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Based on the review you linked, it sounds like the book was written by someone who used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and it draws on her experiences from that time (even if she adds supernatural elements.) While it is still probably crap (since 90% of everything is crap), that at least feels like a book that could have some interesting roman à clef-style presentations of real experiences the author had, if it was in the hands of a competent writer.
There definitely seems to be a one reality, two screens effect here.
Pro-life people like you get to claim that the battle is lost, and abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right. While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.
I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.
While I'm sure much of the grey tribe are more "blue" when it comes to the abortion debate, I actually don't think that the combination of positions you outlined here is a very common one overall.
And they're be wrong and stupid, given mifeprestone mailing and that abortion is up considerably post-Dobbs.
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This isn't going to stick. In a world where abortions were minor surgeries and where travelling across state lines to have the surgery was (a) hard to conceal and (b) likely to be a long way because abortion policy would follow the red/blue divide, which is approximately sectional, rather than being an idiosyncratic feature of each state, this could stick. But in the world we live in, most abortions involve a small number of pills which can be posted from a legal clinic in a blue state, or in extremis illegally by a private citizen who obtained the pills with the tacit approval of her blue-state government. So either the federal government enforces laws* against mail-order abortion pills, or red state abortion laws are unenforceable. And enforcing those laws against the wishes of the (people and governments of) the blue states where the federal crimes are being committed is likely to become an ongoing ICE-in-Minneapolis level ugly political standoff.
Admittedly all this is an improvement because it takes federal abortion policy away from SCOTUS and puts it back into democratic territory.
* One relevant law is already on the books - the Comstock act prohibits sending abortifacients through the US mail. My understanding is that there is also a broad power for the FDA to restrict prescribing of drugs which are at risk of being illegally diverted without the need for new primary legislation.
IIRC current telehealth rules revolve around the locale of the patient, and traditionally doctors are licensed by the states and only have authority within those states. While blue states have allowed this (and I'm not even sure it bothers me too greatly), I wouldn't expect it to not get challenged in court WRT state extradition law and such, or for red states to find an equivalent axe to grind to upset blue state authorities on similar jurisdictional grounds.
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See, that's my point. Murdering the child in the womb is a woman's right. If you can't kill your baby it's the exact same as being chattel. How the fuck did we get to this point? I lived through it, and I still don't understand it.
I think your framing here is pretty uncharitable, as abortion activists aren’t broadly in favour of infanticide, nor do they frame abortions as such. It’s an issue concerning bodily autonomy, that as an autonomous and free agent women shouldn’t be obligated to provide for a foreign body that demands sustenance from her, just the same as we don’t provide for rights to tumours, ticks or other parasites, even if we understand that their removal from a host body will likely result in it’s death. A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.
The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.
To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.
Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.
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At an evolutionary level, females being able to control which males procreate is generally done after the fact, rather than before. Both men and women can be ruthless about whose genes get passed on.
Every year, six hundred thousand dudes get culled from the gene pool after they got their swimmers in.
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As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.
As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.
I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.
No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.
You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.
In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.
Yeah it's just the contradictions inherent to it all.
Miscarriage/hypothetical forced abortion is a tragedy but a willing one it's a clump of cells
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I've never understood how, if Alice in Austin is pregnant and does not want to be, Bob in Big Spring compelling her to remain pregnant is less of an imposition than Carol in Cambridge telling Bob to mind his own.
For Alice it's no less of an imposition, but there ought to be fewer dissatisfied Alices and Bobs. Handling things on a more local level means that more people live in localities where their preferences are law, and that, if the current state of the law is intolerable to you, it's easier to move somewhere where it isn't. Abortion is something of an odd case here: There's little reason to care whether shoplifting is de-facto legal in California if you don't live in California, but pro-life people care very much whether 'baby murder' is permitted anywhere. But on the margin I still think they'd rather it happen somewhere else than right next door, so Federalism does increase satisfaction of preferences.
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Strange, then, that she voluntarily did the pregnant-making thing.
Yeah no... Sex is not the pregnant making thing. Sex is just Sex. It can be done for any number of reasons. Pregnancy is merely a risk of Sex. Provide an actual argument that the sole telos of sex is procreation or leave your Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.
Others have already explained my point better than I could have, so I'll just say the following: I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs. Sex out of wedlock, okay, fine, not ideal but it can work. Aborting retarded and unviably sick kids, nasty but necessary. Deleting public welfare to remove the bottom from society so that people can actually fatally drop out, now that's my hobby-horse. No, I'm pretty sure I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs.
I'm arguing from a hatred for naive, short-sighted, hedonistic, asocial stupidity, no matter how deeply entrenched that stupidity is in the zeitgeist, or to what a degree I myself share in that stupidity.
Life. Life cannot be without procreation. Procreation is sex. Sex makes new life. That makes sex, honest sex, one of the most important acts in the human world. Declaring that sex can be done for any number of reasons may be factually correct, but it's also comically missing the point of it. No matter how much fun it is for how many people, that fun exists only to make people have sex in ways that produce offspring. Everything else is a byproduct, a side-effect, a distraction. Sex being fun is great, because it makes us make babies. Sex being decoupled from the baby-making is a civilization-endangering cultural stupidity.
I mean from a purely eugenic argument, the vast majority of people who get abortions are poor, short sighted, high-time preference individuals who are a net negative on the society that hosts them. A civilization that is full of them is already endangered. It is civilization-destroying to let the stupid outbreed the intelligent. Abortions combined with your lack of public welfare would greatly reduce that amount of people in the bottom rung of society.
Yes.jpg. But by the point society embraces eugenics, I'm pretty sure we're already back on track to sterilizing or euthanizing those deemed unsalvageable. Horrors, to be sure. But perhaps necessary horrors, to delay human obsolescence. And probably not going to happen.
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It doesn't require a shred of Christian belief to recognize that sex is the pregnant making thing. That is basic biological fact. We enjoy sex because it was advantageous (from an evolutionary POV) for us to do so, but that is not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is to reproduce.
So are these:
Arguments deriving morality and telos from biological determinism lead to the justification of behaviors the vast majority of humans consider abhorrent. To deploy it in this one case is cherry picking an arbitrary boundary line.
This post is one giant strawman. Nobody said that it's immoral to have sex for pleasure, people said that sex is "the pregnant-making thing". Which it is.
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I know the "pregnancy isn't a natural result of sex!" crowd hates Christians with a white-hot passion mirroring their hatred of having consequences of their own actions more generally and so want to blame them for all the evils in the world, but it's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.
"Sex is just sex" is nonsensical, like saying "Russian roulette is just Russian roulette, I didn't know I might die."
Well, I don't. Nor do I hate dealing with the consequences of my own actions. What I do hate is hypocrites and unfairness. So if all you pro-lifers want to commit to an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions, I'm willing to accept every risky outcome of my own. Until that happens, this has nothing to do with the straw effigy you've created in your head. From my vantage, you want your cake and to eat it too.
And Christians want everyone to use their frame of the universe while not even considering any others, again, hypocrisy.
I'm all ears, please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.
Nature does a perfectly fine job of that, and you've displayed your unwillingness to accept it. I do not think there is any argument I personally can craft that can overcome your bias against it.
Edit: I'll take a quick stab. For one, I never said unitary telos.
I recognize that not every sex act leads to pregnancy. However, pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex absent interference. We are sexually reproducing beings. Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex. To have sex is to accept that risk.
The natural argument is bad, biological determinism is not deployed in almost any other argument because it has very horrible ramifications. So using it for "this one case" is an arbitrary boundary drawing that fails to lead to a general solution.
This is better.
There is a causality logical assumption in this that is incorrect. If A -> B it does not mean that B -> A. ie If pregnancy occurred, then sex/reproduction-related conditions occurred. Does not follow: If sex occurred, then pregnancy follows.
Pregnancy is a natural risk of sex, but not every sex absent interference results in an intended pregnancy. People have plenty of sex with the purpose of getting pregnant, and not getting pregnant even when its the intended outcome. The reverse is also true.
Agreed
I do not agree. Assumption of risk is never assumed to be accepted, hence why every risky activity involving other parties generally requires you to sign papers assuming that risk onto yourself and acknowledging it. This is what I mean by "an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions" Most people do not believe that, but then to draw an arbitrary line around sex is in essence trying to have your cake and eat it too.
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Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.
It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.
To note, from what I’ve heard, a substantial part of contraceptive failure- I don’t use the things myself- is that people don’t like them. They discomfit people because they’re unnatural, so people take shortcuts, they cheat, they try to get away from it.
It’s an entirely human reaction to refuse to do the thing right, when you know the thing itself is wrong.
One of the frustrating things about sex ed discourse is the extent that controls things. 'Perfect use' (using it every time, correctly) rates of effectiveness for condoms are great! The actual realistic use numbers are comparable to the withdrawal method. Some of that's mechanical failure (either the condom breaking, or not pulling out before erection fades), but a lot of it's just that condoms suck a lot, even for a straight people. There's a demographic of men that can't reach orgasm (or keep it up) with one on, and for various political reasons the mainstream sexology side likes to draw this up as a personal failure of the man involved.
Diaphragms aren't quite as bad for the guy, but I've heard them called less comfortable than a tampon, and some women have reactions to the spermicide. The pill less frustrating in the moment, but actual-use about 7% still get pregnant over a year of normal intercourse.
IUDs and implants avoid that problem, but the former are extremely painful during insertion (especially for people who haven't been pregnant), and about one-in-six women dislike the implant's side effects enough to have it removed early.
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I mean would you extend a biological and evolutionary determinism to everything else humans do?
More than some, less than others, I don’t know. Personally I think that foetuses are pretty human by the end of the second trimester and consider it broadly more appropriate for abortion to stop somewhere around the end of the first trimester.
You asked the more specific question of whether pregnancy can be considered the primary telos of sex from any viewpoint other than a Christian one and I’m just saying that as a biologist it seems very obvious to me and did long before abortion flared up as a public flashpoint (which it mostly still hasn’t in the UK).
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For me it, it is more about pragmatism. Most court-mandated expansions of civil rights in the United States started underwater with the public, and got more popular over time. Roe v Wade did not, and instead it created a wedge issue that made the quality and tenor of American politics worse over the affected period. I actually think politics (narrowly considered) has gotten slightly better since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, because the abortion debate has cooled down as a national issue, and become a state-level one.
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