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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".
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.
There is also a literal horror story of gay couple - including public school teacher - who tortured 13 month old adopted boy to death in UK. Be warned, my wife who is otherwise cynical attorney was crying and had trouble sleeping after reading that shit. My blood boils even thinking about it. The whole chain ranging from how the boy was taken from his incarcerated mother, how his grandma was denied adoption for no reason, through how UK CPS, doctors and even colleagues of gay teacher ignored obvious signs of child abuse, down to literal satanic shit that these monsters did to the boy. It vindicates social conservatives in every step. Do yourself a favor and don't read it, just believe it is a horrific shit.
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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.
This does make the difference. What people do in private as individuals doesn't matter all that much. But they are actively ragebaiting on behalf of their whole group; not only did they think this was a good idea but their group seems to accept this kind of behaviour. They are going to get it back in their faces.
If there were career women going around celebrating in public that their babies cry and claiming this was women's empowerment, then no doubt people would start gaining opinions on women having careers. But they don't do that.
If you're obviously part of some group, no matter which one it is, then your actions will reflect on the group as a whole, unless the rest of them actively and visibly act to stop you.
(This is a more general principle: if someone misbehaves and his family doesn't seem to disapprove, you will think badly of the whole family, and this is still true in a homogeneous society without subgroups.)
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You and @vorpa-glavo both make good points. Perhaps I have been too outrage-baited.
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