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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   22100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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An influencer couple announced that they aborted their pregnancy because the fetus had Down syndrome. This upset a lot of people including some fine congressmen.

However, it's actually very common. Screening for genetic disorders is generally performed between 10 and 20 weeks, giving plenty of time for a reasonably early choice. "As a result of these elective terminations in the U.S., there was a 37% reduction in the numbers of babies with Down syndrome born in 2018. This means that in recent years there were 37% fewer babies with Down syndrome than could have been born". In Iceland, almost all such diagnosed pregnancies are aborted after testing.

People with Down syndrome are clearly generally capable of living "happy" lives. They have the equivalent intelligence of an 8 to 9 year old. Most 8 to 9 year olds seem happy enough to me, and it would not be a horrible curse to live decades in such a condition. Perhaps we might ask if such a life is fulfilling, but a young child can't comprehend what that means; as well ask your dog if he's fulfilled by sniffing butts and digging holes.

For the caretakers of course, life may not be so rosy. Taking care of a small child indefinitely, knowing all of the joys and sorrows of adulthood that they will never experience, does not sound fulfilling, to say nothing of the physical and monetary toll. It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.

God in His infinite wisdom creates babies with far worse afflictions. Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth. Down syndrome, as a patently survivable condition, lies on the edge of this boundary.

It's sad that the uproar created has raised doubts in my mind that anything about this story is real.

Influencers are largely seizing on the same stories that used to be on network TV (Paul brothers and clavicular reinventing pro wrestling from first principles, romantic and gay drama, etc). Abortion as the big controversial topical episode plot has been a soap opera staple since, what, dirty dancing or law and order?

I think it's been a soap opera staple all the way back to Roe in the US and the 1967 Abortion Act in the UK. But the first time the abortion actually happened in a British soap was surprisingly late - before Emmerdale in 2020 all abortion plotlines ended with the mother keeping the baby, or the issue being defused by a miscarriage.

I'm using Soap Opera inexactitly, there were abortion plotlines on network dramas like Tales of the City much earlier than Roe.

I feel like for lightweight entertainment it's pretty hard to approach the topic through anything other than 'gee it's nice to have the right but babies are cute'. You're gonna struggle to have somebody having a totally frivolous abortion without being accused of conservative signalling. Rape/incest hard to broach without turning off the light audience

Typically in old melodrama, which is light on intellectual depth if not on topic, the uniting factor was the evil back alley abortionist. This was the skeleton key to the story, the poor innocent girl who got into trouble was understandable, but look at the results! Dirty Dancing is a good reference point here. The net result can be either pro or anti abortion: either we need to legalize it to make it safe, or we need to keep girls chaste so they don't end up here.

It's interesting to see how this attitude differs between Europe and the US. Most of Europe generally has more restrictive abortion laws than the US, even after Roe v Wade was overturned. The Netherlands has a two-trimester limit on elective abortions, and this is the most liberal in the EU (tied with the UK, but it is not in the EU anymore). Some places, like Poland and Malta, ban elective abortions entirely, on religious grounds.

But medical abortions, including if the child has Down's Syndrome, are always allowed. If your child has Down's Syndrome, that's a valid reason for abortion, and pretty much nobody would say otherwise, including conservatives.

But medical abortions, including if the child has Down's Syndrome, are always allowed. If your child has Down's Syndrome, that's a valid reason for abortion, and pretty much nobody would say otherwise, including conservatives.

Abortion of sufficiently disabled fetuses (up to and including completely nonviable ones such as anencephaly) are where the views of pro-life Christian conservatives diverge from normie social conservatism in a way which has driven some of the nastiest post-Dobbs rows. Christian conservatives support a reasonably broad physical health of the mother exception and want it to work for the small number of women who need it - the reason why it doesn't in some red states is incompetence rather than malice. But Christian conservatives, for reasons which are good and sufficient if you accept their view of Christian morality, want no exceptions whatsoever for fetal illness, and the post-Dobbs abortion bans don't include them.

I imagine that pre ~1960s, if you had a kid with Down Syndrome you weren’t expected to go out of your way to treat him “well”. They wouldn’t have to be dragged to school and their misbehavior was punished with corporal punishment (as it was for normal kids, too). If he fell in a river and drowned or something, it wasn’t a big deal. But modern parents feel compelled to do special things for them, and feel it’s wrong to supply a painful punishment for annoying behaviors even if this may be the only way they can learn. So the burden has increased considerably. If your Down syndrome child gets into an accident because he was left unattended, the parents are blamed, but 100 years ago no one would have cared.

When I was in primary school, there was a boy in my class with Down's syndrome, and he had a dedicated special needs assistant. Even at the time I didn't quite understand why he was there. No one had any real expectation of him being able to learn the material, and if the goal was for him to get socialised or feel included, I'm sceptical of whether it's even possible for a person with Down's syndrome to have any kind of meaningful friendship with a person without.

I knew two kids with Down's syndrome going up. One was as you described, the other was basically a normal kid who looked and talked funny. There's a wide range of ability and some are plenty within the range of normal.

I believe about half of Down Syndrome children are born with severe heart defects and tend to generally be more fragile. When childhood mortality was already very high as a baseline I can't imagine that many got through (plus also younger parents likely meant the incidence rate lower than today)

Yes, one must acknowledge the Downs sufferer as, in most cases, very happy. Often happier than people with the correct number of chromosomes. The death cannot be justified on any QALY-adjacent basis for the dying party, even if it possibly can on the surviving one (but not necessarily).

The death should be understood as a social consequence of the fact that It is considered unacceptable to abandon your child to the state unless you are dead, dying, or totally incapable of looking after it. Severe illness or the fact that looking after them would make a comfortable, low stress life very difficult or impossible is not considered an acceptable reason. Families that don’t care about abortion would be scandalized by a mother deciding she just doesn’t want to deal with the stress and giving a baby up.

And I think that’s the counterargument to @HereAndGone’s point. Mothers’ domestic labor, time spent on child-related work and interaction has gone up even after the automation of a lot of time consuming domestic work. Mothers are expected to provide a holistic level of total life management, love, care, education, training and self-actualization to their kids that their grandmothers and great grandmothers never were. You are a bad mother if you mother the way mothers did for thousands of years.

In this new world of ever higher expectations, of total commitment, raising any child means something very different to what it was sixty years ago. It isn’t chill. It takes all of your time. You’re not occasionally checking in on the kids playing by themselves while gossiping with your friends in the afternoon. You’re alone, or maybe working, and then you’re micromanaging their lives. Adding a severely disabled child for whom you will have to do this for the rest of your life rather than for 18 years makes for an even worse proposition.

a social consequence of the fact that It is considered unacceptable to abandon your child to the state unless you are dead, dying, or totally incapable of looking after it.

I see some truth here, but literally all US states have some degree of Baby Moses law for newborns: we literally have adopted "no questions asked 90 day returns" in some jurisdictions, although I can't speak to how often those are actually used in practice (quick searches suggests low hundreds of cases annually).

She said social consequences, not legal.

Agreed - it would be less scandalising for a middle-class woman in most places to have an illegal abortion than to use a Baby Moses law.

What frustrates me is not that women abort foetuses who will inevitably develop Down's syndrome. That's a defensible decision.

What frustrates me is that women will do this, then turn around and say that eugenics is Nazi ideology.

Eugenics is broadly popular unless:

  • You call it eugenics or
  • It involves State coercion to remove people from the gene pool

Think about attitudes to choice of donor gametes in the IVF industry.

It involves State coercion to remove people from the gene pool

Personally, I get the impression that the culture war in the Anglosphere is becoming hot enough that quite a lot of people would support forced sterilisation of the (Red)/(Blue) Tribe (delete as necessary). I likewise think certain categories of criminal are so stigmatised (e.g. child rapists) that forcibly sterilising them would enjoy broad bi-partisan support.

In the UK, the number of people who want the culture war to go hot is indistinguishable from zero. In America day-of-the-rope poasters exist, and Musk amplifies their social media posts so they look more visible than they are, but my impression is that the actual numbers are Lizardmen-tier - and I am not even sure if they actually mean it rather than shitposting.

In the UK, the number of people who want the culture war to go hot is indistinguishable from zero.

They might not want it, but they seem to find it likely, which might be the better description of the Boogaloos in America as well.

If nobody wants it, it won't happen.

I'm not sure why randos are telling opinion pollsters that they expect a civil war in the next 10 years, but "they have carefully thought about the issue and made a considered judgement call, such that the wisdom of crowds applies" is not a credible answer.

If nobody wants it, it won't happen.

The people who aren't posting but rather engaging in violence want it.

War and violent conflict in general has this nasty property that not only it can happen with only very few wanting it, it can even happen when nobody wants it, but enough feel sufficiently threatened.

Also, a quick check of history shows that indeed a suspiciously large number of first strikers likes to claim that no, they totally didn't want to do this, the other side just forced their hand. Maybe they're right, maybe they're lying, maybe they're wrong on the "forced" part but were right that the other side really was looking to do the same or some other possibility.

Either way, the situation can deteriorate in some bad ways that don't translate neatly to "people just wanted it to happen". That said, I think that as long as most people get to live a broadly comfortable & safe life, nothing much will happen.

Eugenics as a whole necessarily entails external limits put upon female sexual choice by a state authority which is a notion that is extremely off-putting to modern women. I'm assuming this is the most likely explanation.

This is needlessly limiting criterion, almost example noncentral fallacy. Eugenics is not only a government policy, it is also an ideology and a social movement. Eugenicists are interested in outcome of improving DNA of the population, the means to do that can vary. There were rabidly antistatist eugenicist of old, such as radical libertarian Herbert Spencer. They had more in common with modern technocratic approach of "nudges" - moral stigma, social engineering, subtle subsidies or penalties or outright propaganda in lieu of brute coercion.

My personal theory is, that the whole identification of eugenics with fascists and statists was just a standard Progressive PR campaign to clear the stain and declare post-hoc victory of always being on the right side of the history. But underlying impulse and logic is still there. They are defacto eugenicists, they just don't want to be identified with Nazis.

I don't think that's true. There are plenty of non-coercive policy options for promoting eugenic pairings. For example, education programs, or cash payouts for children born to couples meeting certain criteria. Back when eugenics was a popular progressive cause, a lot of eugenics societies focused their efforts in this direction, and just trying to establish societal norms that were conducive to eugenic outcomes.

There are plenty of non-coercive policy options for promoting eugenic pairings.

That doesn't matter, though, because nearly all of them ultimately lead back to the "male oppressors incentivizing -> suggesting -> forcing me to do my job do the thing that requires I be dependent on a man" thing.

The only policy that will work is to valorize and protect those who do their job, but you can only have that in societies that are allowed to accept their own right to rule. (Which is why women reflexively oppose any social movement that suggests this; after all, according to the stereotype, all social turmoil ever comes from the cardinal sin of ever permitting a man to think he can do something right.)

State authorities already place external limits on female sexual choice (e.g. a female high school teacher raping one of her male students is just as illegal as the opposite pairing).

Ah, but the only reason they do that is to protect female class interests when the law has to be symmetric for some reason (women want it to be illegal to fuck young women more than they want the right to fuck young men [which affects a rounding error number of women, and the women who do engage in this are the pick-me-est of pick-mes so they're also hated by women in general]).

Eugenics is different, since the median woman assumes it'll affect who the median woman has babies with.

You sure about that? I know the law sets equal boundaries, but I have my doubts about the legal system doing the same.

Teachers caught doing this are prosecuted. South Park nice jokes aside, this is taken seriously by courts and law enforcement.

Do the police pursue it with equal zeal? Do the prosecutors put as much effort into getting the same punishments? Do judges and juries treat them equally? I'll grant that there are external limits on their choice, but that's a far cry from being just as illegal (unless you treat illegality as a binary, in which case it's just as illegal as walking with ice cream in your back pocket or whatever zany oldtimes law you can find).

Consider Nick Olivas: At 14, he unknowingly fathered a child with a 20-year-old woman. Later, he was pursued for child support and the mother was never charged with any crime. Hermesmann of Hermesmann v. Seyer "contributed to a child's misconduct" when a 13-year-old got her pregnant. There are a few more in this pdf, but I think the pattern is established well enough: Women who commit statutory rape against boys are not consistently prosecuted, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.

Let's imagine the opposite situation, accounting for biological reality. A girl in her early teens becomes pregnant, gives birth, and gives up the child. Later, the (significantly older) father claims paternity, which is confirmed. The state shrugs its shoulders, gives him the child, and goes on with its day.

That's even less of a legal burden than the real cases have, and yet it feels pants shittingly insane. It would never happen in a million years. If you could find something one tenth as crazy, I'd consider it a significant blow against my stance. Can you?

Do they get equivalent punishment?

I think most people are not intelligent enough to and/or do not have the will to see how coherently their various opinions fit together into a larger picture, including second-order effects. The average person who supports people being able to abort Down's syndrome fetuses yet views eugenics as fundamentally wrong is a person who simply does not make the connection that those two things are related in any important way. It's not that they realize the two things are related but have a logical reason to support the abortion but not other kinds of eugenics. It's that they don't realize the two things are related to begin with.

Why do they not realize it? Because they are not in an information environment where they are regularly exposed to the idea that the two things are related. And, lacking the spark to figure it out on their own, they continue to not realize it.

  • The average person who supports people being able to abort Down's syndrome fetuses yet views eugenics as fundamentally wrong is a person who simply does not make the connection that those two things are related in any important way.

There's an easy way to resolve this if one takes the term eugenics to carry an implicit meaning of an external authority or pressure on the parents.

Which given the definition of eugenics you can often find has something like this in it.

the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition

It does seem like a valid interpretation that it's an external force doing it for their Greater Cause as opposed to the parents own decision regarding what QOL they are willing to accept in raising a child.

It's just progressives. They have to violently flinch from the E-word because if they don't then the technocratic element of their ideology inevitably flows into "LMAO we are so obviously the baddies" territory. Many progressives were very pro-eugenics pre-WW2, to the point where some of their organization leaders openly bragged in the 30's about how wonderful it was that a European nation had a strong leader who was taking their obviously correct ideas seriously.

The frustration is not with the individual sentiment, but the communal one. Eugenics was not a left or right position, among the most committed eugenicists were as everyone knows moderate Swedish social democrats. What is taboo is the idea that one can improve human stock societally.

I'd argue the reason why this is a taboo is that it necessarily entails external limitations on female sexual choice.

I was hoping someone had already posted about this so I can ride on it. Let's say they did have the downer, what would happen?

  • within a few years the downer starts consuming large amounts of attention and money as the downer's parents try to give him a simulacron of contemporary white-collar life
  • the resource consumption never ends
  • they probably never have another normal child because they don't have the resources
  • their life continues to be ruined until they die
  • afterwards the downer becomes a burden on the wider society
  • eventually the downer dies

Let's now talk for a second about suicidal empathy. I think suicidal empathy is just christianity + technology. For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive. Better to help someone when they are down on their luck, it's probably temporary, it probably helps the whole village not to let them die for a temporary thing. The upside is probably worth the downside of helping irredemable people some of the time.

Your neighbor now is everyone who lives in a 10000ft radius of the earth surface. You can easily know how they are doing no matter where they are, you can go there within a day or two at a (relatively) irrisory price and you can also make them come to you at the same low price. The somalian sitting of the coast of lybia in a repurposed fishing boat? Your neighbor. The same somalian living in your country definitely your neighbor. His family? Your family's neighbor. Kicking them out as illegals? Definitely not helping them.

And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.

This and the downer's story are actually the same category of error. Had the downer been born in the Christian Dark Ages the downer would have died of some retarded accident within 10 years and if not he would have been given the, relatively cheap, life of the beast of burden, not the simulacron of life of an intellectual that we try to give them now.

Euthanasia is also in the same category. Not killing the sick is a good idea because sometimes they get better and otherwise it's like, an extra two weeks. Not so much when we can keep them alive for 60 more years without much effort. Christianity + technology = suicidal empathy.

What's the solution to suicidal empathy? More cruelty, we need to start liking cruelty. The problem is that nobody is willing to do it, you have to trick people by saying "you're not helping them IT'S AN INVASION!!!!1!!!!!!1!!!11!!11!!!!". But it only goes so far. The downer would basically be happy we have to give as much as we can to the downer.

Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive

I would argue the opposite. Samaritans were reviled by ancient Jews. The Parable of the Good Samaritan was a subversive understanding of who is good and who is bad. A Jewsh priest and a Levite are upstanding respected members of their community. Then in the parable a hated Samaritan is named as the neighbor. The guy talking to Jesus won't even say the term 'Samaritan'; he instead in a roundabout way admits Jesus's point by saying he who showed mercy.

I am very much not ideologically aligned with the Catholic Church, but they may well be following a common understanding of Jesus's message. Consequences be damned as you correctly point out.

common understanding of Jesus's message

It's not just a common understanding if Jesus' message, it's an obviously correct one.

The historical Jesus was, whether he was God the Son or not, an apocalyptic preacher who at the least didn't correct his followers' belief that the Second Coming and Last Judgement would happen during their lifetimes. Jesus' teaching on politically-sensitive topics is a combination of heroic personal virtue on one hand and political quietism/obedience to secular authority on the other - he is teaching in a context where the Roman Empire is what it is and rebelling against it is obviously stupid (which did not prevent the Jews rebelling, or suffering the consequences). And with that background, "regardless of what ICE is or is not doing, you, personally, should show love for the illegal immigrants as a display of self-sacrificing personal piety" makes perfect sense.

The Gospel simply isn't trying to be a source of secular wisdom for princes (or democratic citizens) - hence the consistent attempts by Christian political theorists to find Christian political wisdom in the Old Testament and needing a way round the fact that Solomon definitely was not Christian and was subject to ritual laws that we are not because they have been fulfilled in Christ. But most Christian political movements get their secular politics from secular sources.

Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive

In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.

And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.

In the US, which means far more in Europe, 83% of employees of such charities are either atheists, members other religions, or cultural Catholics excommunicated latae sententiae. This is irrelevant, though, because none of these charities could operate without the prevailing interest of their governments in overseeing demographic replacement. There is the point that the government gives charities large amounts of money and the charities give it back to favored politicians, but the charity industry is the domain of leftists and there are expressly nonreligious charities doing the same work. Regardless of that, it is, also, not as though charities are the bottleneck. Demographic replacement is top-down, charities, any charity, may influence where foreigners are finally placed once in a country and the privileges they enjoy, but those foreigners would be in the country regardless, because that's what power wants. Everything else is set dressing.

"We need more cruelty." How do you think we got here? It wasn't a superabundance of love. In cruelty we destroyed the structures that could support such people and standing in the wreckage we say now tear them apart in the womb.

In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.

There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.

But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.

I don't think you're wrong about the Jews as primary antagonists, at least up to the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, by 70 AD, Peter and Paul had been martyred by Rome. We also see a certain prototype in the Passion account. Jesus asks forgiveness for the Roman soldiers, and now in the nearly 2000 years of martyrs since, where we have their last words, we at least very often read of them forgiving and asking forgiveness for their murderers.

The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians. Suetonius also mentions Jewish riots in Rome during the reign of Claudius instigated by a man named "Chrestus" (possibly Christ), which resulted in their expulsion. Tacitus famously describes how Nero fed Christians to the lions after burning Rome.

The Roman problem with Christians was that they refused to participate in local and state cultic sacrifices, which was the kind of thing that brought disasters and plagues and general suffering from the gods. Unlike Judaism, Christianity was also obviously a new religion, so it didn't get any respect for being ancient. Also, the Romans thought they were getting up to weird stuff in their private sessions, like having giant orgies and eating babies.

Rome didn't really have a formal criminal system. The governor was basically allowed to do whatever he wanted in the name of keeping the peace. So Christianity was rarely "illegal", but they caused general disturbances and that led to persecution.

The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians.

Technically true because Josephus doesn't call it Christianity, but Josephus writes about Jesus in around 93AD, saying that he was hailed as the Messiah and that he was executed by Pilate. This implies the existence of a group of people doing the hailing - i.e. Christians.

Josephus wasn't a pagan. The flavian testimony is useful for confirming that Jesus was a real person and Pilate killed him. It doesn't tell us much about how Roman authorities viewed Christians though, which mostly appears to be as a minor annoyance.

The testimonium flavianum is a forgery: because a jew wouldn't have written that, because the paragraphs before and after flow better together without it in the middle, because Origen didn't know about it when, if it did exist at the time, he would have and because all surviving copies of the antiquities with it go through Eusebius who is coincidentally also the first one to use it.

I know there are recent attempts to rescue it but they are bullshit.

It's generally considered to be partially accurate with Christian interpolations ("He was the Christ", etc). Origen mentions, at least, the passage about James the brother of Jesus. Josephus's original passage on Jesus, with the theology stripped out, would not have been useful for apologetics, so it's unsurprising that no one mentioned it for a while.

The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians.

Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.

But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no reason to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.

* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.

Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one.

Jews in the Bar Kochba Rebellion killed many Christians that refused to join them in the revolt against the Romans.

The most famous example Jesus used was a Samaritan, who were the Jews' outgroup.

Yeah some people here have a deranged understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The 'neighbor' is a member of the hated outgroup, and not respected members of the ingroup.

In the US, which means far more in Europe, 83% of employees of such charities are either atheists, members other religions, or cultural Catholics excommunicated latae sententiae.

"far more in Europe"? Is there a missing word there? I don't understand. Also your link doesn't look to me like it's supporting your assertion. It says "The study of campaign contributions from 2018 through February of this year showed that 83% went to Democratic candidates or political-action committees" the 83% is donating to a party, it doesn't say anything about their religious affiliation. I also followed the link at the top and searched for "atheist" and found no hits.

I could have clearly worded that better. Europe is more progressive than the US, so if we look at a field, such as NGOs in the US, and we find it dominated by progressives, then we should expect an even greater degree of progressive control of charities in Europe. But that's an issue, one of two here I've produced. The first is I am just assuming the European NGO employees are more progressive, and the second is the data references a study of American Catholic charity employees who donated to political causes. I didn't look further to check what percentage of employees donate, so 83% must be wrong, and really it's that 83% of those politically-active donate to leftist causes in the US. Helping women get abortions, which includes donating to and voting for pro-abortion politicians, also incurs automatic excommunication.

So in the studied Catholic NGOs, 83% of their politically active employees are either:

  • Atheists / Non-religious

  • Members of other faiths

  • Catholics who have excommunicated themselves

This isn't an argument about those non-practicing Catholics not being Catholic. They are still Catholic, and they are taught they will be judged more harshly for what they know. This is an argument against aspersing teachings because of the behaviors of people who do not follow those teachings. Is this a useful distinction? POSIWID and all? I think in some things it might not be useful, but here it is useful because it's the governments that are doing this, and they don't need charities to help.

This is a very fantastic interpretation of both canon law and of that statistic. Just to be clear, not even pro-abortion politicians are excommunicated.

I also looked more to that article, and it's sources and I'm starting to have doubts.

Almost a full third of all donations come from a single person, Wayne Paglieri, about whom they have this to say:

Paglieri – the senior development director of Covenant House New Jersey and member of the Covenant House NJ Finance Committee – has made $390,000 in reportable campaign contributions from 2019-2023. What’s strange, however, is that Covenant House New Jersey itself does not identify Paglieri as an employee, nor is he listed on its tax form 990.

Religiosity is higher in US than Europe, so absent other considerations, if most US employees are essentially atheist or Non-Judgemental Therapeutic Deity then in Europe it will be more so.

Not quite sure that checks out - religion is more controversial in US than in Europe precisely because religiosity is higher, and South Europe is more Catholic.

For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor

I note that as much as this interpretation might have been the result (unclear), this is pretty verifiably not the intention on display in the New Testament, much to the embarrassment of many a heatmap-pushing X user treating it as at least an open question.

I'm not talking about intent I'm talking about what was practically possible. The intent, who knows for sure, but probably you are right.

they probably never have another normal child because they don't have the resources

Bloody hell. I work in a service that deals with children with additional needs, and I can tell you about at least one family that had a Down's Syndrome child, then the second pregnancy was normal. Today I read the obituary of a woman in my county who had fourteen children and a normal life (not on welfare, not lower class, lower middle to middle class lifestyle).

So people, unless they're your special bubble of "oh no, unless we can afford at least 200k per year to raise little Timkins until he hits the age of ten and then we need even more money, we cannot possibly have a child" can and do manage to have children. "My child is disabled" is not a reason for not having kids.

Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons" with "having these kids stops people having normal babies", because it doesn't.

I am reminded of this man born to a family with dwarfism. Both his biological parents and siblings have it, but he was a normal, healthy child and grew to be 6ft tall, and according to a DNA test he took, his future kids will probably be normal as well. But growing up as the youngest child in a family environment like that wouldn't have been easy. You'll have to accept early on you'll have a shorter childhood and grow up quickly, because parenting a child with special care needs is extremely stressful, requires heaps of attention, and more often than not results in the breakdown of relationships.

Bro is living out Tiptoes IRL.

Yeah but on the other hand having a young child is already super stressful and resource-intensive, much less having a developmentally-disabled one who requires far greater investment of resources and effort. You'd have to be crazy to expect that there isn't atleast one couple that's being nudged from Yes to No on having a second child if they've gotta deal with a first disabled child. You're also more likely to have to opt into a cesarean or early birth with some conditions for the child and that increases the trauma of delivery/chances of complications that render carrying further children unsafe.

I do agree with one level (especially with larger families frequently hitting a point of economies of scale as sheer numbers means the labor associated actually diffuses especially with siblings reaching sufficient age to help out) that people are capable of having large families

Very nice set of anecdotes.

Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons"

The eugenic solution would be to not have any other child after the first downer. Downers rarely reproduce so there is little risk there but there could be a genetic component (although it seems that it is rare) and that would be a reason to avoid healthy carriers.

Downs is a trisomy, not a mutation, so there are no healthy carriers in the sense that there are for e.g. haemophilia or cystic fibrosis.

(There are genes which somewhat increase the odds of a Downs baby, but the effect is small compared to maternal age).

Gosh, "downer", such an edgelord!

Mind you, I'm the fool for responding to the "haw haw I'm fourteen and think I'm so smart pranking the adults" bait, so congratulations you.

If we're edgelording, I prefer "Mong". It's the term that was used in British school playgrounds when I was in school, though as with all such terms more for people who acted like they had Downs than for people who actually did.

Yes, if we must descend to name-calling, let us at least use the time-honoured insults! No need to reinvent the wheel with "downer" (can't you just hear the chortling about the ever-so-witty pun involved, because they're a downer in the slang sense too, don't you get it?)

Down's syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that is nearly always [i]de novo[/i]. Male Down's syndrome sufferers are nearly always sterile; females are not always sterile and if they have a child they are very likely to have a Downs child. So strictly genetically, having a Down's syndrome boy is isogenic, having a Down's syndrome girl is dysgenic, and having another non-Downs child is no different than if the first Downs syndrome child didn't happen. But going a little wider, you're likely to have fewer children after a Down's child because of the massive amount of resources the Down's child takes up, so if you've got good genes, having the Down's child is dysgenic for that reason.

FYI you put text in italics by putting an * on either each side.

either

each

There's the wrinkle that choosing to have a severely disabled child also imposes a burden on their siblings, particularly after you're dead. Some parents explicitly think of this as their lifelong care plan; others just implicitly let this happen. Impressively, somehow making "I'll let society deal with it" seem relatively responsible.

We're all getting better and better every day, society is more humane, AI will make us all rich post-scarcity, we can colonise the galaxy and be little gods of our own worlds - and yet somehow putting any of that wealth into services for more humane living for all people is impossible.

You see why I'm so sceptical of all the dreams and wishes around transhumanism and the rest of it? We're gonna live forever - but we can't manage to cobble together some system of support for the most vulnerable among us, no that would be too much of an imposition on society.

There are enormous systems of support that are essentially unprecedented in human history. Spazzing wildly any time someone is somewhat skeptical of a particular system providing utility commensurate with it's costs is why a lot of countries are in a fiscal mess on health and disability spending.

It’s not eugenic reasons. If a woman aborts a fetus with down syndrome because she calculates that it will ruin her life, this may be a eugenic act but it certainly isn’t done for “eugenic reasons”, any more so than a violent thug killing someone with some condition is doing it for “eugenic reasons” instead of unrelated ones.

In addition the state funding starts instantaneously. There's huge subsidies for disabled children and their medical even though they also financially wreck the parents.

Down Syndrome's kind of a funny spot in terms of aborting disability since they generally land in a spot of sufficient mental and physical development to be 'happy', though I feel like people are also not comprehending how much public investment goes into keeping a down syndrome person alive. IIRC they generally need several open-heart natal surgeries plus lifetime care.

Maybe aborting your downs-y fetus is something you should do in private. This is intentionally trying to court controversy.

Maybe the early stages of pregnancy should be something you do in private. I always thought that you weren't supposed to tell anyone until 3 months in at a minimum; plenty of things, even besides Downs, can go wrong early on.

Yeah. But, well, Influencers.

Yeah. 14 weeks has been received wisdom in my experience, since I believe about 95% of miscarriages occur by that point and it's usually about the point of the first ultrasound.

Agreed on this, and that aborting the fetus is the right thing to do. But expecting such restraint from an influencer is about as reasonable as expecting couth from Trump; the obnoxiousness is just the nature of the beast.

They already made a video announcing the pregnancy, so they couldn't just pretend that nothing happened.

Yeah, you just don't mention it again and everyone assumes it was a miscarriage and you don't want to discuss it. But yes, Influencers are obnoxious, I know.

Just heavily imply it was a spontaneous miscarriage. Nobody is going to pry much deeper

Since they were already oversharers in the first place, I see it as a good thing, to the extent them being transparent about yeeting their Downed fetus nudges such an action further within the Overton window and encourages others to do the same.

It is preferrable not to lie

Society prefers polite fictions about abortion, miscarriages and SIDS over the alternative

What is the scoop on SIDS? I heard some echoes from conspiritard circles that it's a euphemism for women killing their babies (by accident or not), but I don't have a high degree of faith in the source here, and I'm not an expert on baby health.

Conspiracy? I’ve always been under the impression it was an open secret, that SIDS was mostly a face-saving coverall.

A) To let presumably grieving parents (especially mothers) save face and/or avoid blaming themselves for the infant’s death. Plus, not many people want to be a big meanie and ask too many difficult questions to a parent (especially a mother) who just lost a baby, even if it might be more like “lost” in many cases.

B) To let the poor and BIPOC save face. Like @wqnm and @burkeboi mentioned, SIDS occurs most frequently among the demographics you most expect, and without SIDS as an alibi we’d be outing such parents (especially [single] mothers) as careless, impulsive, neglectful, and/or malicious, and we can’t have that.

SIDS is a tragedy that can strike any mother of an infant at any time. If It Just So Happens that SIDS occurs more frequently among mothers from underserved and minority communities, that only means we need to provide such communities with more support and resources (i.e., taxpayer gibs).

under the impression it was an open secret

Not according to the demographic most likely to take it seriously (which conversely Just So Happens to be the demographic that suffers from SIDS the least frequently), who are likely to try and spend resources preventing it.

Plus, not many people want to be a big meanie and ask too many difficult questions to a parent (especially a mother) who just lost a baby

Beyond very obvious depraved-heart stuff like "gave birth in a bathroom and left the baby in the toilet" I think it's good such questions not be asked. If they were, we'd only be prosecuting it if the mother was white, as a natural extension of who over-zealous CPS reporting is most likely to affect now.

According to baby care classes I took: they think it is largely accidental suffocation. Like falling asleep holding your baby and then shifting your weight so the baby's face ends up pressed against you. They lack the strength to reposition themselves.

I'm friends with an EMT, this is correct. It's most commonly things like tired new parents co-sleeping with newborns and accidentally smothering them, etc. Newborn babies are super fragile, and it's not always prosecution-level negligence that kills them. As burkeboi mentions below, it's especially common amongst certain demographics you would expect.

I was reading the book Expecting Better from Oster since I'm having a kid soon, and she gave a stat where something like 80% or so of SIDS deaths come from smoking households in the UK. Those households are like 10-15% of the total households. That's not to say smoking is the big killer, although it is pretty bad for fetuses and new babies, but a family that is likely to smoke around their kid is likely to ignore other best practices as well.

From that, and other things I've read, it seems that SIDS is highly correlated with parents who do tons of things wrong, rather than just one thing or another. The "conspiracy" take is that a lot of public health messaging, to make the underclass and/or specific minorities look less bad, overemphasizes that 'this could happen to anyone' rather than pointing to most SIDS happening from parents being really negligent on many axes rather than Sally the Secretary having a drink every now and then.

That's an accurate description. Doesn't mean it's the right choice.

They already made a video announcing the pregnancy, so they couldn't just pretend that nothing happened.

I think that as a practical matter, they could. If a few months later the woman was not visibly pregnant, very few people would ask what happened. And if someone did ask, the response "it didn't work out" would generally be accepted.

Yeah. Miscarriages happen and there's a layer of social propriety around this matter where people aren't going to pry.

This question hits differently having just returned from a date with a woman who would be well into her mid-30s at motherhood on any reasonable projected timescale. I’m pretty sure it’s not even legal to abort downies in Texas. I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick. I also wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life babysitting my infertile dead-end offspring.

I honestly have to laugh out loud at all the posts on here about "but the potential mother would be at least thirty-two years old!" because the bigger risk is "the potential mother has spent twenty years on artificial contraception trying to avoid pregnancy, you really think that has no effect on the body when you decide 'okay ready for baby now'?" and gosh, how did all the women in our grandmothers' time manage to have large families up to their forties, what magic was in the air or the water that enabled women who did hard physical work all their lives to have living kids and yet educated, healthy, women in their early thirties are some kind of unique case where the risk of infertility or developmental issues would be paramount?

Yes, the risk goes up with maternal age, but it's not the sole cause. As I said, I know of one family that had a Down's child and the second pregnancy was normal. If the risk is "all pregnancies will be abnormal", that is not so. Indeed, being younger is not a guarantee of not having problems:

Down syndrome occurs in 1 of 700 live births and is the most common genetic cause of developmental delay. Down syndrome occurs in people of all races and economic levels. The risk increases with the mother's age (1 in 1250 for a 25 year old mother to 1 in 1000 at age 31, 1 in 400 at age 35, and about 1 in 100 at age 40). However, 80% of babies with Down syndrome are born to women under age 35 years. Translocation Down syndrome has a greatly increased risk of occurring again in a subsequent pregnancy. The exact cause and prevention of Down syndrome are currently unknown.

I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick.

So it's the inconvenience rather than the killing that upsets your stomach? If you could do it by a discreet journey across town, it would be okey-dokey?

I think its just trying to pick the least bad choice. I hate that choices like that exist and I understand I'd be a horrible person unless I enslaved myself to raise a child with Downs. Downs on a screening or similar is probably one of the few things I'd ok early abortion for.

"Enslaved"? Wow.

And here you all are wondering about why oh why are fertility rates cratering? Hint: maybe having been conditioned to think having kids (even ordinary, non-disabled kids) is slavery might be part of it?

In America at least, standards for what constitutes abuse or neglect are indeed quite high, such that it could feel like enslavement if the relationship doesn't eventually become reciprocal.

It is at least indentured servitude, at least nowadays. But with a profoundly disabled child the indenture is for life.

But with a profoundly disabled child the indenture is for life.

Sounds like slavery to me.

Yes.

Nobody said that. But yes, you’re bound morally and legally to raise your child. With an ordinary child you are rewarded by watching it become a full adult with all the faculties and majesty of Man (plus hopefully certain more pragmatic things like elderly care).

Looking at it from the outside, the labour of raising a developmentally disabled child is far higher and the rewards far lower. It’s no wonder people balk.

For those who are abundantly pro-life I'm curious how they feel about screening semen or eggs for potential down syndrome or other major issues. Sure it's prior to fertilization but it's still life on some level

For Catholics, at least, I don't think the issue would be with killing the sperm or unfertilized egg (not people or even potential people). But Catholicism would not be down with the impulse to treat another person as a consumer good whose worthiness for existence depends on someone else's private standards or tastes.

Not permissible

How are they not potential people? What about with IVF where multiple viable eggs are fertilized and some are potentially discarded since there's no reasonable pathway to incubating them all

I think pro-life people are typically opposed to IVF exactly because of the reason you point out.

Are they against frequent miscarriagers getting pregnant? Not that I really expect a hard-and-fast answer and pulling numbers out of my ass but if if Couple A really wants a child and they've got alternatives of IVF (10 eggs fertilized, 1 healthy child delivered) and 10 years of trying with a very high miscarriage rate (20 eggs fertilized, none making it to term) which is more moral?

They say that the miscarriages are God's responsibility, whereas the IVF fetuses are the parents' and doctors' responsibility, which is different. It isn't necessarily wrong for God to allow smallpox, but if you go and re-release it, you will be doing wrong.

I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick. I also wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life babysitting my infertile dead-end offspring.

In that case, it would be a mercy kill, no? Fate (or genetics) has already decided their odds of having a normal life. So many core human experiences might become unavailable to them because of their condition. I'd definitely travel hundreds of miles to end it before they develop awareness. The earlier, the better. Yes, I would hate myself for it but I can't make them live a half-life.

This is a pretty interesting debate as it demonstrates a real fracture point between the "alt-right" NRx folk (such that still exist) and the "trads" who might otherwise be allies of convenience. We can joke about 13/52 and find common ground on e.g., the execution of rapists, murderers, and child molesters; plausibly agree on the utility of racial profiling, nativism and remigration, and broadly reject blank slatism in all its forms -- but god forbid (and, I suppose, God forbids) we proactively prune a few fetuses with extra chromosomes.

The religious right will, of course, construct their Jenga tower of cope re: why their ideology doesn't immediately collapse back down into leftist slave morality, but ultimately, they protect them because they are pitiful, and that is indistinguishable from progressivism. I have no faith that these "allies" would be willing to bar the gates and sink the ships in a Camp of the Saints-style dystopia; it's all just LARP.

On average, I don’t think trads are that down for joking about 13/52. Nor do I think they’re pro-racial profiling. And not only do modern trads not reject blank slatism, they’re broadly pro-blank slatism (except for “too obvious” cases like Down syndrome).

Agreed that trads wouldn’t have it in them to bar any gates or sink any ships in a Camp of the Saints-type situation. They’d rather lose gracefully than risk being mean to Vulnerable Groups. They may even bend the knee and metaphorically or literally wash the feet of migrants upon arrival. This wouldn’t expose them as LARPers, though, as they’ve been consistent in being progressives driving the speed limit all along.

I don't think this analysis really checks out; "trads" and "conservatives" are not the same group, and the latter are the ones it's reasonable to pose as "progressives driving the speed limit". Best I can tell, trads are generally opposed to racism, but pretty good at noticing when people are fucking with them with false accusations of racism, except in cases that are especially dimwitted and easy for progressives to peel off by any number of tactics. Some of their number predictably die in overseas mission trips or doing other charity work, so they do have to have some "suicidal empathy". However, it's often said that progressives support policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, but wouldn't personally invite them into their homes; I think trads are basically exactly the converse. They aren't generally Amish-style absolute pacifists, and it's pretty easy to whip them up into a nationalist fervor by posing things as a cultural and religious war.

I don't think this analysis really checks out; "trads" and "conservatives" are not the same group, and the latter are the ones it's reasonable to pose as "progressives driving the speed limit".

"Trads," as used to describe the religious right as @meduka was doing, are generally considered a subset of conservatives. And while they may not drive at the exact same speed or always on the same roads as other conservatives, I still contend they're progressives driving the speed limit. This can be seen in instances like you mentioned, suicidal empathy or pathological altruism in overseas mission trips or other charity work at considerable personal time and expense, up to and including death.

pretty good at noticing when people are fucking with them with false accusations of racism

This type of Noticing may be present among Online RETVRN types (who would likely fall under "'alt-right' NRx folk" or a spiritual offshoot thereof), but generally absent from the religious right. It wasn't the Online RETVRN types who were bending the knee to wash black people's feet during BLM. The knees of the modern religious right bend easily, as was the case with gay marriage.

However, it's often said that progressives support policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, but wouldn't personally invite them into their homes; I think trads are basically exactly the converse.

I don't think trads oppose policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, insofar a disproportionate amount of dangerous criminals are the byproduct of letting in migrants from the Global South, and being kind and welcoming to migrants (regardless of their ethnic or regional origins) are part of being a good Christian/Catholic. For example, the two most recent popes are/were oft-quoted in simping for migrants/illegal immigrants.

I've seen/heard relatively little pushback from TradCaths in discussions about the popes' water-carrying for migrants/illegal immigrants, although TradCaths should supposedly be quite down for criticizing the pope for being too ${CurrentYear}. In contrast, I've seen/heard much more spirited participation from TradCaths in discussions about abortion or transsexuality. Stronger opinions in discussions about the popes' water-carrying for migrants/illegal immigrants instead come from the "'alt-right' NRx"-types and progressives, the former lulzing and/or seething ("with Christ-cuck allies like these, who needs enemies?") and the latter dabbing/gloating ("see? Even your pap-daddy in the Vatican says that no human is illegal").

although TradCaths should supposedly be quite down for criticizing the pope for being too ${CurrentYear}

TradCaths are willing to criticise the Pope for deviating from Catholicism. They aren't willing to criticise the Pope for deviating from secular conservatism. The idea that the Christian thing to do can be determined by considering secular conservative political theory is pretty much exclusive to American evangelicals.

Christianity is a universalising religion. You are going to struggle to get a Christian to endorse "Now the Good Samaritan has come to the attention of the authorities, time to deport him back to Samaria, ideally after a few weeks in a deliberately squalid prison camp to deter imitators" or "Actually it would have saved the Roman Empire a lot of trouble if the authorities in Roman Egypt had shipped the Holy Family back to King Herod" - even though the latter is probably correct. You can find Biblical prooftexts for "Rulers should do the politically prudent thing, not the WWJD thing" to go along with the usual secular arguments that immigration restriction is prudent. But immigration restriction isn't Christian doctrine. My understanding of modern Catholic teaching is that the only secular political questions which are a matter of doctrine are right-to-life issues.

I agree the NRx (or whatever label you want to slap on it) and Christianity are very much opposed and its a weird quirk of American politics that anybody would think otherwise.

Your framing of the issue is rather bizarre however. The way you talk about it, one would almost think that empathy and helping the poor and the vulnerable is some sort of leftist and progressive invention. In reality of course, Christianity has promoted these things since its inception more than 1500 years before anything that can be meaningfully called 'leftism' or 'progressivism' ever enters the scene. It would be more accurate in my opinion to state something like leftism took a Christian virtue and isolated it from the rest of the Christian worldview and rather predictably ended up in a rather unbalanced and silly place. Recognizing this silliness in the leftist project, the alt-right/NRx/whatever simply completed the process of the secularist revolution and threw out the last remaining bit of the moral order of Christendom.

It depends. Usually in the Christian form of charity, there was an expectation of the person joining and becoming a Christian, and often The priest would require that the recipient generally improve their behaviors if they are the cause of the problem. If they had no job they were expected to do at least some work. It wasn’t a modern free check where a person could demand gibs despite not being a member of the community or contributing in any way whatsoever.

That is because Christian Charity is not utilitarian, but based on Christian virtue ethics. Even people like Saint Ambrose with radical view on wealth accented the impact of lack of charity on the salvation of the giver, not only on earthly comfort of the one receiving such charity. It also flows into Thomas Aquinas hierarchy of need, where only extreme necessity requires immediate action, and even then in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity - meaning you are responsible for ever expanding circle that however starts with you. So in that sense a heathy beggar who is hungry because he is lazy, is failing in his responsibility and in fact steals from truly needy. Enabling his behavior is at best lack of prudence, and at worst you become complicit, as you trap them in their sins.

It is one of pet peeves of mine - when modern Christian Churches entangle themselves in social policies and preach about human rights or inequalities or even utilitarian systems such as Effective Altruism often calling it as strategic choice. This is secular vocabulary is alien to core social teaching. E.g. talking about American poor is absolutely stupid, they are basically yesteryear millionaires with access to everything they may need materially.

One angle I hear is that Christianity and progressivism are of single, unified lineage, and we've got to RETVRN to the prelapsarian world of blood and suffering.

Louise Perry thinks we already have.

Also a funny take on Twitter when some people came out as pro-choice except for in this case since 'this is eugenics'. The position that a person should be entitled to abort their children for any reason unless the child is maximally inconvenient for them is pretty amusing.

People should be able to abort for any reason except sex selection is a pretty standard lefty viewpoint.

Isn't this just generic "boo outgroup"?

It seems to me that the religious right take a very consistent position on this - it is wrong to kill an innocent person. If the alt-right carve out exceptions, like it's okay to kill pre-natal people, or it's okay to kill people with genetic disorders, or even (implicitly?) it's okay to kill people who are genetically inferior in some other sense, well, they're the ones who would seem to need to justify the inconsistency.

The true religious right, the socially conservative right, has a principle. Do not commit murder. They have stated that principle openly for a long time. For the small, historically new or young group of weirdos constituting the alt-right, or neoreaction, to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.

If anything I think the religious right could more plausibly argue that it's the alt-right, as you describe them, who are pseudo-leftists. If you're going to accuse the religious right of being 'leftists' because they're anti-eugenics, I think they're just as much at liberty to say that you're leftist because you're pro-eugenics, and eugenics was obviously a progressive movement going all the way back to the late 19th century.

Not only are the religious right anti-eugenics their fully generalizable bible inspired tabula rasa views can be used to achieve any ammount of internationalist third worldist leftie bullshit, re immigration, anti-nationalism, justifying cuckoldry etc, endless funding for random third world countries. "The sanctity of life" or moral worth of some random dude's divine soul does not suddenly vanish because they live in africa or mexico.

I'm not sure what point you're making or what this has to do with anything under the sun?

You may well think that the religious right are incorrect, but what you've just said hardly seems to follow from their beliefs. If nothing else, it is demonstrably the case that the religious right do not support endless foreign aid or anti-nationalism. On the contrary, support for high levels of foreign aid or anti-nationalist feeling appear to correlate positively with secularism or irreligion.

Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)

(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)

to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.

I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.

Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.

The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people.

Once you're committed to believing in a category "human person, thus it's wrong to kill them," the difficulty lies not in finding reasons to exclude somebody from the category, but in finding a consistent reason why anybody deserves inclusion.

For instance, let's say that a very wealthy and powerful person, perhaps Hillary Clinton, pities some alt-righters and is pretty sure their lives aren't worth living by comparison with her much more comfortable and fulfilled existence. She finds that their deplorable presence is a constant political burden that makes her life dramatically worse. One might even say it ruins her life, given that she has been forced to spend her entire life fighting their plans!

Hillary Clinton is certainly more able to fund a skilled hitman to take out BAP, or you, than the reverse. Yet you say it would be immoral because you and he have "autonomous human experience"? In what sense are you fully "autonomous," living in a nation where she pays much higher taxes? And even if you/he are, how could you explain to Hillary (non-theistically) that your autonomous experience means it's wrong of her to kill you, even if you're ruining her life?

The difference between fetuses and adults is not that fetuses have lives less worth living, it is that they are very different looking organisms and it’s not at all obvious to people that don’t believe in souls being delivered at the moment that the sperm burrows into the egg that fetuses are people. That’s the thing you need to engage with. Some people might be arguing that it is permissible to “put people out of their misery” if they have lives which don’t seem worth living, but this is a much more fringe position than people who just think fetuses are not people.

The assumption that alt-right morality has to automatically align to conservative Christian morality also feels like a misnomer. I'm sure there's a correlation but it's hardly a precondition.

Right, but it seemed like @OliveTapenade was partially coming at this from a "who are these newcomers to lecture us, the original Right, about what is Right" angle. (This kind of mirrors the "tankie left" vs. "mental health left" (I still think "Ctrl-Left" is a great coinage) divide, though in the US the latter has comprehensively won while the Alt-Right is at most a strong minority within the Right)

Are the Tankie left that mutually exclusive from the mental health left? Though I guess the Left is a lot better at purging heresy on issues like Trans and mental health stuff as a matter of course.

I'd also say there's an element of the environmentalist left where I've seen Green Parties formed across the West purging their founders for doing hecking sexisms or phobias

Tankie left will selectively use the language of the Mental Health Left when it suits them, to cover or to pander.

Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with?

No, but if they believe that the infant in the womb is not a person, such that it can be terminated at any point without guilt, that's something they have in common with leftists, not with conservatives.

(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)

The Didache says, in so many words, "you shall not murder a child by abortion" (Roberts-Donaldson). Is that what you're asking for?

The specific biblical proof-texts include things like Jeremiah 1:5 ("before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you"), but these are more quibble-able, if you're so inclined. Footnote 5 here mentions some of the others.

Augustine, describing sin, writes in On Marriage and Concupiscence, that cruelty and lustfulness, "resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born." This is about a plain a condemnation of abortion as I can imagine.

To personhood specifically, in City of God XXII.12-13, Augustine considers whether aborted infants will be included in the Resurrection, and he considers the question again in Enchiridion 85-6. Here he interestingly admits to ignorance:

And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man's power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being. To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is possible for him to die. And if he die, wheresoever death may overtake him, I cannot discover on what principle he can be denied an interest in the resurrection of the dead.

I take Augustine here as saying, "A late-term infant in the womb is clearly alive, such that killing him or her is murder. I do not know at what moment in the womb the infant begins to live. That question is currently beyond scientific understanding."

Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."

Augustine always frames this in terms of 'life', but the logic seems applicable to personhood, to me? He does not use the exact moral vocabulary that modern thinkers do, but I think the direction of his thought is pretty clear.

Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."

But that would be a very motivated reading. ‘Life’ is either a chemical process that has continued unmolested for 200 million years, living gamete to pluripotent cell to living gamete, or else is something that sperm and eggs don’t have but late term infants do.

“Life begins at conception”, is a convention, and “life is something that slowly accumulates as a foetus develops”, is also a convention. You cannot choose between them scientifically.

I take it as an answer in line with what @aaa said below, which is something like "it's not in the Bible, but clearly something that was believed by early (more Western than the founders?) Christians within 200-300 years of founding". Except for the longer excerpt from Augustine, though, the arguments don't really seem to obviously be implying an outright "personhood"/complete equivalence of fetuses to central examples of "persons" angle, instead going for general pro-natalism (most obviously in the "poisonous drugs to secure barrenness" text: it's associating abortion with contraception which involves no "conceived seed" at all, and the "conceived seed" vocabulary + implication that it has not yet "received vitality" also sounds like it considers the fetus less than human).

At least without context, Jeremiah 1:5 sounds like it's more about God knowing the future. If you want to read meaning into the phrasing in "formed you in the womb", it only seems to suggest that "you" were formed at some point while being in the womb (so between the point where the fertilised egg leaves the tube and birth).

Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."

Sorry, but this seems like what Scott called "Eulering" to me. Defining life, for moral purposes, is not the magisterium of science to begin with.

The Didache is from the first century. If there was nothing critical of abortion in early Christianity, that part was added in very early indeed. I think it's just plausible that early Christians considered it too obvious to require mentioning that abortion is a form of murder - you might compare the way that, for instance, early Christian writings on suicide are similar. As far as I can tell it was just considered obvious that suicide falls under the heading of murder.

Regarding life, I grant that there is room to quibble, but insofar as it is scientifically true that conception is the first moment at which a unique, genetically distinct, new organism comes into being, I think it's reasonable for a modern Christian to consider that morally relevant.

(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)

There isn't but there is a long history all the way back to the 2nd? 3rd? century of christians opposing abortion. Some people speculate that it was because they were accused of eating children or something like that.

I suspect that in the early Christian imagination, abortion was considered basically a form of infanticide. We know that early Christians were known to do things like rescue exposed infants and raise them, and that seems a similar category. Thus my citation of the Didache above: "you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born".

It is probably worth emphasising that in valuing the lives of children so much, early Christians were themselves being counter-cultural and odd - we've lost this today, but Jesus' comments about children (bring the little children unto me etc.) are shocking in their original context because they were made at a time when children were viewed as significantly more disposable than today.

If you lived in a society with a childhood mortality rate around 50% you're naturally going to have a different view of the death of children than a society where it's 0.01%

Christians adopted their views about children when infant mortality was still around 50%.

The idea that "save every child" is something that might actually be achieved, rather than an expression of heroic virtue in the face of impossible odds, is something you start to see in the 19th century.

I remain frustrated that so much of the abortion debate ignores adoption as a possibility. It's so ignored that OP might think it's an unrelated point, but without addressing adoption, statements like...

It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.

are a red herring to me, at least for the USA.

(In all 50 states (and possibly in most non-USAmerican countries as well -IDK), there are Safe Haven laws allowing no-penalty surrender of newborns.)

I want to say this with no offense to OP, because what I'm complaining about is so common.

Adoption would be a realistic solution if there wasn't an oversupply and under demand for adoptable foster kids as is. And considering these severely disabled children that require constant dedication for the rest of their lifetime would be far less wanted than even the typical foster child.

There is excess demand for adoptable infants (though I doubt there is for downy ones).

I know I'm being analytical about an emotional situation in saying this, but, for the parents, which was the focus of the original sentence, adoption is a complete solution.

If we're going to move the discussion to a solution for society in general, I'd say that even if the high demand for infants pointed out down thread doesn't apply to Down Syndrome infants, charity or something charity-adjacent (like foster care) has always been the best solution we have.

even if the high demand for infants pointed out down thread doesn't apply to Down Syndrome infants, charity or something charity-adjacent (like foster care) has always been the best solution we have

Foster care parents are reimbursed by the government for the costs of childcare, with a much higher rate for a child with Down syndrome. So it’s not charity from the perspective of taxpayer James, age 30, who is forced to further pony up on the margin if a couple decides to try to have their Downie baby adopted instead having aborted him or her earlier.

AFAIK Down Syndrome pregnancies have higher risks of complications that can impact the mother than typical pregnancies so it's not like it's purely a matter of 'assuming the infant is instantaneously adopted then it has no welfare impacts on the birthing mother'. There's still substantive risks and costs.

People also underplaying just how expensive this is for the state since a lot of the costs are covered by subsidies. From what I can see out of pocket for a Down Syndrome child's care is generally 100k+ a year and that's tip of a far larger iceberg of tax money being deleted.

Adoption would be a realistic solution if there wasn't an oversupply and under demand for adoptable foster kids as is.

Depends what your threshold for 'adoptable' is. The internet tells me there are 36 couples for every child available for adoption so evidently the market must be clearing at a pretty low 'price'. I assume downs kids would be in less demand, but with 36 couples per child, beggars can't be choosers.

36 couples who have qualified and passed the associated screening? Like it wouldn't shock me if there was a CRM with 36 expressions of interest for a healthy infant adoption but my understanding of adoption is that it's a long and messy process

36 couples who have qualified and passed the associated screening?

I find the rules about adoption of both children and pets insane. Anyone is free to fuck themselves a child or buy a puppy with no screening at all, but adoption? No, that's different, you'll have to jump through more hoops than a circus poodle just to get a chance to adopt. The only barrier to clear should be "is your house than a state orphanage/a cage in a shelter?", which isn't exactly high.

How big are the barriers to pet adoption? I know I had one of a couple childhood dogs that was adopted and it didn't seem like my parents had to comply with any notably more arduous process?

Where I live, the Humane Society requires a screening questionnaire and $200 for adult dog (extra $50 for a puppy). Other pet adoptions are similar. I know a bunch of people who got their dogs with reduced or waived fee because someone was doing a charity promotion to subsidize adoption.

Most of the animals in the rescue system are fostered out. Only the most un-fosterable get kept in the shelter. When we went to pick a dog, they offered us binders full of dogs to peruse. We asked to see the dogs they have on premises, and got a tour of the solitary-confinement cages with giant snarling beasts throwing themselves at the plexiglass.

The Humane Society used to put down un-adoptable animals. They stopped doing that around the turn of this century. Some people who had to get rid of their dog would release it rather that give it to a rescue shelter, figuring that at least this way the dog had a chance at life. The Humane Society's goal is to reduce strays, especially the dangerous kind. Housing some unruly monsters is worth the price of having a reputation of never killing the animal except in medical need.

The process may well be long and messy, but a ratio of 36 couples to one child is not a shortage of parents or an oversupply of kids.

Even overseas adoption has dropped to almost nothing.

Overseas adoption dropped because the countries the infants were coming from made it much more difficult.

What are the advantages of that for a small, poor country? Like I get why a China or a South Korea stopped offering so many as they got relatively rich and birthrates dropped but what's the issue for a poor African nation in releasing adoptees? Probably score some tourism and remittances in the fullness of time and it's less a mouth to feed in the short term?

Many African countries have also improved economically.

There's an oversupply of adoptable foster kids, but an undersupply of adoptable babies. Most people who want to adopt want a baby.

Yeah, lots of people want an infant, very few want a Down's syndrome infant.

What I've heard from couples trying to adopt kids 5 - 12 is that the state's priority is to reunite them with relatives, and even if they've been with a new family for a year, if they find someone in another state who's related and take them in, or their older sibling reaches the age of majority, the state will move them and place them there instead.

This isn't directly related, but - I'm always vaguely amused by this sort of language.

Of course, the Internet has done more to "have people with intellectual disability publicly visible" than this variety of activist ever will - and people's reactions haven't been positive, to say the least. Nor are the activists uncounted, or even uncommon, among that howling crowd.

And of course, they'll say "mental illness doesn't do that!" But they'd still very much like a ... let's say, "more permanent solution."

One can't imagine them ever being happy getting what they're asking for.

Personal subject for me, my next oldest brother has Downs. He's a great guy, extremely high functioning, but he is limited in his life options, and he knows it. He wants the same things most guys want, a family, which he can't have. He's been an immense amount of work for my parents, who have been very supportive of him and his relative independence. He was a fair bit of work for me when we were children, as well as being a source of conflict between me and kids looking to pick on the tard. Not a bit of which do I begrudge him, he's absolutely worth it.

But in the larger sense, this option is not a reasonable one for many parents and I don't fault anyone who doesn't have that drive and faith for that sort of thing. I don't have any fundamental moral compunction with soft eugenics at the individual level. Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer. I'll bite the bullet, the correct number of dead (proto)infants isn't zero. Death is not the worst of outcomes. Obviously there will be disagreement over what counts as worse.

I love my brother, and my life is better, and I am a better person for having him. But I'm not going to moralfag about the real costs of that and people who don't want that for themselves or their retard-to-be kid. Those are the sort of life and death choices we have to make about family. When is it time to pull the plug on Grandma? How big a retard do we think we can raise? Nothing the law or the priests or the redditors say is going to remove the responsibility for these choices.

Ultimately, the abortion issue is, like most hot-button political things, just a way to moralfag over who is killing kids, raping kids, shooting kids etc. etc. Meanwhile, basically everyone is on the same page in practical terms. 80%+ of the electorate, including supermajorities of both parties are fine with restricting late-term or partial-birth abortion, but want it legal up to some point and for emergencies, etc. In practical terms, this is the reality in most states. There is no political conflict underneath that except the most extreme five percent on each side trying to either make all abortion illegal or legal after actual live birth.

Yes, there is legitimacy in thinking about the issues as a moral exercise in where exactly we draw the lines for questions like this, of life and death. But the politics of it is just pure bullshit. The underlying problem is not one with a simple answer, but our current system is far from outrageous.

Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer.

Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.

Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.

People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.

There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.

To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.

and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.

Good?

is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.

How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.

How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?

There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill. Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.

As other said, there is vast difference between Christian denominations, some such as Calvinists/Reformed are more harsh, that may be why you think that. Other such as Catholic Church explains original sin as state of depravity from grace, they inherited the broken nature of humanity from Adam and Eve. It is the whole basis for Christology as second Adam who provided humanity a path to reconciliation. In a sense using the word sin in Original Sin is in a different sense, for instance Orthodox Christians choose different name such as Ancestral Condition. Which by the way is also consistent with Catholic Dogma, there is just a little bit different way of thinking about it.

I don't think most people consider it "good" that veterans suffering from PTSD or homeless people are being offered euthanasia rather than mental health assistance or accomodation respectively, nor that their organs are being harvested for the benefit of wealthier Canadians.

How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.

Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.

How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?

There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.

I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.

There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill.

Agreed. I am not a pacifist.

Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.

Why not?

(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)

Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.

Calvinists argue otherwise. While I am not a Calvinist, scientifically, I think many people are predetermined to sin. And that you can predict this pretty easily. So, children who have not acted yet aren't innocent. We can already know that some of them are sinners.

Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.

I think you have to be completely anti-killing under all circumstances to seriously be against voluntary euthanasia. It's weird to think someone attacking you deserves to be killed and that this is okay with God but someone asking to be killed who has a terminal disease suddenly can't be killed. Even more egregious is believing that groups of humans have the right to murder but not individuals. Most so-called Christians hold the latter view and it's just State worship so if the State says euthanasia is legal they have no basis for disagreeing.

Why not?

Use logic not vibes.

"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.

Use logic not vibes.

If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.

As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.

How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.

Innocent under the laws of man. As I understand it, nowhere in Christianity does it say "your neighbor (like yourself, and all people) has original sin, and therefore you should punish them".

It was not innocent under many laws of man. The fetus is outlawed like a rogue fugitive under the laws of man in the particular time and place where it was, so it was not innocent.

Good?

I have been a net payer to my country's healthcare system for over a decade now. Barring something catastrophic, I expect this state of affairs to continue for the next two decades.

What I am not looking forward to is to be nudged to kill myself the moment I cross the threshold of unprofitability. See, with the system strained under the weight of infinity imported thirdworlders, they just won't be able to just spend money willy-nilly on good ol' white-presenting me.

How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.

Original Sin isn't a universal Christian belief.

... what? Then what's the point of Jesus if there's no original sin? I admit to not having kept up with my theological studies lately, but why do those other Christians believe Jesus died if not "for our sins"? Is it just "the sins committed while alive, so therefore in theory a perfectly virtuous person would not need Jesus"?

Is it just "the sins committed while alive, so therefore in theory a perfectly virtuous person would not need Jesus"?

Yes, but no one is perfectly virtuous.

I was raised in the LDS religion, and in this theology infants explicitly need no redemption.

I'm Mormon, and we believe that Adam's fall caused all his descendants to be of a fallen nature, but that we are not morally culpable for his sin.

The Methodists have a similar belief, as do many other Protestant denominations:

"Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually." - Article VII in the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church

You'll find similar wording used by the Anglicans and other denominations.

Nice to bump into a coreligionist on this forum🫡

Eh, I'm probably not the best at representing our faith on here but I try

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Read St Athenasius "On the Incarnation" if you're interested. "God became man by nature that man might become god by grace"

and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.

What do you think is happening there

Many Canadians are being proactively offered euthanasia for conditions which could not in any way be considered life-threatening (like "PTSD" or "being homeless").

"Sophia" wasn't seeking MAID because she was homeless - it isn't even clear that she was homeless at the point she started the process. She was seeking MAID because she had a squirrelly illness which she (almost certainly wrongly) believed was caused by sensitivities to large numbers of common household chemicals, and the authorities refused to give her a chemical-free home.

People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.

The slopes both ways are always slick.

I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.

When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left. You wouldn't want to murder an innocent, would you? You wouldn't put your personal belongings and finances above a human life would you?

There's millions of scenarios, mercy killings, long-term comas, brain death. Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die. Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent! Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean. Wouldn't want a murder on your conscience!

This "hurr durr gotcha murder" is ridiculous and childish. The sort of thing people think right up until they actually have to make one of these calls for themselves.

On average, we will all, by your lights, murder most of our families until we in turn are murdered by them. Is this a useful way to think morally about life and family?

You seem to have a very strange, non-standard definition of murder here.

When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left.

Choosing not to actively prolong someone else's life is different than choosing to intentionally end a life. Your hypothetical situation here would not be murder.

Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die.

Wait, did he already fall, or am I cutting it to cause him to fall? Your scenario here is very confusing. The specifics of the scenario drastically change whether or not it would be murder.

Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent!

I fully support letting doctors give him the best morphine available to numb the pain until his death. But still no murder required.

Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean.

Not choosing to force someone to continue living != murder. This really isn't all that complicated. Your definitions of murder are, frankly put, real fuckin' weird.

Choosing not to actively prolong someone else's life is different than choosing to intentionally end a life. Your hypothetical situation here would not be murder.

Although euthanasia opponents consider something like the Liverpool Care Pathway to constitute euthanasia. So they draw the distinction between "actively prolong" and "intentionally end a life" somewhere other than where most medics would draw it. In particular, Christian euthanasia opponents consider withdrawing artificial feeding and hydration from a patient who can't eat and drink for themselves to be murder rather than "choosing not to actively prolong" - hence the Terri Schiavo case and numerous other less famous cases.

Once again, that depends greatly on which subset of Christianity you're referring to.

The pope himself did weigh in on the Terri Schaivo case, and practicing Catholics generally seem to feel that removing the feeding tube etc., though I don't know if this would be formally accepted doctrine of the RCC.

The opinions of other Christian denominations were much more varied: https://www.clinician.com/articles/87240-religious-views-of-schiavo-case-vary

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Two people I heard from in person, off the internet:

  1. Nurse for an extreme case of fetal alcohol syndrome, needs 24/7 nursing care (three full time adults?), cannot communicate, hooked up to various medical apparatuses, was already 8 or so, with no expectations of dying any time soon
  2. Sisters at a high school, who were part time caretakers for their other sister, who had various health problems that had left her basically without an immune system. The state was also paying for additional care, and they were carers, paid by the state as well. They did sound somewhat like indentured servants to their family dysfunction. Their father had already moved to another state, and during high school one of the daughters moved to join him.

Having a baby with Down's syndrome is probably fine, and it's a sin to kill it. But there are situations that medical science allowed and which it perpetuates, which are basically black holes of suffering, and which society should not subsidize.

Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?

Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die.

This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.

The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.

It’s also not clear to me that action vs inaction is a super bright line. I would certainly consider someone a murderer who stared down passively as someone else slowly lost their grip on the top of a cliff when the watcher could have reached down to save them at any point.

The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.

It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:

I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. [emphasis added]

That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.

Oh? But what if the cliff is unstable and the potential rescuer is maybe not strong enough to lift the other person? Say, a 100 pound woman and a 300 pound man hanging off the cliff?

Or even if the situation is reversed, but the man has a fear of heights. And so on. Inaction as murder or even hostile intent is a hard sell.

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Situations with the allocation of limited resources or in which a potential pregnancy is overwhelmingly likely going to be non-viable and/or life-threatening for the mother

I don't support abortion in either case, and there are plenty of other people (mostly other Christians) who don't either. If the baby has actually already died in the womb (as opposed to a doctor saying they're unlikely to survive), I'm not aware of any groups that oppose removal of the baby.

For whatever reason, my gut feeling of my friends is that the ones who are most vocal about being pro-abortion are also the most vocal about being anti-screening. It seems like "abortions are no problem, unless you're doing so because the future child would have a disability". I guess it's reconcilable as being against dehumanizing people with disabilities?

Where does that gut feeling come from? As far as hypocrisies go, this isn't one I have ever seen in actual people. My friend group is uniformly pro-abortion, and every couple who has had kids screened them beforehand and likely would have aborted if anything came up. Not doing that would have raised eyebrows and been seen as irresponsible.

I suspect they're a pair of stances that only coexist in kids who are overexposed to lunatics on social media.

I guess it's reconcilable as being against dehumanizing people with disabilities?

Or more generally, reconcilable with believing that the Lives of those who belong to lifetime economically negative value-add groups Matter More.

Yeah there were a bunch of people on twitter pushing the 'Abortion for any reason is fine, unless it's disability at which point you are committing a hecking eugenics' which creates this funny moral situation where you can supposedly abort out of mere potential inconvenience but also the like maximally inconvenient child cannot be aborted.

A similar phenomenon occurs when people who are very pro-abortion for women’s Fun and Freedom reasons get big mad at those who are pro-abortion for reasons relating to the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of abortion-getters.

I can understand where theyre coming from, but it almost makes it into some kind of insane game show: "Okay, you're here for the screening? I'll just need you to sign here to acknowledge that at any point prior to seeing the results, you can abort no problems/no judgement, but once you see the results, if they have any negstive attributes, any abortion becomes morally unjustifiable - although if the screening says they'll be perfect. You can still abort at will. So keep the folder sealed until you're 100% sure you either want the child or are willing to be branded a Nazi to get rid of it!"

For an IVF situation, one could set-up a Monty Hall-type problem. A couple has ten files in front of them (or n files for however many they fertilized), each corresponding to screening results of the embryo they’ll have to implant.

The couple picks a file, say #1. Their doctor opens up a different file, it’s a Downie. Does the couple decide to stay with #1 or choose a different file?

That's interesting, and exactly opposite my intuitions. I think that abortion in general is wrong, but that abortion for a life long disability is much more relatable and grey than abortion because the mother doesn't want to give birth to it (assuming the pregnancy and mother are generally healthy and normal).

but that abortion for a life long disability is much more relatable

Most sane people think this. The thread is overindexing on social media disability activists, most of whom are mentally ill themselves.

Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth.

The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.

Personally, I see a fetus as replaceable and thus am happy to leave the choice with the pregnant woman. Typically, a couple which became pregnant by choice and aborted for medical reasons will simply try again. So another way to phrase this would be to say that the people in Iceland are replacing Down syndrome babies with healthy babies. This is the closest we will get to a cure of trisomia 21 this side of the singularity.

I think this was a point of contention over at ACX at some time, where (IIRC) Scott was basically saying that schizophrenia can be 'cured' through genetic testing. I tend to agree. Sure, if my parents had access to genetic testing, they might have decided to pick a fetus which less prone to depression than I am -- and I am fine with that, because back then I did not have interests of my own.

Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.

The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.

I feel like this is all a sliding scale, though. Downs is the perfect point for debate since it's common enough, visible enough and you can easily say that people with it are capable of living happy lives (albeit at massive cost to the state and those around them). If it's some severe abnormality where the organs are on the outside of the body and the chances of making it 24 hours outside of the window is 0% and the risks of the mother carrying the baby to term are immense that's a completely different conversation. I've got 2 kids and I'd abort a potential future severely disabled fetus despite generally being pro-life (or seeing it as a very weighty decision that shouldn't be made frivolously)

Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.

Probably not, since from the point of view of a woman who wants children, but not this child, the recovery is much shorter for abortion than giving birth full term, and it's more common amongst older mothers, who have less time to lose.


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