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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31033 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?

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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.

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?

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