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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?

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

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