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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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The pro-life movement makes a lot more sense if you model the people behind it as being opposed to recreational sex (and an open/libertine approach to it) rather than abortion. Free birth control would be seen as signalling societal support for it in a way that might even exceed abortion access (which, despite the fierceness of its proponents, still is kept somewhat under wraps and considered a too sensitive topic to sell in convenience stores, advertise on TV and hand out for free to college freshers).

That model would predict that people would be equally opposed to all forms of birth control, which is not what we observe. You don't see people having angry protests outside condom manufacturers and calling them murderers the way you do at abortion clinics.

It makes more sense if you model pro-life as following directly from the personhood of fetuses, and this belief being highly correlated with religion, which in turn is correlated with a separate but lesser opposition to birth control. And also correlated with being deontologists and thus irrationally unwilling to tradeoff on a tacit endorsement for promiscuous sex that's already happening in exchange for solving the mass murder of millions of unborn babies.