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Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?
A story from Canada today that, by its very nature, maximizes heat. I will try to keep my own emotions about this story in check. Sitting at the intersection of gay rights, abortion rights, surrogacy rights, and ultimately the violence upon which all government force is founded, I bring you: Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect
https://nypost.com/2026/07/14/world-news/couple-sues-surrogate-who-refused-to-abort-their-baby-over-a-minor-birth-defect/
Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect
(the article doesn't specify what)and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues). Last I'll say of my own emotions on this is that this strikes me as outright demonic behavior and if I say anything more about my feelings I'm going to drift into fedposting so I'll stop here.The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."
For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction? And why, if you're able to articulate. For me at least, to quote the meme an old friend shared in our edgy groupchat the other day, "Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs".
People can sue for whatever reason.
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The briefest glimpse of surrogacy will show it's an utter house of horrors, and seeing all the nicey-nicey finger-wagging progressives and liberals defend it, was when the last bits of rationalism and liberalism left my body. It was oddly liberating, too. To think I spent all this time worrying about the moral judgement of people who don't bat an eye at a child being sold, and literal Handmaiden's Tale stans who somehow see now issue with it.
I lost quite a bit of patience with "gay rights" when "love is love" and "they're just like us" crashed into the reinforced concrete wall of meeting actual gay people. I especially don't want to hear another word about the "AIDS """crisis"""", but all things considered I can still get behind the idea of tolerance.
Abortion is an interesting one. I was never a fan of it, but being libertarian for a good chunk of my life, I figured it's best to "keep the government out of it". Cases like this are interesting, because they show the Garden of Earthly Delights-esque path from "anything goes between consenting adults" and "my body, my choice" to "women are just incubators" - the very thing feminists thought pro-life thought implies.
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Yes. Any argument for anything decent can be attacked with "this is a slippery slope towards..."
Building infrastructure like mass surveillance that can be used for good and evil is not a fallacy, but I wouldn't call it a slippery slope. The fallacy is, for example, arguing that a (completely optional) OS-level setting "is this user a child?" that gets sent to websites is a "slippery slope" towards mass surveillance.
Here, obvious issues are the couple, that they were allowed to go through surrogacy in the first place, the frivolous lawsuit, and that apparently Canadian surrogates are cheap and can be further ripped-off by forced arbitration.
There's a good argument against surrogacy in general: the state foster care system. Personally, I believe surrogacy is OK if the parents choosing it demonstrate extreme willingness and capability to raise their child (by going through extensive, tedious, and long screening, then paying something like $100,000), because then they would statistically better than the median birth parent. I still strongly believe gay couples who go through screening (not these men) should be allowed to adopt, because of the state foster care system: I'm confident a capable gay couple would raise a child much better than an incapable straight couple (even birth parents) and much better than Canada.
But let's get to the real argument: that the relaxing of social norms including gay marriage and abortion was a slippery slope towards the FUBAR state of Canada, which manages to spawn scenarios this catastrophic. I actually think there is something here, but it's not "gay marriage and abortion caused the failed state of Canada", that's a correlation error; it's that the world has changed, in ways that eliminated unimportant religious taboos, in ways that eroded religion in ways it was important, and in ways that created terrible bureaucracy and enabled frivolous lawsuits. The world was going to and will continue to change no matter what, and these changes can't be reversed, only repaired, like patching a stuffed animal: I doubt for example repealing gay marriage and abortion will reestablish good social norms, because they didn't cause those to erode in the first place but were a side-effect; instead, I think we need to address the inherent problems, like flawed adoption/surrogacy processes and frivolous lawsuits, directly.
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Abortion kills babies? Wow, you're telling me now for the first time.
I'm not really sure what makes this any worse than a mother deciding to abort her own personal child for birth defects. The fact that the rights to make decisions on the fate of the pregnancy were (allegedly) sold doesn't change anything apart from making the whole situation darkly amusing.
I wouldn't put ending voluntary abortion on my top 10 list of political ambitions, but it does warm my heart every time I pass by the abandoned ruins of what used to be the metro Planned Parenthood.
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It's an informal fallacy, which means it's all about whether there are other (usually unstated) assumptions doing the work. If you explain why the slope is slippery (e.g. it's lathered in grease), then that's not a fallacy but an argument. Most accusations of the slippery slope fallacy are just people deflecting the argument. It's actually very rare for someone to argue that because something has begun that it will inevitably escalate further like that's some general law of the universe, because nobody anywhere believes in such a law. They almost always think that there is some reason why the thing will escalate, though the reasons may not always be made explicit. The slippery slope fallacy is almost always bullshit.
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I'm starting to get concerned about surrogacy for gay men specifically, intentionally creating a baby without a mother. We've had 15 years now I'd like to hear the real consequences studies of children raised without mothers at this point (from surrogacy and adoption). It feels like every couple of months we get these horrific child abuse stories about men adopting children and raping them to death, I'd really like to know if the average outcome is significantly worse or if these are outliers. That is NOT me saying that I'm morally opposed to homosexuality, just concerned by a trend.
Some of the 'every couple of months' numbers come about because the same cases are re-reported at each stage of the legal process. The Preston Davey case has been front page news everywhere from the initial allegations to procedural crap to the convictions (legitimately! that's a cw: worst thing imaginable), and I wouldn't be surprised or upset when the killers eventual 'fell down a staircase' ends up news, too.
That said, the denominator for gay surrogacy are low enough that it's still concerning with small N. Fermi estimate, I'd give less than 80k children of surrogacy or adoption living with gay male parents, and probably well under 40k. The "safer biological father" metric is still compared to the 'get the heavy flamethrower' numbers for stepfathers, but while I'd give moderately high confidence we don't have 400 rapes of surrogate- or adopted-children by gay men in the last fifteen years, I can't say the same for 40. So whether they're riskier is going to depend on what you think the base rate for monsters is.
For the broader question, there's a lot of studies, but they're pretty useless for anything short of piranha-level problems. Tiny numbers, massively self-selected on top of the normal selection pressures for surrogates, and a lot of evidence of p-hacking for what's reported versus what isn't. And, because gay surrogacy was incredibly rare before 2010, you're measuring for effect in middle schoolers, using very crappy tools. Still, when the massive problems are "gay dad having to buy tampons for his daughter is even worse than divorced dad", you're at least not seeing some massive BPD or autism effect.
I could imagine effects pushing in both directions for this, but isn't is also possible that gay parents abusing their children is more likely to become a polarizing headline in the first place, and thus increase the availability heuristic around gay parents being abusers?
When a straight father or stepfather sexually abuses or murders his kids, that's "dog bites man", and has hardly any staying power as a culture war issue. There is broad societal agreement that it is a tragedy, and while a particularly bad case during a slow news week might be reported by a local news station, it will rarely become national news. But when a gay teacher and sales manager abuse and murder their adopted child, there is more fuel for a culture war fire.
Yeah, that's likely to impact the visibility, especially if you're solely looking at news coverage. RAIIN's numbers are survey-based and victim-oriented, which probably overcorrects, but it's still an oranges-to-grapefruit comparison.
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Just a nit: A quick search shows that there are about 500 filicide cases in the U.S. annually. That’s rare enough that I would expect almost all of those to make at least the local news, even if they don’t become national stories. Sexual abuse, sure, that’s distressingly common.
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Without getting into the specifics of this individual case...
As Freddie said long ago, social conservatives have a really good track record when it comes to predictions. Generally they predict some consequence (which they consider negative) to a social change, the social change happens, and then the consequence happens exactly as predicted.
When I was a teenager, I was pretty thoughtlessly liberal on all the major social issues - or at least, on all the ones that I understood. I grew up in an atmosphere where it was just taken as axiomatic that of course social conservatives are wrong, and usually motivated by a combination of fear, ignorance, and bigotry, and all of history is a long scroll of them being wrong about everything. As I got older, I started to realise that that isn't always true, and then eventually realised that, hang on, they have in fact mostly been right. They haven't been correct in every single instance, but they have gotten most of them.
Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.
I remember a few months ago running into a tweet where someone said that they won't take conservatives seriously until they admit they were wrong on gay marriage and apologise. Naturally the conservatives say, "well, no, because we weren't wrong on gay marriage", and really, with every year that passes, I feel like the evidence is mounting that they were right.
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I have very mixed feelings about surrogacy. A friend of a friend offered to be surrogate for my friend and her husband, because my friend's medical conditions made it impossible for her to safely become pregnant. This strikes me as an incredibly selfless act and I don't have a moral problem with it, and I think the two main reasons are that the surrogate is known to the parents, and both parents' gametes are still involved in conception. But our society cannot keep anything "safe, legal, and rare", and I think it is realistic to worry about the moral risks of commercialized surrogacy, which I consider literally human trafficking. The "parents" are literally paying money to order a baby! And sadly for the ones who would be good fathers, I consider gay surrogacy to be way too high-risk to allow. There was the gay dads making content mocking their baby who was asking for "mama", Britain's first gay surrogate father getting charged with child sex offenses, the Australian gay couple who used a surrogate to purchase a child to abuse (archive of original article, journalist's "reflections"), and I'm sure I've seen more in the past.
Your link here is behind a paywall, but I will mildly defend this. While I don't think any parents should be mining their children for content online, and I would support strong social norms against it in general because of all the abuses we know happen when parents do this (and that's mostly straight parents!), it is simply not the case that that baby was asking for its "mama."
Some of the first sounds babies are capable of making are "mama" and "dada" / "papa" / "baba", and most human cultures have decided to treat those sounds as referring to the baby's parents. Some languages even reverse the mappings. A quick search shows that Georgian uses "mama" for "father", and "deda" for mother.
If the baby was saying "mama" and then started crying in the video, it was not the primal cry of an infant for its biologically female progenitor. It was the first babbling sounds of an infant, and if the two fathers treated it as a funny thing, it still probably functioned to teach the baby an early lesson about the rudiments of language, which will be just fine for its linguistic development.
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How is this much different from the career women whose babies cry when handed back from the nanny, other than those epic girlbosses having the good sense not to post tiktoks mocking it?
I am morally opposed to surrogacy- but you prove elsewise as well.
You and @vorpa-glavo both make good points. Perhaps I have been too outrage-baited.
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If you oppose two gay guys renting a woman for her body and then getting a lab to artificially inseminate her so they can live out their dreams of owning a baby but then it's not the baby they hoped for so they ask her to kill it and when she doesn't they try to sue her- if you oppose that, and your only argument against it is "it might get weirder in the future," you've already surrendered.
If you opposed any of the precursor policies 20 years ago, and the argument you settled on was "it might get weird in the future," then you surrendered back then. Saying "This is a slippery slope" at the start of the argument is a good opener, but saying it at the end of the argument (which trads ended up doing on all these issues) is a form of sulking surrender, like "Oh you'll be sorry one day." Well it's one day now and none of the winners are sorry. They just keep winning bigger and bigger, which makes invoking the slippery slope even funnier to them.
If you care about this stuff, you need to go to war or give up on the West, and especially the East, where they love abortion and suicide even more than we do. Accept that you live in a society where the average person has been totally given over to evil and futile hedonism, and react accordingly.
I don't know what "accordingly" means, but most people have settled on "I will live exactly like everyone else does except I will not kill my baby or my old aunt" which seems like cope. If the sort of situation described in the article is possible, there's something a lot deeper going on in society.
The argument wasn't "it might get weirder" it was (and is) "it will get weirder" and it will get weirder in very specific, predictable ways (plus some new man-made horrors beyond our comprehension and ability to predict). And it was hardly the only argument against gay marriage, legal abortion, etc.
That's an option, but without a critical mass of people on your side it's not a realistic possibility. One of the other options (and these are not all mutually exclusive) is to create your own pocket of sanity and stability in the world for you and yours, while preparing for when other, more decisive solutions to the issue become more feasible.
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This is a bit of a one-sided spin.
On one hand, I agree that the customers in this case shouldn't have any power to compel abortion, and "emotional distress" is just obnoxious litigiousness; the most they should be able to threaten is cancellation of the contract and the transfer of the baby's custody rights to the mother (not sure how the Canadian law currently works in such cases). But the fact that the child had a real medical problem which, by the way, could have led to lifelong brain damage is an important factor, and they seem straight up correct and responsible in demanding hospital birth.
Siding with a poor exploited woman against dem gay perverts is a very easy way to signal prosociality, and rather hollow, given that embryos not being people and having no right to life is a general societal consensus. Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's? As with Grindr-Tinder, the deviants mostly accelerate the propagation of the cynicism's frontier.
I find both parties corrupt here.
P.S. In fact, this specific detail might point to an ironic conclusion that half-assed Chesterton's fences are worse than committed social engineering from scratch. If you're turning childbirth into a services market and don't want gratuitous cruelty, you should regulate it like factory farming. Pull all soul out of it and replace with low-friction procedure. Hate abortions? Delegitimize cozy home birth with midwives. Surgery-maxx, develop in utero treatment. Actually, remove the mother entirely and speedrun to artificial wombs. The stable state of a post-Christian society is not quasi-Christian.
It seems obvious that a surrogacy contract should cover birth defects. If I were a client, there is no way I would sign something that did not give me an out: an explicit abortion scenario or, as you suggest, the transfer of custody and legal rights/obligations to the surrogate as the surrogate's option, possibly with further financial support in the contract depending just how rich I am. I also would not sign something that did not let me require a hospital birth or even c-section, with these again being problems that can be solved with money.
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A couple of weeks ago. Some of us are actually pro-life.
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Yesterday, if you'll allow (presumptive) early-teenagers. It happens every couple months or so, it's not common but not exceptional either.
Claude says 1/630 live births have Down's and about 50% abortion rate (with bad tracking/stats), which suggests 1/315 conception rate. Compare it to 1/790 live birth rate in the 1970s (same source), and increased screening+abortion isn't even keeping pace with the increased incidence due to aging parents.
This is surprising to me. I guess Americans really re pro-life. I've stopped seeing young Down's years ago. Subjectively it seems they've been decimated in Russia, and probably many other places.
Canada, not the US, but close enough. One very strong confounder is that we aren't seeing a representative sample of society. Even if there was the same rate in different areas (and we both saw the same number of people out and about), they might stay at home or be institutionalized in one country and "in the community" in another.
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I hate the Europoor eugenicists who have mostly eradicated kids with Down's on a similar level to how much I hate the people in this story, so what's your point?
"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby, but she chose to do a home birth instead of a hospital birth (which was not contractually required) despite the adoptive parents wanting one so they're both corrupt". I don't find anything corrupt or objectionable in the surrogate mother's behavior (other than agreeing to the surrogacy in the first place).
This seems to be fake news as they've abandoned this angle upon getting the medical conclusion that the defect is NBD.
I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and morally inconsistent with the opposition to abortion; and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.
Home births(or non-hospital birthing centers, which I suspect this actually was) aren't that dangerous. They're fairly common in the US(which Canada, whether or not it likes it, is enough of a suburb of that the same should apply)- certainly common enough that if they were particularly dangerous, this would be well known and called attention to by major medical bodies.
I don't protest home births in principle, but in this case it seems to have been ill-advised.
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Yeah, I'll second this. The gay guys letter saying that they 'wish' for an abortion when they thought the medical defect was likely to be serious (which I'd find that really objectionable) was ill-advised, and the surrogate's home birth decision was ill-advised, and neither of these seem to really matter for the actual lawsuit/arbitration, which is mostly about compensation for additional costs and fees. Which is its own very stupid mess and everyone involved needs to grow up, but it's not very specific to surrogacy in ways that the home birth or 'do you abort under X conditions' questions are.
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My apologies, "We asked her to do it, and since she didn't we are suing her for a bunch of the problems we're claiming we have to deal with because she didn't do it" might be more accurate.
Home births with a midwife in the US (and I assume Canada) are often (though not always) safer than hospital births, at least in terms of maternal and child outcomes (selection effects and other things obviously play a role here). Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.
Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.
Indeed they are not, but nitpicking aside – they're less dangerous in the case of births for which we have a high prior about medical complications. If I were a parent-to-be, I'd be quite paranoid about breathing difficulties. Babies are sort of built to recover from oxygen deprivation, but there's a limit to that.
No I agree with you, it was a false claim on my part.
EDIT: Specifically, the news article I linked presented it that way and I accepted the idea uncritically, which was an error on my part, and I'm sorry about that.
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It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing. Do you see evidence of an epidemic of surrogates being pushed by their clients to abort? Do you have any particular reason to believe that things like that, or things that you would find worse than this, did not happen in the past? My vague impression of humanity in general and European history in particular (which I am of course more familiar with than the totality of humanity) is that there was never a shortage of any of the ingredients here, like sexual compulsion, inferiors being made to bear children for superiors, abortion and actual infanticide out of convenience. It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth. But if it did, when exactly did we supposedly slip down a slope?
It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.
This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.
And in the past such behavior was punishable by law. Are you being intentionally obtuse here?
Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"? With the particular case at hand, I doubt a lot of progressives are particularly happy with what is going on either; it's just that they would pin their displeasure on the surrogacy aspect of it, not the abortion one. If almost nobody wanted an outcome and it happened in one instance, is that enough to make a slippery slope? In that case, there are really a lot of slippery slopes everywhere. Is every gun murder and mass shooting is at the bottom of the "slippery slope" that started with the 2nd Amendment? Is the entirety of the Anglo-American legal system a slippery slope that led to OJ Simpson walking free? If not, what's different there?
Actually, I have to apologise there - I expected to find a particular shape of scenario (like "some nobleman forces his mistress to get an abortion") but after putting in some time to search it did in fact not seem to have occurred (at least not in a way that left any evidence known to us today). The closest-in-vibes stories I can find are Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, a variety of "queen used her legal authority to torture pregnant mistresses" stories, and the whole lot of sexual violence in American slavery (though I guess someone very upset at abortion in particular would find compelled impregnation/reproduction much less reprehensible than compelled abortion?). Mea culpa, my claim that similar things must have happened in the past was unsupported.
Absolutely. For example, I'm pretty much a second amendment absolutist, but I'm more than willing to admit that certain negative things like mass shootings are inherently downstream of the mere existence of firearms, let alone the right to keep and bear them. I consider this a worthwhile tradeoff for the benefits the right of an individual to keep and bear arms provides. The difference between that and the arguments over abortion, gay marriage, etc. is that there was a massive contingent of the left who were effectively saying "Nuh uh! That totally won't happen" as opposed to "Yeah that will happen but it's worth it" or even "Yeah that will happen but it's actually a good thing too". I'm sure there are 2nd amendment nuts who claim that gun violence and mass shootings are worse in Europe or something silly like that, but they seem like a tiny minority compared to overwhelmingly monolithic voices 20 years ago insisting that stuff like gays adopting babies to rape them would totally never happen (one I personally heard tons of times back then).
I'm happy to accept that refusing to publicly concede that there is such a thing as a tradeoff at all, and their policies might not be all upsides, is an endemic vice of US progressives as well as many other movements that code left. I'm not sure if it's so much a left-wing thing as it's a "progressive and in power" thing, where if you have some utopian vision that you are already ramming through and just want to ram through faster against the feeble protestations of a browbeaten conservative opposition, conceding that there might be downsides at all is tantamount to surrendering to those voices who are begging you to slow down and reconsider (and you suspect are just angling for some more time to extract value under the curve of their evil ways before they are reduced to zero).
Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"? (and if they said "it will happen but that's a good thing"/"worth it" that would be enough to make it an "unfortunate consequence"?) Not only am I not sure I've seen evidence that the proponents actually addressed this specific case, it seems a bit strange to me to pin such a great distinction in evaluating a policy and its consequences not on anything about the policy and consequences, but instead on the honesty of the propaganda of its proponents.
I'm saying that, when social conservatives said "This thing will probably (or will absolutely) happen" progressives often countered with "No it won't, that's the slippery slope fallacy!" I'm simply saying it's not a fallacy in this case. Someone acknowledging that it will happen and it's worth the tradeoffs or it will happen and actually it's a good thing are recognizing that the slope is in fact slippery, that the principle they are using to argue X also applies to Y, etc. etc.
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Eugene Volokh wrote a paper arguing how the answer could be no.
I would say that not only is it not a fallacy but many slopes are slippery. If A->B and A->C and A->D and so on to A->Z, you cannot consistently support A and oppose Z... and it is likely that eventually you will not.
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The use of the term "Demonic" is off-putting.
It's not so much off-putting as ambiguous. Some people believe that these things are caused by literal actual demons, the kind that are repelled by holy water and ecclesiastical Latin. Does OP think that the appropriate solution here is the faithful application of the official Catholic Church manual of exorcism? Inquiring minds want to know.
I prefer hellfire as a solution. Hellfire missiles, in particular.
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From "Are Demons Real?" by the Dreaded Jim:
I find most of the post you linked pretty bad.
Scott Alexander has written enough about culture-bound disorders that I don't find it implausible that several Western psychological disorders are psychogenic on some level (while allowing for a core to some of them that will happen regardless of culture), but I don't really find the framing of depression or PTSD as "demons" to be very helpful.
Even if it turned out that from a God's eye view, that it is better for Western society's collective mental health to not allow therapy speak or knowledge of disorders like depression and PTSD to be widely disseminated, that still wouldn't justify thinking that all of these labelled mental illnesses are best characterized as demonic influence.
From a Christian standpoint, aren't we living in a fallen world tainted by sin? Why can't COVID, PTSD and depression be as "natural" of a consequence of Adam and Eve's transgression as death or pain in childbirth? Why do they have to be demons specifically? The gospels do feature Jesus casting out a lot of demons, but sometimes there is no demon and he just removes the cataracts in a blind man or ends the constant menstrual bleeding that a woman has been suffering for 12 years. Why is it better/more helpful to view COVID/PTSD/depression as the former kind of issue, and not the latter kind?
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OK
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Slippery Slope is absolutely not a fallacy and I'm convinced that its inclusion as a fallacy in high school/college curriculums is some sort of psy-op to create a population that will continue to give away their rights again and again and again.
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I don't have any conclusion besides surrogacy being deeply and unfixably evil. It's just plain human trafficking, and there's no way around it. Treating humans like livestock to be bred and purchased is genuinely evil, and I haven't found anywhere (besides Italy) that even pretends to grapple with this.
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It says "a minor heart defect" farther down in the article.
palate
Thanks for the corrections, I missed the heart defect part.
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