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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?

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.

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.