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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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I would argue that abortion is the motte of the side of the CW whose bailey is restricting sexuality, and their strategies reflect that.

Before effective birth control, pregnancy offered a large disincentive for women to have sex outside marriage. 'If you fuck cute strangers, you will get pregnant, nobody will marry you and you will raise your child in poverty as a single mother, probably through prostitution.' So the best strategy for women was to not have sex until marriage, which is incidentally what the Christian Right prefers.

Then effective birth control arrived, and women suddenly had pretty good odds to have sex without consequences.

I will grant the Christian Right that they actually care about the fate of the fetuses somewhat, but I think most of the issue is an instrumental vehicle to punish women for having sex.

If abortion is murder, then trying to conceive is depraved heart murder.

Suppose you have a 35yo infertile woman who wants a child, so she flies to some African country, procures a baby, places it in her check-in baggage and flies back. There is a 50% chance that the baby will die of oxygen deprivation, the cargo hold of an airplane is simply not a good environment for newborns. If it does die, she claims that this was God's will and tries again with the next baby, until she succeeds or is arrested.

If an embryo is morally equivalent to a baby, then any 35yo woman trying to conceive is doing exactly that. A significant fraction of fertilized eggs will not implant and subsequently die -- just like the babies in the cargo hold.

Yet I have not met anyone who worries about that. Sure, there are some on the CR who frown on IVF for creating embryos which will not become babies, but if there are any Church groups who encourage wives to only have anal sex after a certain cutoff age, I have not heard about them.

If the fate of the embryo was the only concern of the CR, they would fully embrace whatever forms of birth control do not produce embryos.

My baseline for serious people who care is EA. An EA org which was utterly convinced that abortion was murder would not decide that fighting a culture war is the right way to go about it. Lobbying for the pill to be made available on the taxpayers dime (or through anti-abortion charities) would be an easy win, try to convince any woman who menstruates to go on the pill whether she has sex or not, try to convince every guy to freeze sperm and then get a vasectomy. Accept that teens will make questionable decisions and simply mitigate the consequences. Lesbians, Gays and Trans people under HRT are all much less likely to be involved in an unplanned conception, so you would want to make sure that none of the queers are pressured into having straight sex through heterenormative cliches. Research into improving implantation efficiency for people trying to conceive would be another big cause area -- a drug which increases implantation probability by factor 1.05 is not worth a lot to couples simply trying for a baby, who don't really care too much if it takes another month or not, but it would prevent a lot of dead embryos.

Basically, if someone loudly opposes Zuckerberg and Altman for being (((Evil Wall Street Capitalists))), but is strangely quiet about Musk or Thiel, and somehow very uncomfortable with Sanders and Chomsky, it would be reasonably to conclude that their opposition to Wall Street is really more of an opposition to an ethnicity masquerading as anti-capitalism. This is basically how I feel about the Christian Right and abortion, if the life of the fetus was the main concern, they would behave differently. "Abortion is murder" is not something people say because they believe that a fertilized egg failing to implant is equivalent to a kid starving to death, but purely because it is a useful argument-as-a-soldier in the fight against people having sex.