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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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If you support abortion, you agree that it is sometimes okay to kill a child

That one. Abortion, as standardly practised and as it is in most people's heads, is killing a small and non-sapient lump of flesh. It may one day turn into something that we regard as a 'person' but it isn't one yet. Personhood is either assigned to it in anticipation of what it will someday be, or because of church doctrine that holds that personhood is about ensoulment rather than sapience and that ensoulment happens at conception.

Naturally, if you alter the passage to distinguish fetuses from children it stops making sense:

If you support abortion, you agree that it is sometimes okay to kill a small ball of nonsapient flesh. Therefore you do not care about the well-being of that small ball of non-sapient flesh being killed. Therefore there are some five-year-olds whose well-being you don't care about that much. Therefore it is possible we could agree on a way to relax government standards around five-year-old safety, considering the deleterious downstream effects on parents, family formation, birth rates and society in general.

I'm not asking you to agree with that distinction, only to recognise that many others do.

A much more exaggerated version would be "If you use disinfectants, you kill millions of living things on your kitchen top. Therefore you do not care about the wellbeing of those living things, and there are living things whose well-being you don't care about that much. Therefore, it is possible that we should could exterminate the more inconvenient races in our country. You've already shown you're okay with exterminating living things."

I'm not aiming this at you, necessarily, but while I have some sympathy with the anti-abortion movement they have a strong tendency to refuse to acknowledge any difference between an early fetus and a small child. It seems to me to mirror the refusal of left-wingers to admit any difference between genociding a group by hacking them apart with carving knives and 'genociding' them by forbidding their ancestral practice of gory human sacrifice. What is sometimes called the non-central fallacy. It increases the passion of their movement, and makes debate futile in ways that can be advantageous, but it still seems disingenuous and it makes it harder for people to understand each other.

(I am in no way saying that the pro-abortion movement is devoid of rhetorical dirty-tricks. Faaaaaar from it.)


EDIT: I see this comment wasn't aimed at me. Downside of reading from the comments feed.