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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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You generally can't remove a baby without violating their bodily autonomy. Most abortions involve essentially blending the baby up and scraping them out.

In the hypothetical future where we do a C-section to remove the clump of cells that will be come a baby, or the partially formed baby without killing it in the uterus, you are then ok with abortion? Regardless of the baby's viability outside the womb?

That's just straight up weird, children have been almost universally considered to be of greater moral worth than adults for all of human history.

I feel like we don't even live in the same reality if you think this is remotely true. The revealed preference of pretty much all civilizations, cultures, creeds, and faiths is that children as a class are not given any special consideration. Individuals love their children and the children of friends and family (aka the tribe) but the children of the other tribe? Absolutely not. Anyone with even a basic understanding of history should know this.

  • Infant exposure in ancient Rome and Greece: unwanted newborns were abandoned or killed; this was a recognized social practice.
  • Medieval and early modern European infanticide and abandonment
  • The Children’s Crusade (1212)
  • Massacre at Béziers (1209) during the Albigensian Crusade, women, children, and the elderly were massacred.
  • Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) a major Christian sectarian massacre in France; children were not spared in the broader slaughter.
  • European transatlantic slave trade: children were trafficked with adults, and many died in transport and enslavement.
  • Industrial child labor in Britain children were heavily exploited in factories and mines under brutal conditions.
  • Great Irish Famine / workhouse regime: mass death and child suffering occurred under British rule, including harsh workhouse conditions.
  • Congo Free State under Leopold II mass atrocities under a European Christian monarchy; children were among the victims of forced labor and terror.
  • German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904–07) women and children were imprisoned and worked under lethal conditions.
  • U.S. American Indian boarding schools: Native children were forcibly removed, abused, and many died in the system.
  • Canadian Indian residential schools: church-administered schools subjected Indigenous children to abuse, malnutrition, disease, and death.
  • Holocaust: Jewish children: Nazi Germany and collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children.
  • Holocaust: Romani children: tens of thousands of Romani children were murdered.
  • Nazi “euthanasia” program / Aktion T4: disabled children in institutions were systematically killed.
  • Armenian Genocide (1915–16): children were deported and killed along with the wider Armenian population.
  • Holodomor (1932–33) a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that starved civilians, including huge numbers of children.
  • Bengal famine of 1943: mass death from famine under British wartime rule, with children among the dead and malnourished.
  • Great Leap Forward famine: Chinese state policies caused catastrophic famine; children were among the millions who died.
  • Khmer Rouge Cambodia: mass death through starvation, forced labor, torture, and execution affected children on a huge scale.
  • Rwandan genocide (1994): children were murdered along with the broader Tutsi population and other targets.
  • Biafra / Nigerian Civil War starvation crisis: mass starvation devastated civilians, especially children, becoming a global symbol of famine.
  • Carthaginian child sacrifice: thousands of urns with burned child remains have been found at Carthage’s tofet.
  • Aztec and related Mesoamerican sacrificial systems: large-scale human sacrifice included children in some rites tied to rain and fertility cults.

Do I need to keep going?

If children occupied a universally elevated moral status in human societies. Then history should show near-taboo protection. It does not. It shows repeated infanticide, sacrifice, enslavement, starvation, institutional abuse, and massacre of children across civilizations, including Christian and Western ones. You may believe children deserve special moral protection, but history does not support the claim that humans have generally treated them as a uniquely sacred class.

Only utilitarian ethics (and similar deranged branches of ethics) would reach the conclusions you're suggesting.

Incorrect, a deontologist could easily reach the same conclusion, or a consequentialist. It just requires different values.

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