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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.
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.
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.
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"?)
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.
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?
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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
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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%
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