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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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