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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22265 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I just don't buy that our society incentivizes women to murder their children for convenience's sake.

So why do we have abortion laws, then? The women tell me it's literally a female-privilege/power thing- that the baby creates a liability, and that it's OK to kill liabilities.

Are they incorrect? Obviously they must be.

If they are correct, then "I am allowed to abort my children whenever I want, including post-natally" is trivially a natural consequence of the same abortion argument.

Note that I do completely agree that this case isn't motivated by convenience (because she had other ways to do that). It's basically just a bog-standard family annihilator case, with the associated motivations- convenience may commonly be claimed (or shorthand) for the motive in those cases, but I doubt that's anywhere near the whole story.

To the point that I actually don't think there's anything mentally wrong with the people that do this (well, other than "being insufficiently able to resist a very specific trapped prior", which is what some types of mass shooters do as well, right down to the suicide [by self or cop]).
But that's not insanity. You had the choice to resist doing that and you didn't; that's why it needs to be prosecuted.

Yet the women defending her are doing so because they perceive, correctly, that their convenience/privilege would be called into question should she be found guilty. That's the difference.

They can't just say "bad woman was bad, #notAllWomen", for the same reason behind why every mass shooting turns into a gun control male privilege debate (and note that these are the women who absolutely will #allMen when that happens).

But that's not insanity. You had the choice to resist doing that and you didn't; that's why it needs to be prosecuted.

Oh, I wasn't saying it necessarily met the bar for legal insanity - though I do think it meets the bar for vernacular, common-sense "insanity", as do all mass shooters. Just that these are not the actions of someone who coldly thought of getting rid of her children as something that was, or should be, as casual as getting an early-term abortion or a nose job; that these are not the actions of someone who thought she was going to, in any meaningful sense, get away with it. Either she didn't want to get away with it, or she wasn't thinking of the future at all. It sounds like you agree with me on that much.

So why do we have abortion laws, then? The women tell me it's literally a female-privilege/power thing- that the baby creates a liability, and that it's OK to kill liabilities. (…) If they are correct, then "I am allowed to abort my children whenever I want, including post-natally" is trivially a natural consequence of the same abortion argument.

Well, I think that's a somewhat unfair gloss of what "the women" are saying, though I'm sure some say it. But even taking this argument at face value I don't think it's a natural consequence at all. "It's okay to kill liabilities" might be rephrased as "it's okay to kill liabilities if it's the only way to get rid of them". There are, as covered, other, better ways to get rid of living children, while there's typically no way to get rid of a fetus without killing it. If science advances to the point that transplanting a fetus at any stage of development into an artificial womb becomes easy and cheap, I don't think it will be too hard to get people to outlaw old-school, lethal abortions.

"It's okay to kill liabilities" might be rephrased as "it's okay to kill liabilities if it's the only way to get rid of them".

No, it can't; the other option is "have the baby, put it up for adoption right then".

The point is that being forced to do that is, on its face, a threat to female power. It doesn't matter what it is; it's getting sacrificed for more power for them (usually couched as "never vulnerable to the Patriarchy", but that's just a soundbite).

So it's opposed by the bloc of women who want power as an end unto itself. Those looking for it as means are more even-handed, but they're not talking about this, now are they?

I think the almost certainly true story was that Clancy was having a really hard time, had a lot of intrusive thoughts, and started viewing this as the only way out.

While that may not be sane, I don’t think it means she lacked the ability to understand her actions were illegal or lacked the ability to not comply with her intrusive thoughts. Indeed, she previously resisted these intrusive thoughts making it clear she could resist; she just didn’t one time when the feelings were quite palpable.

So she is criminally guilty in my mind.

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