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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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".

This is a bit of a one-sided spin.

According to the suit, filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by the National Post, the parents claim the surrogate didn’t adequately keep them informed about the baby’s health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality and caused them emotional distress.

[…] The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip.

But tensions flared again between the surrogate and the parents when she insisted on a home birth performed by midwives rather than in a hospital, as the parents requested due to the cleft lip.

The child had breathing difficulties during delivery but recovered when he was given oxygen, and that an ambulance was summoned to take him to the hospital, the report said.

After their child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate, who asked them to cover around $10,000 in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs and skipped contributions to her pension plan.

The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.

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.

when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's

A couple of weeks ago. Some of us are actually pro-life.

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