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Popping the filter bubble and the sanctity of life.
This Tuesday I was presented with a piece of Trivia that brought me up short.
My initial reaction was to quite literally exclaim "bullshit!" but having looked into it, there does appear to be a case. According to the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (which is currently the most recent report available) Canadian doctors euthanized 16,499 individuals in 2024, an increase of 7.5% over the 15,343 euthanized in 2023. Meanwhile The Trace a website maintained by the Gun Control advocacy organization Everytown USA maintains that there were 14,651 instances of Homicide by Gunshot in 2025. While this number does not include self-inflicted gunshots (IE Suicides) it does include an estimated 1,200 cases where the shooting was likely justified (IE suspects being shot by police or by would-be victims) and at least 2 instances of execution by firing squad.
Upon review of those numbers and their associated trend-lines where instances of euthanasia in Canada have increased with each consecutive year since it was legalized, while homicide in the US has been trending downward for the last 5 years from it's Pandemic-era peak it actually seems likely to me that more people are killed by doctors in Canada than are killed by guns in the US. Not "per capita" but by raw quantity (16 thousand people and change versus 14 thousand and change).
Considering the above in the context of another story that came across my feed a couple weeks ago. A Ghoulish Proposal Gets a Prestige Endorsement, it seems to me that there is a concerted effort on the part of certain factions to commodify and devalue Human life. See this story from the New York Times last year Organ Donors are too Rare we Need a New Definition of Death. I expect the media to assure me that that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announcing that the Network for Hope (an organ procurement non-profit serving Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio) having had their certification revoked on the basis of credible claims that many donors were not legally dead at the time their organs were harvested is completely unrelated.
On a slightly different track, back when Harris was running for president there was this "ridiculous claim" that the Left wanted to legalize Abortion up to the moment of crowning, but just this Monday, Massachusetts became the 10th state in the union to do just that.
As in my prior "Popping filter bubbles" posts I don't feel like any of these things really warrant a post on their own, but when taken together they illustrate a trend, and I find myself lacking the vocabulary to describe my growing sense of unease with where this one seems to be going.
Why stop there? More Canadians are killed by cancer, heart disease, COVID, and accidents than doctors. More Americans are killed by themselves than by other people with guns. Reasoning with raw quantities is more likely to get assisted suicide expanded rather than abolished. You won’t dismantle the master’s house with his tools.
Who, exactly, do you have in mind? Doctors? Liberals?
It is a little ridiculous. Most states still have restrictions after 5 to 6 months, including California, Virginia and New York. Most states will also allow extremely late abortions…if only to save the mother’s life. Some, like Texas, have been intentionally vague about what they would and wouldn’t tolerate. Massachusetts claims that it’s rescinding its second-trimester exception specifically to help mothers in that situation. There is no insinuation that anyone involved would be happy about a D&E.
In conclusion, I think you’re overfitting the trend. Abortion laws are relatively stable now that the post-Dobbs reactions have smoothed out. They also don’t really connect to suicide or organ donor laws on the left. For the religious right, they’re all spiritual concerns, but the material facts don’t line up.
Would you extend this much charity to a crowd you weren't already sympathetic to?
The insinuation is that they just don't care. They cheered at the signing of the bill. I do not feel the need to see them cheer at the actual D&E.
Is there a word for this "you are not allowed to draw revealed conclusions to the left" thing?
Reminds me a little of the "I'm not for open borders; I just vehemently oppose all enforcement and refuse to describe any enforcement I'd find tolerable" attitude.
EDIT:
"Life is meaningless at the beginning, it's meaningless at the end, and we won't help you figure out what it's supposed to mean in between" is a helluva philosophy.
Yes. Something like “the right wants to punish women for having sex” would be a ridiculous claim, even if some laws occasionally have that effect. Even when some of the fringe will cheerfully say as much! I believe conservatives when they say they really want to stop the baby murders.
Massachusetts says that this law is supposed to reduce uncertainty in an already-tragic situation. In doing so, it creates the possibility for an abortion right up before crowning. I hope that never happens, and I would be disturbed and disgusted if it did—but it is not the goal of the law. Polling suggests most Americans think like I do, and support bans with exceptions rather than unrestricted abortion. I expect most residents of Massachusetts would feel the same way.
Bans with exceptions are the popular, median position. I suspect it's probably something like an intensive activist core pushing as far as possible, and politicians (who may or may not share the fervor) granting the win because no one bothers to read the text of bills. It's easy to spin positively and almost trivial with a compliant media. We had plenty of disingenuous articles about purported tragedies resulting from post-Dobbs bans. I would predict that even if it happened, we would never see an article about a woman getting a 7-9 month abortion because it interfered with Coachella from any outlet further left than Fox News.
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