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Notes -
I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/
This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.
But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.
I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.
Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.
Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.
Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.
That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.
Why is any abortion insane? Where you you personally draw the line? There is only no limit in 7 states btw.
Going by just moral revulsion, the idea of a aborting a couple of cells seems like no big deal.
On the other hand, imagine a newborn baby. A living, crying, perfectly healthy baby. Only a monster would kill that baby. But wait, rewind the clock 1 day. Now they are in the womb. Same baby, one day earlier, looks like 99.9% the same. Now, it's totally okay to kill. Go ahead and murder them for any reason, no matter how capricious. That is an insane belief system.
First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.
From a purely technocratic perspective, this is a bit hairy. You can only do an initial screening for certain genetic anomalies starting at 10wks (which, incidentally it's itself a borders-on-magic-technology that's fairly new). The test itself takes a couple of days to process and then a confirmation test is performed before scheduling a termination.
Reliably fitting that in under 13-14wks is quite hard. A realistic schedule (one that assumes mothers will schedule everything within a week but are not min-maxing-it-to-the-day) under the technology that we have would yield most terminations for genetic anomalies by the 16-17th week of pregnancy. After all, some small fraction of mothers will be traveling, some small fractions of samples will be lost or contaminated.
And FWIW, the anomalies revealed tend to be awful. Some are either incompatible with life or incompatible with living beyond 1-2yrs.
That all said, I understand that a technocratic-type approach is not palatable across the political spectrum for obvious reasons. Just a comment about the best we can do for genetic screening.
Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?
If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?
No, but I would be in favor of a supportive-care type model that realizes that there is no long term potential to that life and eschews aggressive-but-futile medical intervention. I'm not holier than the Pope.
Yes, I am in favor of more palliative care options and honest counseling. But the question isn't whether you would let the child die but rather would you let the parents kill the child? Maybe the distinction is meaningless to your ethical system, but it is not to many people's ethical systems.
I thought I answered that clearly in the first word: No.
Honestly, that distinction is meaningful in most contexts but is a lot less distinct for a newborn, especially one with serious medical problems.
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I would not object.
In reality, I would be constrained by legal concerns and my desire to maintain my job and good standing with the medical licensing boards of two different nations. But in that case, I would object only because I'm forced to, not because I want to.
I've seen plenty of babies born for whom the kindest option would be a pillow over the face, if an overdose of morphine wouldn't suffice. Thankfully most of them just die on their own when the "acceptable" option of extending minimal supportive care or simply withdrawing it is possible, which is thankfully accepted in the UK.
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Most countries let the parents surrender the child if they don't think they can care for it themselves, though with severe conditions nobody else is really able to either.
I knew some teen girls who were basically pressed into service from a young age caring for their disabled younger sister who needed around the clock care or she would die (it sounded like the government had approved funds to hire a carer, but it was difficult and unstable to actually find one), and it didn't seem very good that they were doing that instead of having more normal childhoods themselves.
I'm not sure that I could care for a highly disabled baby very well, with two children already. It wasn't even that trivial to get them to learn to eat at first, and they were healthy. Newborn babies are unbelievably dependent on their mothers taking active steps to keep them alive. My expectation would be that babies with very severe problems mostly weren't up to breastfeeding before modern medicine, and usually couldn't get enough nutrition to survive. It's not a clear win to then hook them up to a feeding tube and oxygen or something if their parents don't even want that and the prognosis is basically hopeless.
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