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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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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).
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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 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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