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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   37614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I'd say that generalizing the leftist position as 'always make the choice that results in more minorities' is in error - specifically, the actual position is anti-anti-minority.

Compare with abortion. Leftists are not trying to maximize the total number of abortions, which among other things would involve working to ban all forms of contraception. They just want to remove all possible obstacles to abortion if that is what a mother decides. They arent pro-abortion, no matter how the pro-life camp likes to strawman them; they're anti-anti-abortion. If the natural consequence of knocking down all the barriers on the left means Cthulhu drifts in that direction & abortion rates skyrocket, that is perfectly acceptable but not the actual goal.

The distinction in this case would be: people are allowed to take the pill, even as minors, even without parental consent. People are allowed to try to convince others to take the pill, with a few limitations. (Teachers pressuring students is a no-no, though many will push their luck. Paying people to take it is probably no good either.) Physically preventimg people from taking the pill is illegal, and counselling them not to is legal but cancellable/fireable. But, no-one is ever forced to take the pill, even if everyone (who counts) agrees it would be better if they did.

I have seen people arguing for "if a child is unwanted, it should be aborted" in the context of the whole 'forced birth' view of the current situation re: Roe vs Wade. The argument is (and has always been a stalwart part of pro-choice/pro-abortion) that unwanted children are more likely to suffer abuse. Why would you force a woman to bear a child she doesn't want, when this means she will resent, hate, and abuse that child? is the logic there. It's a lot better to terminate the pregnancy rather than have a child born into a bad life:

Among women who seek an abortion but are denied it, more than 90 percent choose to keep and raise the child rather than place it for adoption. What is life like for these children? We compared children born after their mothers were denied abortions to the next children born to women who received abortions. Writing in JAMA Pediatrics, we showed that children born to women who were denied abortions fared worse. They were more likely to live in households where there wasn’t enough money to pay for basic living expenses. Women are also much more likely to report poor maternal bonding — feeling trapped as a mother, resenting their baby, or longing for the “old days” before they had the baby — with the child born after abortion denial than with the next child born following a wanted abortion.

Thus, there is a desire to increase rates of abortion - for unwanted/unplanned pregnancies, or where the mother is unable to financially support another child, or where the woman is not ready to become a mother - all in the name of greater compassion. Better to have more abortions than more unwanted children abused by their birth parents and dumped into the care system where they are also at higher risk of abuse.

That it is not their end goal to increase abortions. It's to make it so woman can get an abortion as easy as possible at any point. It's splitting hairs but I do agree.

I think if you're arguing "unwanted children should be aborted in order to avoid the abuse they will undergo if born", that is looking to increase abortions. Making it easier to access abortion is the means to that end. If it were "make it easy and accessible, but no opinions one way or the other on whether the woman should abort", then that would be one thing, but "we need abortion because unwanted children bad" is not that opinion.

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