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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I mean, any smart pro-choice person can make the late term abortion argument - "Almost all late term abortions are tragic situations where there is no other choice, and it's sad religious extremists want to make these women jump through hoops to appease their own doctrines. Like most American's, I trust women and their doctor to make the right choice for them, as opposed to thinking they need to fulfill whatever those who have already openly said they want to ban all abortions want them to do."

Then, depending on the audience, maybe throwing in a crack that Republican's want it to be more difficult for a woman and a doctor to come to a conclusion about an abortion than for a teenager to get an assault rifle.

I think the Democrat argument is a good one, but would fall flat in the face of the actual realities of a late-term abortion. I don't know what late-term abortions look like, but I imagine it's a lot like killing a baby.

If those images were seen by people, I doubt many would actually countenance it.

But why stop at late-term abortions? In early Roman times, a man had the right to kill his wife and children. Even in later Roman times, infanticide was widely practiced. Why should the state get between man, the gods, and his right to kill his family? It's downright un-Roman.

The reality is that the state already controls all areas of our life. Personally, I think this is wrong. But I find it bewildering that you can't cut hair without a license but terminating a 8.99 months pregnancy is totally fine. If you're going to allow unlimited abortion on libertarian grounds, fine. But only if you also want to dismantle like 99% of existing laws and regulation. Otherwise it just feels like an unprincipled argument.

I mean, the pro-life side has tried the whole "show pictures of fetuses after abortions" in ads and such, and it hasn't seemed to work. Even low-info people understand that medical procedures are messy. Hell, if I was an enterprising liberal media type, I'd take a video of some perfectly benign medical procedure, chop it in a way it could be seen as possibly a late term abortion, then go to a pro-life rally, and see what reactions I could get.

Because once a baby is born, the rest of society can step in, not while it's still in the mother's womb, and we've decided it's bad to force a woman to go through a pregnancy when it might affect her mentally or physically, only for a child to barely survive or only survive for hours or days.

Well, I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian, but neither are most American's, but most Americans have an undercurrent of 'don't tell me what to do', which makes life difficult for both lefties like me and social conservatives. But, I'm happy to use the libertarian-style argument when it's to my advantage.

Ironically, though, government licensure is why people both want the government to make sure a hairdresser isn't a fly by night operator (especially for more complicated things a guy like me with short hair doesn't understand) and why they think it's OK for a doctor, who has been licensed by the government to make a decision, with a woman when it comes to reproductive choice, instead of getting the OK from a panel of conservative politicians who were formerly used car salesmen, dentists, and McDonald franchise owners.

There is a license for terminating pregnancies - the medical license.