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