" and "safe", but don't have a strong opinion on "rare"). However, I went from pro Roe v Wade to anti -- I think that was a terrible precedent to set, and I think this past year really opened my eyes to how often the supreme court has been legislating from the bench (and how rarely our legislators have been meaningfully legislating).

I'm still pro abortion but I am coming around to the idea that the original Roe v Wade decision was poor constitutional scholarship. I support the right to abortion, but I don't think it's actually in the constitution. That decision was more than a little bit of a stretch.

A few years ago I was a pretty straightforward "legal safe and rare" bro, but the last year has really pushed me towards being anti-abortion.

  • Leftists seems to not just accept abortion, but celebrate it.

  • They do this while also taking extreme anti-natalist positions, attacking the concept of public school, attacking the concept of families, etc.

  • They refuse to condemn late stage abortions, or refuse to even offer an explanation for how this isn't just blatant murder.

If you dropped me into the middle of a movie which was the world we are currently living in, it wouldn't be a bad assumption to see leftists as cartoonish villain trying to collapse society. I mean seriously watch any of the congressional hearings about this. The abortion advocates won't acknowledge that murdering a living child the day before it is born is morally hazardous. It just goes so far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The only word I can think of to describe this behavior is evil.

The RvW stuff finally just fully removed the leftists mask. No, actually they aren't just okay with murdering unborn children, but they actually celebrate it like some sort of sacrament.

So yeah: I have moved to the right on this topic.

If you are seeing people as “cartoonish villains trying to collapse society,” you are probably missing something.

Consider the leftists who think Republican policy is Literally 1984. Or who assert that corporate executives are thrilled to destroy the planet. Do you think these people have an accurate model of the world?

If not, then consider that you might also be wrong about their motives.

I don't think you understood my comment. I'm not saying that leftist are trying to collapse society, but I'm saying that they're acting like it.

Consider the leftists who think Republican policy is Literally 1984. Or who assert that corporate executives are thrilled to destroy the planet. Do you think these people have an accurate model of the world?

Do you think it's possible that one ideology could be more long term stable than another one, or are they all perfect mirrors or one another?

False dichotomy, no?

Conservatism could be strictly more long-term stable. Perhaps conservatives are more likely to be correct on the object level, too. I still wouldn’t believe that liberals in the general sense are out to destroy society. Outside of the lunatic fringe of doomsday cults, they expect to live in it, too. That is a pretty strong incentive not to do society-destroying things. If you’d like to assert that, no, they’re poo-poo heads who don’t care about looking bad...why? Why would anyone do that?

I don’t understand your distinction between “acting like” and “trying to” destroy society.

Acting like and trying is the difference between malevolence and incompetence or apathy.

I don’t think most leftists are destroying society on purpose, I just think that they’re too lazy of horrified to think through to the conclusions of the policies that they support.

But then there are some large leftist groups who say things like that their goal is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”, and I’m not really sure what to do other than take those groups at their word.

I just think that they’re too lazy of horrified to think through to the conclusions of the policies that they support.

Or dumb, or very biased (like having a strong bias for perfection, resulting in them rejecting any solutions where they can see the flaws, which naturally selects for solutions that they cannot understand, since perfection is impossible).

Or a combination of factors, of course.

One thing I've somewhat internalized is that if there isn't a bright-line rule that is strictly enforced regarding [practice] one can expect that said practice to expand to be far more common than one might consider reasonable.

I don't know for sure if this is an example of totalizing ideologies that can't broach compromise or if it's a natural molochian process where anything that isn't forbidden is considered permissible and every step down a given path to 'hell' makes every subsequent step easier.

I think we're starting to see it happen with Euthanasia in Canada, too.

If there's no law preventing the practice in question from becoming common, and we're no longer allowed to use social shame and other 'soft' pressures to make people reluctant to engage in the practice, and we throw out the concept of divine punishment for 'sin,' either in the current world or the afterlife... then we are resigned to accept it becoming a pure exercise in economic viability/incentives.

In short, the slippery slope is not a fallacy if you tear down all the Chesterton's fences that might have arrested one's slide down the mountain.

I decided a long time ago now that I myself wouldn't be willing to hold a gun to a woman's head to prevent her from getting an abortion, so I can't in good faith support laws that would likewise use violence to prevent women from carrying out abortions.

But there's still plenty of approaches that could keep it "Legal, safe, and rare" such as restricting the ability of doctors to perform the procedure, or impose 'time, place, and manner' restrictions so there aren't abortion clinics on every corner.

Incidentally, I might be willing to hold a gun to a Doctor's head to keep him/her from performing an abortion.

While I would like to celebrate that you are joining the "obviously correct" side I think it is necessary to caution you about basing your political positions in what someone else says or does. If you think or thought it was a necessary evil or even a reluctant burden for abortion to be legal, safe and rare and just changed your position due to the disgust you felt with the craziest of your ingroup advocates; maybe it's better to maintain that position but condemn the crazies?.

Now with that nasty business out of the way, Welcome aboard!. Good of you to join all the correct thinking people!.

My position is in alignment with the Catholic Church. Basically: if a mothers life is being threatened, then abortion is permissible.

Those would be the legal, safe, and rare abortion im talking about. I still support those, because I don’t see the surgical removal of an ectopic pregnancy as the same as murdering an unborn child.

The reaction from me is because before, leftists were essentially saying that they needed this tool, but that they would use it responsibly. My reaction is due to learning that their “use” is industrial scale murder of children.

Not American and not Catholic, not a woman, I usually collapse the abortion threads.

I haven't changed my position but I've had a little more flesh added to the bones of the various arguments. Ultimately nobody thinks abortion is good as an end in itself, it's a lesser-of-two-evils debate where one side chooses the mother (and alleviating social ills downstream from unwanted children) and the other side chooses the child (and alleviating the moral ills downstream from permitting unwanted children to be killed before they reach the cradle. Note that it's permitting, abortions won't effectively stop if the permission is withdrawn). It's a poisoned chalice but I'll prioritise lowering the burden of social dysfunction over evading the gravity of moral judgements.

Ultimately nobody thinks abortion is good as an end in itself

Sorry to nitpick but plenty of people do think it's good as an end in itself. I see it as a sort of "moral induction" where the thought process goes

  1. Access to abortion good

  2. (Fuzzy, unconscious step where counterarguments gain a negatively charged emotional valence, abortion itself gains a positively charged emotional valence, reasoning is obscured, allies become good and enemies become bad)

  3. Abortion is good in and of itself, because to suggest otherwise would be to hint at a counterargument which is bad

I realize we're meant to steelman here but we shouldn't do so to the point of denying that any fleshmen exist.

I will caution against using absolutes when talking about political sides, as the "Shout your abortion!" crowd can be used as a rhetorical weapon against your argument.

I don't think I've changed my position but my commitment definitely feels more intense than previously. Reading accounts like what happened to Kaitlyn Joshua (Or Marlena Stell or Nancy Davis) make me think the United States having our own Savita Halappanavar moment is inevitable and it will have been totally preventable. Hell you can read accounts of non-pregnant women with psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or cancer being denied access to medication for their condition because that medication can also be used to induce abortion.

The steady drumbeat of pain and suffering of women due to increased restrictions on access to abortion and its means reinforces my desire to see all such laws ended.

This is my experience also. While I always opposed an abortion ban, I honestly had no idea how many downstream repercussions there would be from them. It's kind of shocking how people cannot be depended upon to make common sense decisions.

My take concerning the ethical issues is very similar to yours.

I have gained a greater appreciation of just how difficult it is to write a sane law banning abortion. ... However, laws should be written to give the maximum benefit of doubt to the doctor and mother. There should be a medical emergency exception. To prosecute an abortion as not being medically necessary the state should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the doctor was, not just wrong, but actively acting in bad faith.

I have come to conclusion that the difficulties are not about the law as written, but the societal and cultural stuff it is supposed to reflect. Namely, there is nothing to reflect. You can not write a law and have it obeyed if it doesn't "fit" the society.

(Draconian authoritarian enforcement may help, but that option comes with a risk that the draconian authoritarian enforcers will take bribes to look the other way because they don't agree with law either. Part of the risk in a police state is that it won't be the ideal Spartan "tough but just" police state but the draconian police state where widespread corruption and disrespect of the law is a norm, which is worse.)

If people have a commonly shared moral framework broadly accepted by mostly everyone, you can write a law "abortion is generally banned except in medical emergencies" and have outcomes you expect. Without the such shared moral framework, you either get "no medical emergency is serious enough, women suffer / die of complications" or "having an unwanted baby would cause some unwanted mental distress, which qualifies as a medical reason".

Thus, my opinion is that any serious [1] legal solution is downstream of values. Why people no longer want kids? Why they are viewed as a burden? If we'd solve that, and there is a possibility for long-term effective change.

[1] There is a possibility there are legal changes that could go together with a successful values reappraisal, or some marginal tweak will improve individual outcomes. But in big picture, it won't move the overall statistic / sentiment.

"Legal but commonly recognized as immoral" does not seem to be an option.

One counterexample here would be adultery. It's not illegal, or in the cases where it is the laws are never enforced but almost everyone agrees that it's immoral.

That is changing too. Bit by bit "monagamist" is becoming an epithet, the sign of a closed-minded, selfish, insecure loser. You won't want to come across as being polyphobic.

I'm curious where you see this happening outside of poly arrangements and their communities. Even for all the promotion of LGBT+ people in culture and media, you don't tend to see cases where they promote having more than a single partner at a time. The only one that comes to recent memory for me is Sex and Love, where a woman cheats on her husband with her ex and the show shows this ending as something happy and joyous. But even they don't go as far as calling monogamy evil, just unfulfilling.

No, my opinion is much the same as it has ever been, and probably has hardened due to things like thinkpieces and articles about "now here is how you explain abortion is a good thing to the ignorant" which want to reach out to people on the pro-life side, but in essence give nothing as a compromise; we'll teach you how to persuade pro-lifers abortion is fine, but we won't give in on anything we believe about it.

What ground my gears recently was someone writing a Substack article about this where they explained to their (presumably) pro-choice readers that "pro-lifers think the foetus is a baby and that it is a person". So if you can just convince us dumb pro-lifers that a foetus is not a baby or a person... oh, and yes, the pro-lifers do use "baby" for the thing that is inside the womb, instead of the more correct "fetus" even though etymologically, fetus is Latin, derived from a verb meaning "to breed/bear" and refers to "being pregnant; having young, progeny; those young, progeny" - so in effect, 'fetus' is just medical Latin for 'baby'. I have noticed this kind of language-juggling before - "baby" means something different and is emotive, the real neutral scientific term is "fetus" which doesn't mean a baby, it means something like a clump of cells is all.

Convince me first that the noodle who wrote that is a person with rights and not just a particularly large clump of cells, and then maybe I'll change my mind on "the products of conception".

After seeing the general pattern of "no limiting principle" coming from the blue side (on at least trans issues, abortion, and assisted euthanasia), my views have swung towards the pro-life side but in a way that isn't really backed by the traditional axiom of fetal personhood. Instead, it is backed by the revulsion I feel towards people who gleefully abort instead of using birth control, and my view that sex is a serious thing with serious consequences that you do not frivolously engage with. I also strongly believe that humanity needs its best and brightest to reproduce if we want to pass the great filter, and am much more in favor of good people having kids than I was even three years ago. Unlike the traditional red-tribe view, I am somewhat okay with people aborting severely disabled or nonviable fetuses. But that road leads to dark places unless stopped with a limiting principle of its own, and so I cannot endorse it unreservedly either.

I also strongly believe that humanity needs its best and brightest to reproduce if we want to pass the great filter, and am much more in favor of good people having kids than I was even three years ago.

I agree with this strongly but I have the opposite takeaway on abortion. Statistics show that those having abortions are disproportionately poor, black and uneducated. They're the opposite of the kind of people we want reproducing. The best and the brightest need abortions less frequently because they're more capable of effectively using birth control

How many of those people are there?

I worry that the sides in this culture war have obvious incentives to paint opponents as uncompromising extremists, while in reality, most Americans support restrictions. And most women getting an abortion haven’t had one before, which suggests abortion-as-birth-control is relatively rare. I would still like to see that eliminated, and easy access to contraception is probably the best way to do so...but the constituency interested in banning abortion is also proud to make that more difficult.

That’s why I’m not fond of arguments from “no limiting principle.” It is easy to mistake the political value of extremist stances for an actual desire to implement them. Plus, the media has every incentive to demonize their outgroup with its worst examples. In the interest of avoiding toxoplasma of rage, I try to focus on the grounds for compromise. For abortion, that’s far more popular than the media suggests.

By all means, believe that the 8% of Americans supporting unconditional abortion are extremists. That shouldn’t prevent treating with the broader group. There are ~5 times as many people who believe in restrictions, in exceptions, and who vote against the absolutist measures proposed by the other end of the spectrum. Why should the extremists get to drown them out?

There are responses in this thread claiming that “left-wing” excesses have pushed them away from compromise positions on abortion. That is letting the terrorists win.

How many of those people are there?

Probably fewer than it looks like when I spend too much time online.

but in a way that isn't really backed by the traditional axiom of fetal personhood

How does this play with viability, BTW?

Unless I misunderstand you, I think I answered that above. Did you mean something else by your question?

Unlike the traditional red-tribe view, I am somewhat okay with people aborting severely disabled or nonviable fetuses.

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I share your frustrations. I would, however, suggest to you a third alternative when you say:

So, my options, as a person with my personal convictions, have grown to encompass 1) believing a majority of people even in red states are willing to tolerate and enable genocide, or 2) moderating my stance such that what is happening is no longer a genocide.

I think you need to consider option 3: a majority of people even in red states do not believe abortion to be tantamount to murder. That takes it from "these people are willing to callously slaughter innocents" to "these people don't believe that what they are doing is an act of murder". I think that it's both less of a blackpill, and more accurate, to believe the latter of people than the former.

That isn't to say I think those people are right - I don't. But a person who says "no, this isn't murder because the unborn child doesn't have moral rights" is someone I can accept much more easily than someone who blithely shrugs and says "yeah it's murdering a child, what of it?". As you indicate, it's far more distressing to think your countrymen believe the latter than the former.

I agree it's a fundamental value difference, I just think the distinction does matter. Like I said, for me personally it's a lot less horrific if someone thinks the unborn don't have rights than if they agree the unborn has rights but don't care if they hurt them. The first person is a person who I can accept is wrong but not necessarily a bad person. The second is just a bad person.

Abortion can be more accurately described as decentralized eugenics and has been hypothesized as a long term crime reduction policy. Those who are least willing and able to raise children choose to abort. This skews towards impoverished single mothers, the demographic most at risk for raising dysfunctional children. The fathers tend to not be involved either, presumably due to low impulse control, inability to provide materially, drug abuse, criminality, etc.

Even if you believe that abortion is murder, there is a strong argument that it is the lesser evil compared to forcing these types of women to birth and potentially raise these children. I doubt adoption would be an effective replacement, since the current number of abortions per year is roughly an order of magnitude higher than the number of adoptions. You would have to dramatically liberalize the adoption process, which would increase the risk of unfit parents adopting orphans. I also suspect there would still be low demand for children suspected to have come from drug addicted underclass mothers, resulting in further stress on the foster system, damaging most of these kids and dooming them to the underclass.

Even if you believe that abortion is murder, there is a strong argument that it is the lesser evil compared to forcing these types of women to birth and potentially raise these children

I believe unborn children are morally equivalent to everyone else in regard to their right not to be intentionally killed. So if you think I should treat abortion as a lesser evil because the children who are aborted might turn into dysfunctional people (and please correct me if that's a misrepresentation of your argument), then shouldn't I also treat killing dysfunctional people at any stage, whether child or adult, as a lesser evil than banning the murder of them generally, given that I think both have an equally strong right not to be murdered?

So like, not to nitpick, but this seems particularly egregious expansion: What "Genos" exactly is being "-Cided" such that Abortion can be called Genocide? Genocide is the killing of a people, the extermination of a race/ethnicity/group, its total elimination on at least a local basis. The trope-namer events that give us our entire concept for Genocide are things like the Holocaust (Jewish populations locally eliminated in much of occupied Eastern Europe, global Jewish Population still hasn't recovered), the Armenian Genocide (Anatolian Armenian populations have never recovered), and the Rwandan Genocide (Tutsis, in spite of regaining political power, have failed to regain control over much of the land from which they were exterminated). The modal abortion-seeker already has one-or-more-children, and while there is some ethnic difference in abortion rates I don't think you're repeating NoI talking points about legalized abortion being a way to keep the Black Man down, and anyway abortion rate doesn't really track demographic changes.

So what ethnic group is being wiped out here? Or do you use Genocide as synonymous with "mass killing?" Personally, I really do think there is something significantly and substantively worse about wiping out an ethnic group than just killing a lot of people, and that is the purpose of the term Genocide.

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Atrocity? Bloodbath? Industrial-scale killing?

Also having a child this year and I can say my opinion hasn’t moved at all. I personally would want access to abortion if my child had some sort of problem. That said, overturning Roe or various state level bans wouldn’t prevent me from getting an abortion in that situation, my wife could just take a trip if I happened to live in a state where it was illegal.

To me the handwringing about access to abortions reminds me of handwringing about people unable to get any form of ID in order to vote. I refuse to believe there is anyone so poor or stupid they’d be unable to get an abortion or an ID if they wanted. I only see it affecting extremely lazy, short-sighted people who simply hardly care one way or another.

So taken together, I would prefer abortion to be legal but I hardly care either way, it will always be readily available regardless of law

To me the handwringing about access to abortions reminds me of handwringing about people unable to get any form of ID in order to vote. I refuse to believe there is anyone so poor or stupid they’d be unable to get an abortion or an ID if they wanted. I only see it affecting extremely lazy, short-sighted people who simply hardly care one way or another.

I'm very much with you on this for the most part. The voting ID thing drives me bananas.

However, back in another thread, @daseindustriesLtd provided a relatively compelling study about abortion access near the border. In short, lower access didn't reduce abortions very much. But it did make them occur later. People were lazy and stupid. Not enough to go through with an unwanted pregnancy, but enough to terminate it a month later than they would have otherwise.

For people who think personhood is an exponential gradient, this is a point for access. I want the sociopathic monster who should never be a mother to be able to walk next door and terminate.

This is in stark contrast to the 2-4 year timeline to get a voting ID. IMO, if you can't get an ID, you're too lazy and stupid to vote. It's that simple.

I think you're underestimating how stupid some people are

No, I haven't. I still think it's unwise to have different limits on abortion in different states and I think it's not the job of the legislators or the judges to regulate it. US PHS should be in charge of whatever restrictions medical professional have to abide by when performing abortions.

My opinion has remained more or less the same. I was always pro-choice, though I found the procedure itself distasteful and the legal reasoning behind the Roe decision quite shoddy. The latter position has led to several arguments with liberal family members and friends over the past few months, but nothing enlightening. I would guess that the only thing that would cause a substantial shift in my thinking on this issue would be having a child, as several others have pointed out.

Was a moderate on the issue fine with some restrictions but changed to total pro-choice over the last year. I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception. Given that I want abortion available as an option, and that past talk of exemptions and the like proved to just be the equivalent of the gun control cake slicing meme, I started donating to pro-choice efforts and voted accordingly to swing the pendulum in the other direction.

Same thing also independently caused a bunch of my friends (Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Banning abortion might be popular in the pulpits of some dwindling denominations and internet forums, but it is highly unpopular outside of specific geographic and religious bubbles that are way out of touch with most Americans. Those in favor of banning abortion punch above their weight in primaries and state house compositions due to unrepresentative political systems, but they were BTFO when it was a straight up popular vote even in Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Montana.

I find your post interesting because we probably have the same actual positions on abortion and directly related issues, but I've mostly taken the opposite conclusion from what happened with the overturning.

My impression overall is that the bottom line is that pro-life leaning people are roughly 50% of the population (including 50%-ish of women by the way). The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, Supreme Court, all of that stuff, is meant to cover things we have more like 90% agreement with as a society. In this view, Roe v Wade was always an ugly hack. There's nothing about it in the Constitution and it's ridiculously stunted reasoning by abortion activists to get their preferred point of view enacted as court precedent and thus immune to legislative processes. Keeping it in place only serves to ensure we are constantly fighting Holy Wars over Supreme Court nominees over whether they will or won't swear to keep the ridiculous charade in place at all costs.

The Constitutional Amendment process is very tough for a reason - only things that we have very broad and long-lasting agreement on in our society should end up enshrined at that level and protected by court rulings. If we desire to have abortion granted that level of protection, it should be done right - by passing an explicit Constitutional Amendment about it. If there isn't the support level needed to do that, then abortion doesn't belong there and issues around it should be resolved by state and federal legislation, the way it was intended to be. That's why I think this is a good thing - states where pro-life is strong will now be able to pass and enforce the legislation they wanted to, hopefully without bothering people outside their state much. States where pro-choice is string will continue to be able to have abortion on-demand. People with strong positions on the wrong side of one of those lines will be able to move somewhere that their preferred policy is in place. Democracy in action!

Bottom line, pro-life is a solid segment of our population and they aren't going away. If your political position is that their policy preference must be absolutely suppressed at all costs, then what you're advocating for is not Democracy.

I lean red overall politically, and I am aware that this may have cost red team / Republicans some degree of the gains they would have expected in the recent midterms. I think that's a reasonable price to pay to get this issue off of the national stage. Let the states make their preferred laws, let them sneer at each other, and keep the courts for things we aspirationally have broader agreement on.

I mean, the reality is, with the advent of mass media, people will only put up with what they see as people within their coalition being hurt by people outside of their coalition, and being told they can't stop it because of some lines on a map. That started, at least in the US, w/ Uncle Tom's Cabin, and has only expanded with the advent of radio, TV, and now social media. People at least get nations are nations - the argument over state's rights was shot in Appotomax, and then put into the ground at Selma.

Not to bring Civil Right's into it, do you honestly think the 60's and 70's would've gone better if interracial marriage stated illegal until the early-to-mid 80's, which is when it crossed 50% approval in Gallup polling?

We're a representative democracy bounded by a Constitution that guarantees rights - we've never been, and nobody close to power has ever really advocated for total legislative supremacy or direct democracy.

I get your first point, though I suppose that's something that all movements of any sort will have to live with in the modern age.

On the second, I don't think I agree. I'm saying we need to make a reasonably good-faith effort to follow our constitutional processes in the intended ways. As far as I know, nothing that could reasonably be described as that took place with respect to the civil rights conflicts. I think Roe v Wade is pretty far from that.

Safe legal and rare was never a compromise, though, because there never was a compromise. There’s been one side imposing its values on the other for 50 years, sometimes with more moderate rhetoric.

Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Who is this supposed to endear these people to? Racism and 4chan originated conspiracy theory adherence are vices that the pro-life religious group puts up with to get the policy they think will end the baby holocaust, not the other way around. To the degree that these people vote against pro-life measures they are not allies of the pro-life movement.

It's a description, not a personal endorsement of racism or that Qanon conspiracy stuff. Those individuals are separate from people I'd count as friends, though I realize now the wording was somewhat ambiguous.

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

https://civiqs.com/results/abortion_legal?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&choice=Illegal%20in%20all%20cases&party=Republican

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.

If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.

It's not advice, it's a description of the recent votes having unusual line crossing.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception.

Some on the pro-choice side took the mask off about rare before that:

Despite the Democratic Party dropping “safe, legal, and rare” from the party platform in 2012, politicians are still repeating it nearly a decade later to signal their moral superiority and supposedly commonsense position on abortion. Even Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband President Bill Clinton, is credited with popularizing the phrase, eventually stopped saying it, opting for “safe and legal” during her 2016 presidential campaign. Yet some pro-choice politicians can’t let it go.

...Demanding abortion be “rare” is stigmatizing at its core; it posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make, and if they do, it must be in the direst of circumstances. This messaging tells those of us who’ve had abortions that we did something wrong to need an abortion, and we shouldn’t do it again. It unfairly stigmatizes people who will have more than one abortion, which is nearly half of abortion patients.

Hillary gets mentioned here as well:

Clinton used this language in her 2008 presidential campaign; Bill Clinton, meanwhile, had introduced it into Democratic politics back in 1992. The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be “rare” placed stigma on people who seek it.

“There’s a fundamental notion of bodily autonomy that we’ve been fighting for as advocates and activists on this issue for years,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of the All* Above All Action Fund, a nonprofit that works to expand abortion access, told Vox. Saying abortion should be rare “completely negates all the work that we’ve done to really make this about the ability to decide what’s best for your body, for your family, for your community,” she said.

Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

This is hard to believe that they would react so strongly to largely symbolic bans coming from a party that has been saying this is precisely what they want to do for decades. It would be like suddenly losing it and flipping republican because Democrats decide to give blacks some effectively symbolic reparations checks for $100 or something.

1.) People don't hurt parties for what they say they'll do - this is consistent. This annoys us lefties when the GOP consistently (outside of a small period when Trump initially won) want to privatize or radically cut Social Security or Medicare, and voters in focus groups literally don't believe it. For both sides, the voters only hurt them when they actually do things.

2.) There was a very decent chunk of what could be described as 'leave me the hell alone' voters to Trump - anti-immigration, pro-gun, but also pro-choice. Blue collar non-college educated non-religious voters who don't hate religious people, but also don't like God botherers sticking their nose into their business.

With Roe v. Wade overturned, a guaranteed floor on abortion access that previously existed was removed and folks who voted Republican but did not favor hardcore pro-lifer bans now had real skin in the game and the opprotunity to vote directly on it in multiple states.

If it's "symbolic" because of varying state laws, I disagree. I would not consider NYC gun bans, mandatory registration and other impositions "symbolic" just because a New Yorker could hypothetically go to New Hampshire and buy an AR15 in cash from some guy outside Denny's. Additionally, pro-life factions are creating and promoting legislation to penalize people who travel out of state for abortions or those who assist in such.

Also the scenario you describe sounds pretty realistic to me. In this case though it's not total party flips, it's people voting contra most expectations on an issue when that issue is put before them directly.

That scenario would totally happen, though.

It would be like suddenly losing it and flipping republican because Democrats decide to give blacks some effectively symbolic reparations checks for $100 or something.

I think that's also quite plausible, perhaps because of the symbolic element: symbols can be precedents unto themselves, "making an example" of someone or something is effectively establishing that you could do the same thing to others, and overturning Roe was, in a sense, a reservation of the right to make impositions.

1 in 6 of anything is in no way shape or form rare. There are about 6 million pregnancies per year in the US, about 1 million are aborted each year and about 1 million end naturally, with only 4 million ending in a live birth.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare"

I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.

So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.

2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.

Ya I do not see the masks coming off it’s just that they won. And Roe let’s be honest was a constitutional issue which a lot of scholars on the left disagreeing with the reasoning. That wasn’t legislation.

If anything I think the Pro-life people have moderated since Roe ended. From memory the legislation they went for at the federal level was closer to the moderates position of having federal rules similar to the rules in Europe. I think the left just played the politics well to make you think they went extreme - when a lot of GOP politicians moderated their public positions after.

The story of the parent poster does not sound like it is adequately summarised by "people who disagree with us push back"; these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them. Being able to offer a compromise and stand by it, rather than always trying to seize a bit more, seems to be an ability that is tragically lost on all sides of the culture war.

these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them.

But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.

So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.

He specifically mentions closing exemptions and having certain modes of contraception at all. There is a non-trivial of people who align with pro-life politics: no abortion.. Unless it's rape or incest. They're also basically normal people, insofar they don't want plan B or hormonal contraception banned. Pro-life activists getting both of these struck alienates these people, and taking note of this seems entirely valid.

And so is, yes, deciding you don't want these people on your side. That's fine too.

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This is probably just me being out of the loop, but I wasn't aware that this was happening. I thought descriptions of contraceptives being banned was just motte-and-bailey'd references to abortifacent pills. Can you talk a bit more about this?

Emergency contraception can work either by preventing ovulation or by preventing a fertilised egg implanting. In practice, the types that can be taken up to 3 days after unprotected sex work entirely by preventing ovulation, and the types that work up to 5 days after sex work using a combination of both methods. If you believe that life begins at fertilisation then intentionally preventing implantation is abortion, and using emergency contraception is at the very least taking a reckless risk of causing an abortion. I don't think this view makes sense given that nobody cares about the vast number of early miscarriages by non-implantation, but it is sincerely held by the people who hold it.

So the problem is that a subset of pro-lifers (including the people in charge of the movement, and the median voter in a non-Presidential Republican primary in a red state) have a genuine disagreement with everyone else about whether the meaning of the term "abortifacent" includes emergency contraception.

As a separate issue, mifepristone (which is undoubtedly an abortifacent) is marketed as emergency contraception in some countries (but not the US), so I imagine pro-lifers have slippery slope concerns about admitting a distinction between "emergency contraception" and "early medication abortion".

The case I'm most familiar with is Louisiana. There may be others. Louisiana's proposed law on abortion was to prohibit the practice of it in every circumstance, to charge every single purveyor of it with murder, and to legally codify life as starting at fertilisation. This would make the sale of hormonal IUD's and plan B murder under Louisiana's law. Louisiana's legislature is full of people who would prefer not to be voted out immediately, so the fertilisation bit was struck - to the tune of much complaining from those who'd drafted the bill in the first place. This is not a motte of 'we just want to keep people twelve weeks in from aborting-by-pill', and I can very much see how moderate pro-life sorts might come to distrust the movement when their representatives try to pass laws like these.

It's not related to politics, and I can't say the experience changed my views at the policy level, but after seeing my wife's ultrasound at around 8 weeks I just couldn't imagine going through with aborting your own child. I felt a really strong and immediate attachment that I wasn't expecting to have until after it was born. I guess it feels different if it's not a kid you're hoping for, but I just can't put myself in the mindset of someone who would want to end that life.

Not over the course of the last year, but I went through a personal experience with abortion that has changed my feelings. I have always leaned heavily pro-choice since I see the value of human life as something that basically starts from zero and accumulates over time as we develop. Any other position is extreme, the only room for uncertainty is in drawing the line of when a life is valuable enough to protect against the potential harm of bringing a child into the world who is unwelcome, un-cared for, or has some condition that makes them unequipped to lead a good life. And as I see it, the potential for suffering is low for an embryo or an early fetus that has a brain significantly less developed than a newborn baby. So I would have said, go ahead, abort as many as you like! As long as it’s the first trimester. Plenty of valid reasons to abort well into the second trimester as well, but at that point I would not allow it just for poor planning or inconvenience. Lastly, it’s important that women have good access to abortion to prevent the societal harms of unwanted pregnancies.

Then, at the age of 24, my girlfriend and I got pregnant. We caught it a bit late at six weeks. It came as a real surprise because she was on the pill, it turned out later there was a recall on her medication. But we figured we weren’t ready, so the very next day after we found out we headed into the clinic.

At the clinic it turned out she was carrying twins. That made it a lot harder, for some reason, maybe because it felt special and unlikely to happen that way again if we decided to have kids later. But we still went through with it.

The reality of going through an abortion is it’s a highly unpleasant experience. No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you. I felt, and still feel deeply ashamed about the whole thing. Not because of societal pressure or stigma or anything like that, but because fundamentally I killed my unborn children.

I am still pro-choice and my views around timing and access to abortion have not changed, but I now think it is not a decision to be taken lightly and there are valid reasons to be hesitant to have an abortion. I am far more sympathetic now to doctors who refuse to perform or condone abortions as well (it’s also explicitly forbidden under the Hippocratic Oath). And paradoxically, I have a lot less sympathy to those who attempt to interfere with couples seeking abortions and the doctors facilitating that process. It’s extremely difficult to make that decision and carry through with it, and any barrier to access could lead to an outcome they will regret for the rest of their lives.

No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you.

I don't want to detract from the pain you went through in that situation, but please don't assume everyone who goes through an abortion will have the same feelings about it that you did.

I went through something similar with my girlfriend around that same age - we were both 22, I think. I felt no emotional attachment to it myself. I can't know everything that went through her mind, but she certainly didn't give any indication that she had any emotional attachment to it either. And looking back at it, many years later, I can say that I've never felt any shame or regret about it whatsoever.

Personally I've thought more about the dynamics of state level abortion bans. The result of banning it in some states and allowing it in others is that you only ban it for the poor, stupid, low conscientiousness, hesitant, unconnected. Which means there probably won't be any increase in babies born to high IQ, high conscientiousness women who have the money for a bus ticket. While I'm not broadly in favor of eugenic policies, I am broadly opposed to dysgenic ones. It simply isn't practical to ban abortion at the state level in most states.

Before I was pro abortion in some cases, against it in others. Now, having thought about it more, I'm very against it on a state level. Probably a national level ban is the minimum to achieve any benefits. I still think it should be handled socially rather than legally.

It seems like we have real world data on the decline in abortions(most of which is probably from Texas, which is the big state with the least abortion access)- is it concentrated among blacks, poor, stupid, apathetic?

I'll have to look into it, but I think what we're looking for isn't abortions per se but changes in number of live births. It's not really a question of who gets abortions, but of who has more kids as a result. I would be shocked to find out that there was any change in the birth rates of upper-income highly-educated Texan women. I might even expect a decline, as reduced abortion access leads to a climate of fear and less sex overall. I think we'll have to wait 1-2 years to really see how it shakes out though.

As for race, Abortions are overwhelmingly non-white, looking at @FirstfullOfCrows data below the only states with a majority of white abortions were 90%+ white.

It skews black and rural when you consider % of population.

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/

I'm pro choice, and also pro-infanticide (of disabled children). Not as prescriptive policy, but something that ought to available as an option to parents.

However, I feel extremely disgusted and strongly about abortion activists, and think there need to be limits. Generally EU seems to have fairly sensible legislation.

Abortion and any similar killing is an extremely serious affair, and should be treated as such. Being proud of having an abortion seems completely perverse.

Hard to express what I hate about them. It's the same sort of disgust I have to people who treat dead enemy combatans with disrespect.

also pro-infanticide

I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out

We should allow parents to kill their severely disabled children - e.g. more than light mental retardation, the bad cases of autism, very severe health issues. Not have them euthanised, have to do it themselves.

It greatly saddens me to see parents caring about practical vegetables with devotion for decades, forgoing having healthy children. It's sad and infuriating see people caring for such beg for charity on social media. Heartbreaking dysfunction of instincts, enabled by bad cultural attitudes.

Children are precious because they represent future human potential, continuation of our families. Our emotions make us care about them for that reason. Our emotions are functional, yet most people don't care to think about that for even a smidgeon of a time. Every major emotion exists for some reason, they're something like control variables.

A mentally retarded cripple who's never not going to slobber represents nothing but a resource sink. A violent, non-verbal autistic who is a physical danger to his carers, to the point that in 'enlightened' countries like the US they inject such with hormone blockers iirc or growth retardants.. .. what is the purpose of such a life ?

Call me a monster, call me a high decoupler, I don't really care. Not like any of this matters, as we're probably all going to be biodiesel within a couple of generations.

It greatly saddens me to see parents caring about practical vegetables with devotion for decades, forgoing having healthy children.

Or having healthy children who are severely neglected because all the care and attention goes to the vegetable sibling.

Seeing people ask for donations for someone who isn't even there is almost as psychologically damaging to me as watching those dating tiktok video compilations.

What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn? Neither can survive independently and neither has a sense of self. Killing one is like killing another.

There is some fuzzy boundary when a zygote becomes a "person", but I would argue it happens far enough after birth for it not to make a difference here.

What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn?

One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.

Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.

Bravo, this is my position too, all the way up to being pro-murder. After all, what is a full grown adult except an especially large fetus? So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.

I don't think there's a substantial moral difference between killing a fetus and killing a full-grown adult that cannot survive independently and does not have a sense of self (e.g. unplugging the life-support of someone brain-dead). If anything, I think the moral case for allowing someone to pull the plug on a brain-dead adult is stronger than the moral case for allowing abortion.

I basically think of abortion as morally equivalent to pulling the plug on someone who is currently comatose, but has a good chance of becoming functional if given expensive life support until they awaken, and then a decade or two of rehabilitation (for the sake of the analogy, said comatose adult will never regain their past memories).

I unironically am pro "murder" in the case of the "pull-the-plug-murder" scenario above -- I genuinely think that killing someone in that situation because it is convenient is justifiable (though note that the "they will never regain any past memories" is a load-bearing part of that judgement for me).

So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.

That's called death penalty.

Ironically your/Singer's position makes more sense to me than the ones claiming a baby is just a morally valueless "clump of cells" until it magically becomes fully human the second it's out of the womb. Like either of us could be wrong, but at least both positions are coherent.

I agree with your view of coherence, but not completely: why stop at children?

I am absolutely not pro-infanticide, but the killing, or at least exposure of crippled or deformed infants is extremely common throughout history. In ancient Rome it was considered something you kept quiet, but by no means a crime or a horrific crime as it might be considered today. Oftentimes people were not considered 'full' humans until they had lived a few years already, partially because mortality rates among infants and young children were so high. The idea infanticide is a heinous moral abomination seems to be a product of the slow christianization of western morality.

Technically illegal but socially tolerated infanticide was a thing in a society as rich and Christian as Victorian England. Very quickly after the practice is stopped, we get a change in the law to make infanticide a relatively minor crime (which it still is in most of the Commonwealth).

Society can't make women raise unwanted children (it can barely make deadbeat dads pay child support, and collecting cash under threat of violence is something states are good at) and generally doesn't try. The real-world feasibility of a pro-life regime depends on the availability of loving adoptive parents (which is currently not an issue, at least if you are willing to see large-scale interracial adoption).

I mean, you could also have orphanages, which is strictly worse than adoption, but it does do the same job.

You could say that about a lot of things. Institutionalised rape, slavery and child brides were pretty common and accepted throughout the ancient world as well, but it would be unusual for a person to defend those things today.

Ancient world? A lot of the things were popular at most 200 years ago.

Some forms of institutionalized rape I think I could still argue for in an anonymous format. I think a reasonable argument can be made of a husband having sexual rights in a marriage presupposing he’s being a good husband and it’s part of the marriage compact. And Russian serfdom (which was supposedly quite harsh) and Chattel slavery was less than 200 hundred years.

That's the marriage debt, it applies to both spouses (wives too have a right to sex) and it's not rape, since in marriage you are presumed to give consent to sexual activity with your spouse. There was a fine-grained legal distinction that rape was sex without consent, and since married couples consented to have sex, the crime of rape could not be committed within marriage (which is not to say that the act of rape could not be committed).

Forcing someone unwilling, by threats, violence, or other coercion, is wrong. That's not what marriage is supposed to be. So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).

So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).

Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?

I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.

This reminds me of many of Vox Day's blog posts back in the day. He'd say "Marital rape doesn't exist" and "Getting married implicitly gives permanent consent." People would ask him "Does that mean if your wife says 'Not tonight, I have a headache' you can just smack her around until she submits?" He would always dodge or just sneer at the question.

I thought he was being disingenuous then, and I think your "Chesterston's fence" here is a bit disingenuous.

I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.

Well, first of all, no, I think it's ridiculous to think that we should just accept the received wisdom of ten thousand generations of savages. There are a whole lot of things our ancestors believed for ten thousand generations and we only realized in the last few hundred years were stupid.

So legally, yes, a husband in most societies historically had the right to literally rape his wife (by which I mean "rape rape", not just threats, pressure, and cajoling), but even the most misogynistic cultures generally didn't think highly of a man who physically abused his wife and had to force her to have sex with him. I strongly suspect that even back in caveman days, couples with genuine affection for each other were looked on with much more respect than couples where the man was literally having to knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair to get laid.

On to the present day, which you seem to think is missing a little something something because a man can't knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair anymore. But presumably you didn't mean literally that. But then I would ask you the same question put to Vox Day: what did you mean? If your wife says "Not tonight, I have a headache," are you claiming that you should literally have the right to say "Tough shit, on your back," backed up by force if necessary?

So presuming the actual question is not "What if she's not in the mood sometimes?" but "What if she refuses to sleep with me, ever?" Well, obviously, your marriage is dysfunctional, and you have a range of options from counseling to divorce. Even if you're a tradcon who believes divorce should be off the table, I would think you would want to find out why your wife is refusing to have sex with you, and try to fix that. If it's a physical ailment, well, you did promise "in sickness or in health," right? If it's depression, she needs help, not being compelled to put out because it's her "wifely duty." If it's none of these things, and it's genuinely not your fault for being a jerk husband - if you're stuck with a woman who pretended to like sex until you got married and then turned it off afterwards, like in those horrible old Playboy cartoons, well, I guess if you won't divorce her, then it kind of sucks to have made a poor life choice. But seriously, what do you think should be your options in that case?

(And yes, I've made the assumption above that we are talking about the woman being the one who refuses sex, because realistically, if it's the man refusing to have sex, it's very rare that his wife has any ability to force him. But I'd say the same thing to a woman whose husband rejects her and the situation doesn't appear fixable: if you won't consider divorce, then I guess you're trapped in an unhappy marriage. Which is why I don't think divorce should be off the table.)

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The solution was to consider it being a bad wife, and still not grant license for forcible rape.

Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?

That's always going to happen occasionally. The idea that any religious authority would approve of forcing it in all cases is silly, so I won't address that, instead I'll assume you're saying something like Partner B has been refusing sex for an extended period of time, say six months at a time.

While I'm a big Chesterton guy, you also have to consider that the thousands of generations before you lived in different circumstances. Particularly, I don't think you can keep the "forced sex is ok if you're married" fence up if you've torn down the "living within a community of people who you can talk to about it" fence. Maybe a Benedict option argument at some level? The idea of Marital Debt comes largely from ecclesiastical court cases where spouses literally went to a formal tribunal to determine the answers to these questions! At a less formal level, you and your spouse go to your mutual priest and confessor, alone or together, and seek guidance. Today, we call this practice marital counseling, the only difference is the training of the counselor changing from theological to psychological, from one brand of nonsense to another more cynically.

We've also lost the kind of family honor-bonds that protected both parties to a marriage. A woman in an abusive marriage might count on pressure from her father, brothers, uncles, male cousins, and general social opprobrium to prevent overly vicious abuse. A husband who was too violent with his wife risked social outcast status, or revenge, even if divorce was impossible. Today, that kind of thing is unthinkable: we don't live in close knit families, private violence is anathema, and there is no sense of honor that would lead a would-be-Sonny to defend his sister.

Catholicism, of course, absolutely forbids divorce. Other religious traditions, nonetheless quite strict on their own views, take different attitudes:

Most Islamic scholars agree that it is forbidden for husbands to forgo sex for more than four months, and Sharia law allows a wife to seek a divorce if her husband is unable to satisfy her physical needs.

"Satisfying sexual desire is one of the two main purposes of marriage in Islam," said Abdul Wahid Asimi, the director of Herat's department of haj and religious affairs. "When a man deprives his wife of sexual intercourse, he will have to answer to Allah for his actions." He added, "If a woman complains that her husband has refused to have sex with her, the court has the right to order their separation."

So what does a solution look like? Compromise, talk to each other, talk to spiritual/moral counselors you respect, reach a place where things work for both of you. Just like you would for literally any other marital issue.

Don't marry someone who doesn't feel like it for longer periods than you can tolerate?

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I had been pretty default pro-choice, having been basically a 90s libertarian. I feel like I've moved a little bit in the pro-life direction. Reasons:

  • This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

  • Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

  • A thought I had that doesn't seem to want to go away: If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously? What would you expect them to think of that? Children can be really annoying and inconvenient at the best of times. Virtually all of them will be imperfect in some way. The reason why we give children unconditional love is because they are so extraordinarily dependent on their parents and they know it, so they're naturally terrified at the idea of being abandoned. How can a child expect that from you once they realize that you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient? Oh, we didn't have a good job and weren't sure how we would support ourselves - does that mean that once you actually have a kid, if you lose your job or get in an accident or things get tough some other way, it's bye bye kiddo? Okay so you don't tell them. Unless they manage to find out some other way. Or maybe just don't do something that you'll never be able to tell your kid?

If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?

Yes?

My mother told me that. It means I was actually wanted. If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

Well that's a point. Maybe the whole thing is me just over-thinking things. If you're happy with the situation, then all is well and good I guess.

If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

My mother never having had an abortion means that I and my siblings were born like most of humanity: married people having sex, getting pregnant from that, everyone knows sex means babies and once you're married, babies are expected.

People did have accidents and unplanned pregnancies, but that was also taken in stride because accidents happen. This modern attitude about demanding extreme control over every aspect of life is excessive, and anyways - if your mother didn't kill you when you were still an infant, how do you know you weren't just an unwanted baby she was pressured to not murder because society frowns on infanticide?

What a question. "How do you know your mother didn't want to kill you but wasn't allowed to do so?"

It also means that given an small change in circumstances she wouldn't have hesitated in killing you.

We don't live in that universe, though.

Eh. Given a small change in circumstances, most mothers wouldn't hesitate to significantly delay having kids, and ones does choose number and timing of kids based on life circumstances. "Not existing" isn't better than "existing for a few months".

But "not producing" is morally very different from "killing". And yes, not existing is very different from being killed too (I won't say better or worse), even if what exists is not fully human yet.

If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

I wouldn't care if I was an accident she was pressured to keep, because social shaming women out of making bad decisions is perfectly legit. This is an example of "patriarchy working as intended towards good outcomes".

Conversely I would be quite mad to find out my mother murdered my older sibling.

I can't imagine feeling better that I was possibly unwanted and merely tolerated over actively wanted. But you do you.

I didn't say "better", I said "don't care".

My mother is here the beneficiary of my soft bigotry of low expectations. I don't expect good life choices or coherent cost-benefit-analyses out of women in their 20s, especially when they're hysterical from pregnancy hormones.

"Actively wanted" means fuck-all. It can just as easily apply to "I wanted a child who would be happy, successful, and popular - but I got you. You've been a disappointment to me all your life, and it's worse because you were an intended pregnancy".

Most people have been born because their mothers got pregnant at some time that wasn't timed down to the minute. "Actively wanted" pregnancies are a result of the pressure on women not to have babies until it's convenient for the economy, when their employer has obtained maximum return on them. Now that you're in the final years of your fertility and it's 'now or never' to have a child, then you are graciously permitted to try for one.

Would you be in favor of removing taboos on infanticide for these reasons? Many parents go through quite stressful times when raising a small child. This stress causes a not insignificant fraction of those parents to desire no longer having said child. Some fraction of those parents consider the possibility of killing/abandoning their child to remove such concerns. Some fraction of those parents actually do the deed, regardless of the current social pressure against it.

You may feel comfortable believing that you were actively wanted in some period between approximately -9mo and -3mo. After that time, say, between -3mo and +2yr, perhaps a very substantial portion of that time, you could have been very unwanted. Perhaps you were very barely marginally merely tolerated, and that only due to the extreme quantities of social pressure exerted on your parents.

Do you think the world would be a better place if we removed all that social pressure, so you could make sure that you were, like, actually actually wanted?

The type of unconditional love you describe is not universal. In some, maybe even most, non-western cultures (the one I am familiar with is old rural China), children are expected to "pay their rent" in terms of household labor from a young age and during hard times a child who isn't pulling their weight may be sold off for adoption to a wealthy family or to better-off distant relatives. Statements along the lines of "If my children are disobedient, I can always get rid of them and make more," though now mostly in jest, can still be heard in many Asian and Asian immigrant households as a vestige of these practices. While I don't condone all these behaviors, most of the people who experienced them seem to have turned out fairly well-adjusted.

An interesting point as well. I have wondered at times if we're a little over-concerned with how safe our children are, harkening back to the 90s era of complaining that everything is "for the children" and Free Range Kids and all that. I may need to think a little on how those basic beliefs intersect with the abortion stuff. I wonder how much the Chinese care about abortions?

This was also true in some premodern western cultures. (source: this book, which I did read, although I think it presented a rather negatively-biased picture).

If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?

I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.

I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.

I have yet to meet a single child who developed the kind of neurosis or anxiety you envisioned from learning that their parents had an abortion.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a non-issue for anyone not a delicate neo-Victorian waif struck by consumption haha

Not sure I follow. Has your support waned because American liberals "seem" to be calling for more dramatic action?

If so, I can assure you that the maximalist position is not a popular one. Consider the DNC party plank: fund Planned Parenthood, repeal the Hyde Amendment, oppose federal and state "barriers to reproductive health and rights." Wishy-washy, meaning amenable to a compromise.

Or look at public support. 19% "legal in all cases, no exceptions." Most of the rest say that length of pregnancy matters, that parents/guardians need to be informed for minors, that violating such laws should result in penalties. This is compatible with a compromise position where we get some restrictions and some protections!

Most Americans support abortion up to 6 weeks. 14 weeks is more evenly split, and 24 weeks is unpopular. Isn't that more or less in line with the rest of the first world?

Regarding your third point--doesn't this all rely on one assumption?

you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient

Okay, so if you don't believe abortion kills a child, you're not really going to worry about the rest of those hypotheticals. Looking back at the Pew survey, only 15% of "most/all cases" respondents agreed with a similar position. Out of those who did agree that a fetus was a person, yet still supported abortion, how many were thinking of rape exceptions, or other awful dilemmas that you'd "never be able to tell your kid?"

I think a lot of the feeling of liberals calling for more dramatic action was the recent federal legislation proposed had only an extremely vague limiter on post-viability abortions, any risk whatsoever to physical or mental health, and so people feel that Democrats are looking to enforce abortion until birth. It also doesn't help that no Dem politician seems to be able to come up with a limit on abortion they would be ok with during interviews. At least assuming the use of "liberals" from the OP is more as a stand-in for Democrats rather than something like "classical liberals". Sometimes hard to tell. If it was meant as just "classical liberals" then I'd agree with your post.

This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

No compromise breeds no compromise. Supporters of abortion rights know well that pro-lifers do not want "reasonable regulations", but want to ban abortion completely at any place and time (and then move to ban contraception, pornography, "sodomy", race mixing and everything else they see as immoral).

The same in gun politics - gun right supporters know well that anti-gunners do not want "reasonable gun control", but ban everything that looks like gun (and then move to knives and all sharp instruments, like in UK). If you compromise with the uncompromising, you always lose.

Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

Again, the same with guns. Instead of fudds who just wanted to shoot Bambi, you got hard core gun nuts openly carrying big scary black rifles. This seems sick to gun controllers, and this is the point.

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing? Do you for that matter believe that there's even close to a plurality that want to ban contraception(no, the government not giving condoms to middle schoolers is not a ban on contraception)? Even Texas has committed to keeping the morning after pill on the shelves.

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing

I don't believe there was a meaningful number of 1750s voting-reform advocates who wanted 18 year old non-landowning born-out-of-wedlock black women to vote.

But that's where we ended up by following (the coherent extrapolated volition of) their 1750s logic.

So the answer to your question is "No, but I know a slippery slope when I see one"

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

If your model of pro-lifers is "conservatives who want to turn the clock back to the social mores of 1950", the answer becomes obvious. It's a slope of "concessions to that agenda".

First they go for the least popular and legally flimsiest 2020s social more (abortion). When they succeed at that one, it's easier to knock down the next domino, both because the conservatives are energised by the proof that liberal progress can be reversed, and because their opponents have to concede "OK when the conservatives won last time the country didn't immediately get consumed by hellfire". Slip!

But that model is wrong, and contra-indicated by every piece of evidence available.

What slippery slope exists between abortion, contraception, porn and homosexuality?

All these things are seen as sins, regardless whether they increase or decrease killing unborn babies, and opponents of abortion hate them all.

Interracial marriage and race mixing in general was traditionally considered as extremely serious sin in American Christianity, for far longer you would imagine.

If proponents of war on sin get their way on all of the things above, it is not impausible that they will bring back this issue too. Slippery slope all the way up, all the way to heaven!

The irony was, the reason God told the Jews not to marry outside the nation of Israel was to avoid idolatry and dissolution of their faith, not their blood.

Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, revisits the command explicitly on the grounds of faith alone, not blood: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”

Racists who never read Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians decided God's command to Israel, along with the genesis of nations following the Flood and the Tower of Babel, was Biblical justification for their very human isolation of races.

Yet we Christians believe we have two natures (births), a human birth into the species of Adam and a spiritual birth with God as our Father. The second birth, a birth chosen by us, regathers us whose families were scattered by the Curse of Babel and joins us with Jesus, the second Adam, in a new nation, the Kingdom of God. Among Christians who take the whole Bible as holy and sacred, there are no races among us.

You are making the unwarranted assumption that racism is something the pro-life movement is generally in support of, as opposed to something they grudgingly tolerate from their political allies. And, historically, the pro-life movement has been extremely honest in describing their unpopular policies, and so it should take some pretty strong countervailing evidence that it’s secretly in opposition to race mixing.

And what is the slippery slope here? Loving was decided primarily on Equal Protections ground so can easily be differentiated from Dobbs.

You're making a legal argument here, which is, in Cercei Lannister's words, "some flimsy piece of paper". Law is an untrustworthy ally; it will not save anyone from any slipperiness, long-term. Your enemies will just change the law when they get legislative power.

By way of example: naturalisation of anyone other than "white persons of good character" was illegal until 1795; your argument is that of a man in 1794 claiming "No-one has to worry about demographic change ever, it'll never happen, it's the law!".

I accept that. Even agree with it. But I don’t see the slope between interracial marriage and abortion outside of the legal one. So can you tell me the slope?

I don't believe there was a meaningful number of 1750s voting-reform advocates who wanted 18 year old non-landowning born-out-of-wedlock black women to vote.

But that's where we ended up by following (the coherent extrapolated volition of) their 1750s logic.

So the answer to your question is "No, but I know a slippery slope when I see one"

Yes. We do not have to extrapolate anything - we see slippery slope in practice.

As for guns and weapons in general, we all know example of UK. Were gun controllers satisfied with making Britain gun free? No, they moved forward to knives and other sharp instruments.

What is next in line? Logic says it will be martial arts and fitness training. You got rid of guns, you got rid of knives, why should you let people got to gyms and turn their hands and fists into murder machines?

If it saves only one life, it is worth it.

As for abortion and "Christian morals" in general, we see Poland. Abortion ban with small exceptions was passed, and as time moves, the law is tightened more and these minuscule exceptions are rolled out.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/22/polands-constitutional-tribunal-rolls-back-reproductive-rights

And so go other "moral issues".

If you really wanted to minimize murder of innocent babies you would encourage gay sex as much as possible - no danger of unwanted pregnancy here. Of course, we all know it is not about saving lives, it is all about ending sin.

s for guns and weapons in general, we all know example of UK. Were gun controllers satisfied with making Britain gun free? No, they moved forward to knives and other sharp instruments.

Britain is not gun free let alone knife free. Much of my family have shotguns for example, my cousin is a sport shooter and has multiple rifles. Handguns are mostly banned it is true but that is not the same thing as guns in general being banned. And mostly every kitchen has enough knives to murder a few people were you so inclined.

The UK has significantly more restrictions than the US, but guns are not banned, let alone knives. You do need to get the appropriate license or certificate but you are very likely to be able to get a rifle or shotgun license as long as “they require their firearm on a regular, legitimate basis for work, sport or leisure (including collections or research)”

Some of my in-laws live in a rural area, plus I spent a lot of time around the culture while trying to buy a cocker spaniel puppy raised in a shooting household - I can confirm that rural shotgun culture in the UK is as strong as rural gun culture in other countries, and that shotgun licenses are easy to get. The rules are designed to discourage using a shotgun which is owned for sporting purposes as a home defence weapon (you have to store the gun unloaded, with the gun and ammo in two different locked compartments), but 100% of the rural gun owners I spoke to planned to shoot a burglar if the opportunity arose. Armed farmers were generally aware of the Tony Martin case, and thought that he shouldn't have been convicted, but also that they were not in danger from the law because they wouldn't be as stupid as Tony Martin (who had already lost his gun license in a separate incident to the one he was jailed for for shooting at a moving getaway car).

I think "but extremists" is hardly ever a useful take. Yes, of course there are extremists on both sides of every issue. Most of the time, they aren't relevant due to being small in number. It might be a useful barometer if we can show somehow that the extremists are growing in number. Or if we can see their positions changing.

I don't agree with the pro-life extremists, but I don't think their positions or numbers have changed much. The pro-choice extremists may still be small in number, but their position does seem to be crazier than it was before. Free abortion on demand for everyone is one thing, but is it really appropriate to brag about it?

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I personally have no interest in banning contraceptives because, again, who cares.

I want literally the opposite, largely because I am pro-life. I am tentatively in favor of forcing unmarried people to use contraceptives, except that there's no reasonable to enforce it without authoritarian government control that I'm not in favor of. At the very least, we should bring back all of the shame and stigma that used to be attached to unmarried sex a couple centuries ago, but only apply it to people who don't use birth control. Also make it free to incentivize people to use it.

First and foremost, this will reduce abortions. The argument against outlawing it is that people will just do it anyway but in unsafe ways. If so, the only way to truly prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so we should be pushing legal and social pressures towards doing so.

Second, I believe it is immoral to bring an unwanted child into existence. They will not have the love and support from their parents that a child deserves. Again, pro-choice people use this as an argument in favor of abortions, but I think having an unwanted child is less evil than killing them (otherwise we could replace orphanages with euthanasia clinics). But it's still evil, and more birth control would also reduce this.

Thirdly, I believe it is immoral to deliberately have a child as a single parent, even if you want one. I feel less strongly about this, and I'm not sure I would go so far to call it "evil", just misguided and irresponsible. All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes, I don't think one parent alone can fulfill all of the responsibilities of both paying for and actually educating and caring for a child, and doesn't have the full breadth of wisdom and life experiences to impart, since they only have their own perspective.

Unmarried people should not be conceiving children, because it inevitably leads to one of these scenarios (unless you have a shotgun wedding, which is still likely to lead to suboptimal results if your partner wasn't someone you were previously planning to marry). Therefore, unmarried heterosexual people should not engage in unprotected sex, at least in any form with a nonnegligble chance of conception. I'm not convinced it is the responsibility of the government to prevent this, I don't think it's within the range of powers they ought to have. But at the very least anyone who does this is a bad person and we need social pressure that disincentivizes people from doing it. Slut shaming is a lost cause, but I hope that unprotected-slut-shaming (Of both sexes. Men are equally culpable for their actions.) can make a comeback.

All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes

Is this true after controlling for money and intelligence?

I think so. It's been a while since I learned about this so I don't remember all the details or studies off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure there were many such studies and probably at least some controlled correctly. I'm not completely certain though.

However I don't think it would even be appropriate to control for money/wealth/family-income directly, because part of the value of a two-parent household is the increased income. And even if you look at income per parent that's not necessarily appropriate because being a single parent forces them to juggle career and child rearing which would lead to less opportunities to take on high paying but demanding jobs. You'd have to control for socio-economic status of the families the parents came from (ie the grandchildren of the kids) or something complicated like that which controls for potential earning power rather than actual earnings.

The problem with this position is that it's precisely contraception that enables people to think about sex in a way that makes abortion seem desirable. As long as sex is something that is done primarily for fun, and only incidentally, sometimes, if it's desired, for procreation, then the "what if the contraception fails" argument for abortion will always loom large in the background.

Now one might respond to this point with resignation, "the cat's out of the bag", but the point is that this cat creates a gravitational pull toward liberal abortion laws. Because when you have a culture of people who believe they are entitled to have sex for fun, it doesn't work to tell them, "if you forget to take your pill, or if the condom breaks, etc. etc. then sorry, you're out of luck, you have to have that child." That runs totally contrary to the way they understand sex and so it seems unlikely to me that they will accept that state of affairs. Why should they have to give up that entitlement to consequence-free sex and accept a dramatic change to their lifestyle simply because they made a little slip-up one time?

So sure, who knows, maybe we'll never be able to undo the sexual revolution...but in that case I really don't see how we'll ever shift the landscape conceptually and fundamentally away from abortion, such that abortion loses its gravitational pull. Success, if it's obtained through political wizardry, would always be an unstable imposition on a culture that would naturally incline the other way.

People have had sex for fun throughout all of human history. Even in times with serious social stigma for it, people did it in secret anyway. Even the Bible is absolutely riddled with people having sex they're not supposed to. The cat was never in the bag: people have always and will always want to have lots of sex. It has gotten worse in recent years, but it has always been there.

The most realistic path forward that I see is advances in technology making better, easier, safer forms of birth control that don't have the flaws of current ones. Something like an IUD but less invasive and easier to just give to everyone and then not remove until they get married. Or some fancy injection you can regularly give people like a flu shot sterilizes them for a year before it wears off (with reliable predictable timing so nobody ends up permanently sterilized or having kids if it wears off too soon). At the very least, some sort of significant birth control pill or IUD-like-thing for men so that both people can independently control their reproduction status and not be vulnerable to the other one lying.

But in the meantime, we have to work with the technology that exists. And while I do agree that it does contribute to promiscuity, I think that the effect there is secondary and minor while the effect on reducing pregnancies is direct and significant such that the net effect at saving unborn lives is definitely positive.

The cat that I'm referring to isn't having sex for fun, it's believing that you should be able to have sex for fun without incurring any consequences. That social attitude, which is enabled by contraception, is what (it seems plausible to me) creates the gravitational pull in favor of allowing abortion. Without that attitude, it's just seen as foolish conduct, not something that people are victims of and need to be rescued from.

If I had some god-given certainty that any population with legal access to birth control would, independently of any soft pressure or incentives other than the force of the law, end up with fertility below replacement, then I would begrudgingly accept legal controls on it to prevent the extinction of the human race.

With anything less than said absolute certainty, I would attempt to explore a number of softer options. You could provide tax incentives and/or literally pay people to have children. You could attempt to increase the social status of good parents and shame childless people. You could attempt to advance technology to create artificial wombs and have the state make and raise babies (not at all an ideal outcome, but better than extinction or forcing people to breed against their will). You could explore the replacement rates of different subpopulations and attempt to preserve and promote cultures with higher fecundity. Maybe all the liberal white atheists voluntarily go extinct as their population exponentially declines, and they get replaced by immigrants and Amish people who keep having babies. I suppose a religion which forces people to avoid birth control taking over the population is comparable to just directly outlawing birth control, but not the same because people can leave. Maybe we end up in a long term equilibrium where 1/5 of the population are strongly religious with a reproductive rate of 3, and 4/5 of the population are atheists with a reproductive rate of 1/2, so the total population remains constant (1 religious person and 4 atheists have 3 and 2 kids in each group respectively), and some fraction of the religious children leave the faith every generation such that the sizes of each group remain constant.

There are a lot of possibilities that would mitigate the effects. Extinction of specific subgroups and cultures via demographic replacement is a valid and realistic concern for people who care about those subgroups and cultures. But I don't think extinction of the entire human species by perpetually lowered birthrates is a realistic threat unless some sort of chemical pollution actually destroys biological fecundity such that even people who want kids can't have them.

No not really. Seems like the political calculus is 15 weeks.

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