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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31027 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?

I'm pro choice, and also pro-infanticide (of disabled children). Not as prescriptive policy, but something that ought to available as an option to parents.

However, I feel extremely disgusted and strongly about abortion activists, and think there need to be limits. Generally EU seems to have fairly sensible legislation.

Abortion and any similar killing is an extremely serious affair, and should be treated as such. Being proud of having an abortion seems completely perverse.

Hard to express what I hate about them. It's the same sort of disgust I have to people who treat dead enemy combatans with disrespect.

also pro-infanticide

I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out

What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn? Neither can survive independently and neither has a sense of self. Killing one is like killing another.

There is some fuzzy boundary when a zygote becomes a "person", but I would argue it happens far enough after birth for it not to make a difference here.

Bravo, this is my position too, all the way up to being pro-murder. After all, what is a full grown adult except an especially large fetus? So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.

I don't think there's a substantial moral difference between killing a fetus and killing a full-grown adult that cannot survive independently and does not have a sense of self (e.g. unplugging the life-support of someone brain-dead). If anything, I think the moral case for allowing someone to pull the plug on a brain-dead adult is stronger than the moral case for allowing abortion.

I basically think of abortion as morally equivalent to pulling the plug on someone who is currently comatose, but has a good chance of becoming functional if given expensive life support until they awaken, and then a decade or two of rehabilitation (for the sake of the analogy, said comatose adult will never regain their past memories).

I unironically am pro "murder" in the case of the "pull-the-plug-murder" scenario above -- I genuinely think that killing someone in that situation because it is convenient is justifiable (though note that the "they will never regain any past memories" is a load-bearing part of that judgement for me).

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