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Notes -
But we have numbers!
Everything below comes from this link from Guttmacher. Guttmacher is rabidly pro-choice.
You can piece through the crosstabs as you like, but I focus on these numbers:
Here's another Guttmacher link - " About half of all U.S. women having an abortion have had one previously."
What does all of this mean?
Your categorization of good/bad/meh abortions is good and useful. The raw numbers, however, show that even if "bad" abortions make up a very small minority of all abortions, we're talking about (probably) somewhere on the order of 100,000s of cases of what a lot of reasonable people would probably view as infanticide.
Secondly, there's a bit of a hidden conclusion to drawn from the "Only 7% occur after 14 weeks" statistic. Some posters here like to point out how raising a r*tarded child is somehow beyond the pale for many humans (I think differently). Taken a little more charitably, it makes sense to consider that a fetus that has demonstrable physical or cognitive deformities could give would-be parents pause. But, if 45% of people are getting these abortions at six weeks or earlier, people aren't making these judgements based on particularly advanced fetus condition. At 6 weeks, an embryo is 6mm long, the size of a pea. Yes, there could be markers, indications, signs, what have you. But the often presented narrative of "We learned our baby would require 24/7 care forever" is far more rare than is presented in campaign narratives.
And that leads me back to the numbers. Democrats love to campaign on the the smaller proportion of abortions that would probably fall mostly into "meh" (and definitely into "good"). Pro-lifers see the plain fact that a lot of abortions are purely elective on the part of a mother than feels somehow "unready" to be a mother. We (I) think these are absolutely "bad" abortions, mostly the product of a sexual lack of discipline or a cavalier disregarding for what are very predictable outcomes of, you know, having sex.
While I don't doubt the sincerity of those emotions, there is no way they outweigh the fundamental right of an otherwise healthy baby to be born. Hypothetical future states about being "unloved" or "having a bad life" have to be thrown out. That's literally trading the truth of the present for an emotionally based forecast of the future. That's bad decision making 101.
Finally, regarding the fact that half of all women getting abortions have had one previously, I don't see how this is anything than stupid after-the-fact birth control. "Young girl makes mistake" is certainly an understandable situation for a single abortion. I do not see how it can be that common (50%!) unless it is viewed plainly as "no big deal"
Infanticide was a large part of the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years. With no real access to abortion and no way to tell if a child would be deformed at birth it was a very common practice.
"Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskan"
Killing actual living babies and not just a small pile of cells with no consciousness is a time honored human tradition, back when HARD TIMES™ made HARD MEN.
Abortion seems like a big step up in humanitarian behavior.
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You're discounting that gestational time plays into most people's moral calculus. Most people feel differently about six weeks than six months. Which is logical: miscarriage rates start dropping precipitously after six weeks, and are minuscule after ten weeks. Many people might be placing those abortions of fetuses the size of peas in the meh category automatically, as the probabilistic child isn't probable enough or present enough at that stage.
To piggyback off of what @The_Nybbler said. This comes down to a bright line definition of when life starts. And an honest debate about abortion would have that at its center.
It's funny, we've all heard the joke about it being impossible to be "a little bit pregnant" - you are or you aren't. It seems, however, you can be pregnant with something that is only "a little bit human."
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The problem is that this becomes the Sorites Paradox -- the paradox that asks the question "how many grains of sand make a heap?" (Worse, actually, because time is continuous). It's not resolvable.
@100ProofTollBooth
I'm not saying it doesn't present a philosophical illogicality. What I am saying is that philosophical consistency ends up requiring (for most people) taking counterintuitive actions in real life.
Taking a hard black-and-white stand at conception or at birth prevents you from ever facing inconsistency. But each requires biting the bullet and accepting some tough choices. The shift from people identifying as pro-life vs pro-choice is mostly capturing shifts in the perceived environment around those people, their actual beliefs resemble neither philosophically consistent position.
The polling is like asking people "Do you think we should paint things Blue?" Some small percentage of people will genuinely never tolerate anything blue, and some small percentage of penn state fans want everything blue. Most people will change their minds depending how many things are already blue.
I see what you're saying. This makes sense. And I appreciate the comment on philosophical consistency.
I'm not pro-life because of dogmatic adhere to religious teachings (although I do that in my spare time). I'm pro-life because I think philosophical consistency would push the more rabidly pro-choice into favoring eugenics.
To the extent that this is true, this would be an extremely positive development.
Just to be clear, you're an explicit eugenicist?
I would say I’m an explicit eugenics advocate; I lack any serious scientific training and cannot meaningfully contribute to the project of eugenics in any way other than internet advocacy and my own hypothetical future mating decisions, so I think to call myself a “eugenicist” would be to give myself too much credit. But yes, I believe that eugenics is a salutary project which will be a key part of policymaking at every level - including, at some point, probably global - in the future.
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Two questions:
Can you point to an example of intentional, explicit eugenics delivering clear benefits?/
Do you support price controls?
Yes, in the early 20th century, many states implemented programs which resulted in the sterilization of women who had been institutionalized for mental illnesses, or who had criminal histories, or who had profound mental disabilities. This prevented the births of what would have been another generation of orphans, invalids, wards of the state, and criminals. The fact that these laws and programs were abandoned after a few decades had nothing to do with their efficacy and everything to do with what I would consider small-minded moral squeamishness.
I will not pretend to have a strong grasp of economics, which is why I rarely comment on economic/financial policy. Given what I know, and the opinions of commentators I trust, it seems like price controls are generally a very bad policy, distorting the market and incentivizing massive corner-cutting in order to squeeze profits out of what is already an industry with extremely tight margins.
Okay. Given that this practice was carried out at some scale for a couple decades, what evidence convinces you that it had a clearly beneficial effect? Murder rate per capita would be my go-to here, and while I can't find a chart at the moment due to them all starting in the 1950s, I'm pretty sure the graphs I've seen doesn't support a story where the sterilization program provided an obvious benefit. How are you measuring the outcomes, and what are the observed measurements?
We're on the same page here. Obviously, we both recognize the idea of "coordinate effort to create positive value where none existed before" is generally a pretty good strategy. Naïvely, one might think that this general model would work for price controls too; the prices are "wrong", and we coordinate effort to fix them, thus creating positive value that would otherwise not be available to us. The problem is that the coordination doesn't work, because while effort can be coordinated, the information needed to determine how that effort should be spent to achieve the desired outcome is absent. As a consequence, the effort is wasted, and the result is a loss of value rather than a gain.
I think Eugenics has the same problem. I don't believe that I can define "good people" any more than I can define "good prices". I certainly don't believe that other people can do so, nor do I particularly trust them to even try. Absent the definition and trust, there's no reason to believe that the effort won't be wasted, resulting in loss of value. I certainly don't think "MOAR INT PLOX" does it; a lot of very, very smart people went in for Communism and the New Soviet Man, with results that seem very obviously dysgenic even from a steelmanned Eugenics perspective.
Table stakes for this idea should be a demonstration that "good people" can be reliably produced at a community level, and that these people remain "good" at least three generations down the line. There's no actual obstacle I can see to such an effort, and indeed I observe a number of people and groups who have tried this sort of thing in the past. The results I'm aware of don't strike me as promising for your thesis, and the best results I'm aware of come pretty much exclusively from the religious, not from the sort of Materialist Rationalism it seems you prefer.
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It's not squeamishness, some of us would just like to be something more than livestock, bred by the elites to whatever twisted goals pop into their heads.
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