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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I'm aware of all of this, and it was the reason I linked the Louise Perry article at the bottom. Infanticide was the norm prior to Christianity. Legal abortion was sold to Western societies with the promise that it would not lead to a renewed normalisation of infanticide. In retrospect, that promise seems to have been an empty one.

But is it really renewed if occurrences did not increase? You claim a slippery slope, but I fail to see one. Have abortions increased over time? It doesn't seem like it is the case. While there was an increase in abortions after legalization, the amount has since fallen over time. Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion? I couldn't find exact statistics on this, but scientific consensus seems to be that it is correlated with mental illness and lack of support, and still opposed in most countries including the US. So in this case, I think blaming the atomization of society makes more sense.

The Clancy supporters are problematic to say the least, but it is not at all clear to me how their actions are downstream of abortion and contraception access.

The article you cite yourself cite claims that abortions per capita increased by 0.7 points between 2016 and 2020. (Which, incidentally, puts the lie to the hysterical comparisons of the USA under Trump to The Handmaid's Tale).

It's also not a like-for-like comparison, as fertility rates have plummeted since Roe v. Wade: can't get an abortion if you never got pregnant in the first place. What you'd really want to do is to compare the ratio of live births to abortions – or, in other words, what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion vs. end in delivery vs. end in miscarriage. I'll do an effortpost on this next week.

Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion?

Again confounded by falling fertility rates, but quote Perry:

As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”

If you want to say this is a policy you support, fair enough, but don't tell me it isn't happening.

I'm not even necessarily arguing that abortion and infanticide are becoming more common over time, but rather that the latter is becoming, for lack of a better word, "destigmatised". By way of analogy, no one disputes that homosexuality has become vastly more socially acceptable over the past few decades in Western society, even if the proportion of the population who is gay or lesbian has remained fairly constant.

0.7 points after being stagnant for decades is hardly proof of a trend.

And when talking about canada, MAID is an entirely different beast from abortions. Assisted suicide leading to pressure to kill difficult family members is an entirely different mechanism from abortions leading to filicide.

It's not like the two trends are wholly independent of one another, and I don't know why that would be the null hypothesis.