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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?

I had been pretty default pro-choice, having been basically a 90s libertarian. I feel like I've moved a little bit in the pro-life direction. Reasons:

  • This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

  • Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

  • A thought I had that doesn't seem to want to go away: If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously? What would you expect them to think of that? Children can be really annoying and inconvenient at the best of times. Virtually all of them will be imperfect in some way. The reason why we give children unconditional love is because they are so extraordinarily dependent on their parents and they know it, so they're naturally terrified at the idea of being abandoned. How can a child expect that from you once they realize that you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient? Oh, we didn't have a good job and weren't sure how we would support ourselves - does that mean that once you actually have a kid, if you lose your job or get in an accident or things get tough some other way, it's bye bye kiddo? Okay so you don't tell them. Unless they manage to find out some other way. Or maybe just don't do something that you'll never be able to tell your kid?

This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

No compromise breeds no compromise. Supporters of abortion rights know well that pro-lifers do not want "reasonable regulations", but want to ban abortion completely at any place and time (and then move to ban contraception, pornography, "sodomy", race mixing and everything else they see as immoral).

The same in gun politics - gun right supporters know well that anti-gunners do not want "reasonable gun control", but ban everything that looks like gun (and then move to knives and all sharp instruments, like in UK). If you compromise with the uncompromising, you always lose.

Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

Again, the same with guns. Instead of fudds who just wanted to shoot Bambi, you got hard core gun nuts openly carrying big scary black rifles. This seems sick to gun controllers, and this is the point.

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing? Do you for that matter believe that there's even close to a plurality that want to ban contraception(no, the government not giving condoms to middle schoolers is not a ban on contraception)? Even Texas has committed to keeping the morning after pill on the shelves.

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing

I don't believe there was a meaningful number of 1750s voting-reform advocates who wanted 18 year old non-landowning born-out-of-wedlock black women to vote.

But that's where we ended up by following (the coherent extrapolated volition of) their 1750s logic.

So the answer to your question is "No, but I know a slippery slope when I see one"

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

If your model of pro-lifers is "conservatives who want to turn the clock back to the social mores of 1950", the answer becomes obvious. It's a slope of "concessions to that agenda".

First they go for the least popular and legally flimsiest 2020s social more (abortion). When they succeed at that one, it's easier to knock down the next domino, both because the conservatives are energised by the proof that liberal progress can be reversed, and because their opponents have to concede "OK when the conservatives won last time the country didn't immediately get consumed by hellfire". Slip!

But that model is wrong, and contra-indicated by every piece of evidence available.