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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:

https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/

The state recorded eight deaths among infants who survived abortion attempts during Tim Walz’s tenure as governor.

The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).

In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.

Here’s some thoughts about this:

  • At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.

  • Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world

  • This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.

  • We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.

  • If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.

Your timeline has errors. As reported in the article,

Year LBAA Survived Notes
2015 5 ? BAIPA signed
2016 5 ?
2017 3 ?
2018 3 ?
2019 3 0 Walz takes office
2020 0 0
2021 5 0
2022 0 0
2023 ? ? BAIPA repealed

So 8 live births after abortion (LBAA) occurred “under his watch,” while 0 survived. This is before any amendments to the law. But the article is incomplete; it didn’t include survivorship numbers for the pre-Walz years. Fortunately, those are included in the linked documents:

Year LBAA Survived Notes
2015 5 0 BAIPA signed
2016 5 0
2017 3 0
2018 3 0
2019 3 0 Walz takes office

Oh. It turns out that infants from their mother’s womb untimely torn don’t have a very good survivorship rate, even before Tim Walz gets involved. The linked reports break these down into more detail, too. Recurring phrases include “anomalies incompatible with life” and “APGAR score of 1.” Roughly a third received “comfort care” measures. We aren’t talking about squalling toddlers left out for the wolves. These are dying or brain-dead infants who cannot be saved by “reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice.”

One other thing I noticed in the 2015 report is that all of its LBAAs came from hospitals, not abortion clinics. Is it possible that the kind of late-term abortion which results in a born-alive infant is particularly dangerous? Say, when the health of the mother is most at risk?

It’s beside the point. Kirk posted his rant about how Walz treated eight children like trash. His data actually showed that Minnesota doctors perform triage in the rare, rare cases where infants are born alive after abortions. You filled in the gaps.

Doesn’t that deserve a fact check?

I made a comment early about how this all seems cargo cultish to me. Thank you for doing the work to collect the data on how many angels fit on the head of a pin in Minnesota in any given year, but I'm personally not interested in quibbling over the million-baby-skulls-a-year sized Baal-pit in which I as an American voter have been playing for the last couple generations.

This may sound to some readers like a woman saying "I'm not interested in quibbling over the government telling me what to do with my body" - I am also writing for you. Please consider that the dead babies are real. Those 10's of millions of lives snuffed out are real. Their right to life came from God. The "right" to an abortion was made up by communists.

I've considered it, and would like to politely suggest that He stop furnishing tiny, fragile clumps of cells with their own souls.

I can laugh about it with you and also gesture toward every other time we've tried to be clever with God

It's only funny and endearing if the end result is not a pile of a million dead baby skills a year

It’s beside the point. Kirk posted his rant about how Walz treated eight children like trash. His data actually showed that Minnesota doctors perform triage in the rare, rare cases where infants are born alive after abortions. You filled in the gaps.

Where are you getting this from? Is there some other report I'm missing where the doctors actually tried to save the baby's life? In none of the reports provided (2015-2022) is triage even mentioned, unless you count palliative care as triage.

In this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When mitigating factors are present, such as the infant being pre-viability or otherwise unhealthy, they are mentioned. Legally they are required to mention such factors. So when, as is the case with about a third of these infants, no such issues are mentioned, we can be confident that they did not exist at all.

This is proof that abortion clinics (and hospitals) did not attempt to save healthy post-viability infants.

One other thing I noticed in the 2015 report is that all of its LBAAs came from hospitals, not abortion clinics. Is it possible that the kind of late-term abortion which results in a born-alive infant is particularly dangerous? Say, when the health of the mother is most at risk?

Or that abortion clinics are most likely to be staffed by ideological allies willing to round up in their reporting. If an infant is born breathing but obviously unhealthy, round that to not breathing; it was only breathing for a few minutes after all.

I agree that you can’t tell “heartbeat stopped two seconds out of the womb” from “heartbeat stopped in the trash can” based on this report. I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter. The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

It might be possible to track down birth and death certificates for these individuals. I’m sure they exist, but I have no idea if we have access to a vital records database.

Let me first state a few things I think we agree upon:

  1. It is quite difficult for abortion clinics to attempt to save the lives of infants who are born alive. NICU babies require quite a lot of care and these babies probably require as much or more, plus they're outside of a hospital where that care could be provided.
  2. Abortion clinics are probably already accustomed to hiding, at least to some extent, this specific situation--born-alive infants. The mothers are going to be traumatized if they hear the infant survived. Likely they already have procedures in place to spirit the infant away, living or dead, in order to protect the mother from this knowledge.
  3. Abortionists strongly support the right to kill healthy infants who were intended to be aborted. The "why" does not matter. Maybe they think infants have moral worth but that born-alive infants are rare enough to not be worth jeopardizing women's rights to bodily autonomy. Maybe they think infants don't have moral worth. But they certainly want to be allowed to kill healthy born-alive babies. We know this because they have enough pull to legalize doing this in at least one state. If the common people support legalizing this, the ones actually performing the abortions will doubtless be far more extreme.
  4. The existence of born-alive infants is politically inconvenient. You're acknowledging not only that some of these abortions are performed on viable babies, but also that the abortion procedure itself can potentially result in a living baby. Meaning, abortionists admit that the safest abortion in some cases is essentially just delivery of a viable child, except they kill the child first. At that point, why not just deliver the baby?

Keeping all of this in mind, I find it highly unlikely that abortion clinicians don't fudge the numbers.

You'll note that a few of the babies in the documents listed did not have any pre-existing conditions listed and also were not provided any care at all. These are living, breathing babies, capable of experiencing pain, who were left to die without so much as painkillers to ease their passing. I wouldn't trust someone capable of doing that to report something extremely inconvenient and damaging to the movement that owns their soul.

Putting all of that aside though...

The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

Okay, and some of the infants were reported as having no mitigating factors and receiving no medical care at all. Lacking more information, I think we can assume that the legally mandated report is accurate, and that abortion clinicians would report factors favorable to their decision not to help the child if such factors existed.

I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter.

Lacking more information I think we can assume that the information provided by abortion clinicians paints them in a maximally favorable light.

Damn it. Some day I will get a table to render correctly.

Edit: you gotta have three dashes in each column on your second line. So

|a |b|
|-|-|
| | |

is no bueno.

I've always thought that you can get agreement on abortion by addressing the root cause. What causes abortion? It's unplanned pregnancy. What causes unplanned pregnancy? It's sex. What can you do to prevent sex? Don't have sex unless you know the risks and you are both emotionally mature enough to partake in it, or, use contraception to lower your risk of an unplanned pregnancy. How do we get people to do both those things? Sexual education and free or reduced-cost contraception. As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%. Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.

As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.

That is demonstrably untrue. Gay sex and lesbian sex carries no risk of pregnancy, and there are plenty of ways for cishet couples to have sex besides PIV which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy, such as oral or anal sex.

Based on the past success of a sex education focused on abstinence, I think that a sex education which focuses on anal sex would likely be more effective.

There are cases where reasonably proficiently used birth control methods lead to pregnancy, but I would wager that most unwanted pregnancies result from sexual encounters where birth control was either not used at all or used in obviously deficient ways as a result of a lack of advance planning or intoxication.

If you teach students

It is preferable to learn how to use birth control in a safe and comfortable environment. If you are using a condom correctly, the risk of pregnancy is small. If it fails in obvious ways, you should take Plan B. In the unlikely event that it fails in non-obvious ways, you can get an abortion. Carry condoms with you whenever there is a chance you might end up having sex with someone. that will in my estimate lead to a small number of unwanted pregnancies.

However, if you teach students

Birth control methods are not 100%, so the only safe way to avoid pregnancy is not to have sex. Wear these purity rings and remember that only sluts have sex outside marriage. Don't carry condoms, they will only lure you into thinking it is safe to have sex WHEN IT IS NEVER EVER SAFE.

then my prediction is that the median student will not have any planned sexual contacts. As the sex drive is quite strong in late-teenage humans (selection pressure) and most people don't marry and have kids early, it is very likely that at some point -- typically under the influence of alcohol -- the sex drive wins against Jesus. A drunk makeout session after some party is not a good time to learn how to use a condom even if any of the participants had the foresight to bring some. The mixture of shame and booze will likely not help with acknowledging what happened and seeking a morning-after pill, and might also lead to denial about a pregnancy which will eventually either lead to a late-term abortion or an unwanted kid being born, neither of which I consider good outcomes.

Abstinence education treats the sex drive as a lake whose flooding can be prevented by a huge enough dam made out of fear and shame. I would treat it as a river which can't be blocked, but certainly can be channeled in a way in which it is least likely to cause harmful flooding.

While I'm all for better sex ed and better access to contraception, the comment you replied to is talking about very-late-term abortions. These are almost certainly not unwanted pregnancies or they would have been aborted earlier. They are wanted but failed pregnancies which are some combination of non-viable and dangerous to the mother. The risks here are made significantly greater by "pro-life" policies which discourage administering medical care to pregnant people if there's at all some way to squint at it and pretend refusing that care could have resulted in another baby being born.

That is the common canard, but when the issue is studied this is not the majority of cases:

The most common reasons for delay were that it took a long time to make arrangements (59%), to decide (39%) and to find out about the pregnancy (36%).

We can also find statistics embeded into other studies. This one was testing the effect of a drug duirng late term abortions. As part of the information gathered, Dr. Hern reports:

Pre-operative estimates of fetal age ranged from 18 to 38 menstrual weeks. Follow-up contact was obtained with 51% of all patients. Seventy six patients (6.3%) had a history of previous cesarean section, and 20.8% (N=250) of all patients sought assistance because of a diagnosed fetal disorder.

Both quotes align with all other studies I have found:

Why does this matter if it's only 1% of abortions? 1% of abortions is still 15,000 of deaths a year at a developmental age where they could have possibly survived outside the mother.

Compare that number to the 16,651 of people who are murdered by guns a year and you can understand the moral outrage that some people have. If approx. 15,000 gun murders causes a well-spring of laws, activism, protests, movements, then surely ~15,000 abortions of fetuses that share the same gestational age as the kids in the nearest NICU are also cause for the same.

Is there any randomize or blinded evidence for sex ed? Having been a teenager who went through the class, I feel it was entirely useless. In many ways anti-informative about the truth of the world.

How much overall empirical evidence is there in education in general? It seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of credible research on exactly what works and what doesn't, as well as to whom and how much, and I'm reminded of the line about marketing, that you know only 10% of it works, but you don't know which 10%. And with the replication crisis in social sciences that has shown no signs of getting any better recently, it seems unlikely that there's much credible research on this out there. This problem is compounded by the fact that researchers of this sort are overwhelmingly professional academics, which would bias them towards overweighting the value of the education system that they themselves have invested so much time and effort into, as well as the well known partisan bias, which, in the case of sex ed, would lead to the vast majority of researchers being biased in favor of discovering that the type of sex ed being implemented right now is really useful and valuable.

As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.

Isn't this the status quo? Does any school's sex ed actually teach that birth control is 100%? I'd bet it's a very small percentage of women who are getting abortions who are educatable but uneducated about birth control.

The basic problem is that sex is fun, and not only are all forms of birth control less than 100% effective, all forms have significant downsides. Also couples in a sexual relationship want different things, or feel very different in the moment than a few weeks later when a pregnancy test has returned positive and their life has changed forever.

Their life has only changed forever if they are against abortion.

Having an abortion changes a person forever.

No it doesn't, unless your super religious. Most people don't give it a second thought.

I've heard accounts from women who have an abortion, and then years later see mothers with their children, realize that could have been them, and experience significant and lasting regret.

Did someone really say that to your face?

I, uh, don’t think that’s true.

I personally know people who changed their sexual habits because of a pregnancy scare. I’d expect actually having to go to the doctor, talk about it, etc. to be more impactful, even for someone who isn’t spiritual at all.

Sex ed is surely good but this is also like saying that D.A.R.E. programs will be a magical solution to all drug use because once you sat through a school program, now you automatically make good choices.

Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.

Let me try to make the case that this isn't really getting to the heart of the matter and why these issues are difficult.

One, imagine that schools had a strictly materialist class about the proper ways to season and cook your dead pets and dead relatives to eat them, in times of war or famine or plane crashes in the Andes or even just economic depression. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper ways to use sex workers or to even perform as one yourself in a healthy way, if you happen to come from a moral culture that sees that as being reasonable. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper care and upkeep of your slaves to ensure they had good diet and exercise to perform their slaving duties effectively. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the most efficient way to operate a factory farm. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the healthiest ways to engage in sexual gratification with minors. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the current state of human biodiversity in different populations, and the appropriate ways to take advantage of those biological facts in constructing a functional society.

In each case, these classes would be controversial, regardless of whether the material was actually accurate and useful, because the move to a strictly materialist frame is already putting the activity in question into a category that some people would intensely disagree about in a metaphysical way. And just so with sex ed. Traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about abortion is downstream from traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about what sex IS, in some profound existential / spiritual sense, and, for that matter, what humans and families and mortality all are... just as in my hypothetical, the other classes would be offensive because they make assumptions about what a dead relative is, what so called "sex work" is (which is the entire point of the rebranding), what slavery is, and so on.

And two, the actual history of the 20th century and progressives championing of Sex Ed and abortion and planned parenthood and contraception and all the rest has had a significant undercurrent of them trying (from what they see as a civically responsible perspective) to get a bunch of other demographics to get their fertility rates under control... which has, of course, totally worked. It absolutely hasn't been just been some disinterested attempt to share some really interesting facts that they learned. You really don't have to read around much in history to see that this is true. I'm not even going to argue the morality or wisdom of this here; I'm just saying there is a history here. I'm also not saying that many people haven't also become convinced of the moral neutrality of a great deal of sexual stuff, or a bunch of the individual rights aspects of sexual liberation or whatever, either. But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics. And because of that history, there's no way to talk about "Hey, so, what about Sex Ed?" without it raising a bunch of controversy, especially with groups that have been on the receiving end of this all. It already absolutely hasn't been used in a neutral way.

Jesus dude. Tldr became real for me today.

  • -35

Less of this, please.

Unsolicited writing advice is tempting but not usually productive.

As you said, contraception only lowers the risk of unplanned pregnancy while increasing sexual promiscuity. Additionally presence of both options also decreases willingness of men to marry their pregnant girlfriends, no more shotgun weddings. The logic is simple - men did not want the child and it was woman's decision to not take pills properly and to keep the child when abortion is such an easy and accessible "healthcare" option. Which on average increases abortions while also increasing single parenthood.

This, in effect, would entail telling young women to voluntarily withdraw from the sexual rat race in exchange for a long-term benefit that, in their minds, only exists in the hateful rhetoric of icky garbage human incel dudebros. It'll never work.

Well, except that isn't the "abstinence-only" perspective that the conservatives want. They don't want sex ed or contraception taught, they want only abstinence taught, it says it right in the name of the policy.

I'd be ok with everyone receiving the program I got in High School. It was a lot like the described:

First it went into the social aspect of sex. I remember they had a gotcha icebreaker task where they asked everyone what the first step to having consensual sex was out of a list. The answer was "eye contact." They talked about how intercourse took place after a sequence of events, (eye contact, conversation, seclusion, etc) which a person could get out of at any time by being vocal and making a choice to get out of the sequence.

A lot of "if you are pressured into having sex, here are some trusted adults you can go to."

Then went into the most common contraception methods available to teenagers, but actually read the warning labels on every box. Explained that none of them were fully effective at preventing STDs, not even condoms. None of them were 100% effective at preventing pregnancy.

Described economic and social status outcomes of pregnant teenage mothers. That pregnancy and childbirth changes you hormonally and "you don't really want to be like your mom yet, do you?"

We had to make posters describing STDs, symptoms and treatments. Presented them to the class.

I would call it abstinence-first education. It explained contraception thoroughly. The problem is, once you explain contraception thoroughly, it doesn't deliver on all the goods that abstinence can. Over a population, it is effective. As individuals, a 5/100 risk of pregnancy each year is still a lot of sexually active pregnant teens.

Property used contraception does work. The 5/100 is from people fucking it up. Also abstinence only education doesn't work you can look anywhere on earth and find that stats to back that up. Teens and young adults are going to fuck before getting married.

To your experience. It is surprisingly hard to find any info on abstinence-first education and perhaps the term is just not well defined enough to show up in the sea of competing abstinence only and full blown sex ed debates. I don't have a problem with that approach, except again, young attractive people are going to have sex with one another, unless you live in Korea, so you may as well teach them how to do it safely.

"Perfect use" condom is 2%, "Perfect use" Pill is .3%. Even "properly used" contraception means that there are thousands of women winding up pregnant from "perfect use." But how many people in a high school class are going to use it perfectly? "Typical use" is 14% and 7% respectively.

Things that are 100% like sterilization are unlikely options for teenagers. I suppose now IUDs might be more available.

I guess the idea is that, with education, "typical use' rates will go down? If so, my sex ed class covered explicitly how to put on a condom, the importance of taking a pill every day and that a single missed day means that the woman is more likely to get pregnant for the next month. Etc. They went very deep into the failure modes of each.

The biggest problem is that "Sex Ed" was one week. How many of your classmates on the internet are claiming that they never learned about the Vietnam war in school, or segregation, or whatever, when you remember very clearly that these topics were covered? I would prefer for Sex Ed to be a weekly thing all throughout Middle and High school.

Teens and young adults are going to fuck before getting married.

I didn't. My parent's didn't. My grandparents didn't.

That being said, in hindsight I think my Sex Ed was trying to encourage oral. They went deep into dental dams and things.

My parent's didn't. My grandparents didn't.

That being said, in hindsight I think my Sex Ed was trying to encourage oral. They went deep into dental dams and things.

Sure, sure they didn't... I bet if you sat down your grandad he would tell you about about being a poon hound and it would scar you for life.

I can't imagine something less encouraging for oral sex (barring explicit discouragement) than telling kids you need dental dams for it. I have never even heard of such a device before I was 20.

Smh, kids these days are so vulgar. When I was a kid we called them “dental darns”!

There’s got to be a historical reason for emphasizing dental dams. Either a specific STD panic or some sort of lobby. Maybe they just really wanted to beat the allegations of sex-ed pandering to men?

There’s a growing body of evidence that oral HPV is one of the main causes of throat and mouth cancer.

Either a specific STD panic or some sort of lobby. Maybe they just really wanted to beat the allegations of sex-ed pandering to men?

My impression's that they wanted to have something relevant for the (cis) lesbians, and that's pretty much all that comes up -- it's still hella low risk rates for the really dangerous STDs, but at least relevant for things like cold sores.

((Ironically, dams are still more useful for guys, even separate from STD risks, but I'll admit I have a lot of sympathy for sex ed teachers not wanting to get into rimming.))

Puritanism. If you gave honest fact based stats, it's practically an advertisement for Sapphism.

How could a perfect use condom be 2%? It is a physical barrier. A perfect use condom can't be anything but 100% effective. Pill wise. I know zero people that have gotten pregnant on it unless "oops" I missed a few. Don't try to fuck with an already low fail percentage to justify abstinence stuff dude.

Also; no one in the history of sex has ever used a dental dam. This is detached from reality.

Pill wise. I know zero people that have gotten pregnant on it unless "oops" I missed a few.

I can personally vouch that "99.9% effective when taken as directed" is not, in fact, 100%. If you take the word of an anonymous Internet stranger.

Was this you, or your wife?

More comments

About 5% of women make an enzyme that breaks down the hormones in birth control faster. This might explain a perfect use failure. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/genetics-may-explain-why-birth-control-doesnt-always-work-for-some-women

Condom failure rate was described by gattsuru better than I can.

These effectiveness numbers are so well known in my circle I hadn't even thought to cite them, but I assure you the Guttmacher Institute is not Christian propaganda. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-effectiveness-united-states

Women dissolve condoms with their enzymes? That is truly amazing! ( I joke, obviously) but like what are you on about? If you don't want a baby you're not going to have one.

More comments

Breakage, probably. Maybe they count spills?

As far as I know, the rates aren’t for individual acts. They counted how many couples had gotten pregnant after a year, conditional on using the method correctly. So I agree there’s room for reporting issues. But I don’t think OP is being disingenuous.

Also, dental dams are used exclusively as slingshots by college students. No idea how they got inserted into every sex ed curriculum.

The post you're responding to is showing as "Filtered" to me.

If the question is about how failure rates pop up, these studies are based on reporting. This goes into a lot of the statistics and processes, including some counterintuitive results (effectiveness of imperfect use is often underestimated, because many studies only ask about imperfect use where pregnancy occurred).

Mechanically, breakages are the most understood 'correct' use failure, with incorrectly applied (unrolled separately and then placed onto penis, air inside) or stored or outdated condoms, vigorous sex, age, and insufficient lubrication being some of the most common risk factors. Incompatible materials (eg oil and a latex condom) are usually lumped here, though there is a fair argument they should be considered imperfect use. About a fifth to a third of people a year using condoms report at least one condom break, although this is not evenly distributed.

Slippage is... about what it sounds like. You'd think it would be more obvious and easier to withdraw and reapply a different condom or move onto other sex acts, compared to a split down the side of a condom, but you still see 10-20% reporting it happen, usually pretty often if it happens at all.

Leaks are the least understood and I think play a bigger role than most people expect. "Correct" condom use is to withdraw immediately after ejaculation while firmly holding the base of the condom tight. Waiting too long (or just deflating fast enough) gives a lot of opportunity for semen to get around, and while it's something only a small percentage of people report having problems with, as a behavior it's one with the clearest immediate mechanisms for semen transfer, and with the least clear distinction between 'right' and 'wrong'.

Semen just getting around, separate from sex itself is another risk. People overestimate the risks of preejaculatory fluid for pregnancy, but the guy finishing and moving to help his partner finish without washing his hands first is both plausible and easy to overlook.

More comments

Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.

When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.

This may miss the forest.

The individual abortion may be typically "eugenic," for a particular definition of eugenic, in that it stops poor, unmarried women from having children, or having more children, which means they use less welfare.

Collectively, access to abortion, and welfare, may be highly "dysgenic," though again for a particular definition of dysgenic. Abortion is a kind of incentive, in that it makes a once-risky behavior less risky. Welfare does this too, so do condoms and hormonal birth control. These are prophylactics and contraceptives and treatments centered around the relationship, and since men and women produce children, I'll stick to heterosexual relationships. What's their status? Worse categorically. Dating, courtship, marriage, and childrearing; historically poor, all but nonexistent, also historically poor, a toss-up, some cases best-in-history, many and possibly the mode of cases rife with mental illness. Marriage in particular, the lack of it, the preponderance of single-mother households. What conditions brought this about?

Casual sex. If casual relationships had a positive impact on the psychological growth of a person, making them "better" at being married, we would know. What we see shows they don't. Later marriages, later first children, fewer children, more children in single-mother households. That last of which has categorically poor life outcomes. Why does the behavior persist? What conditions allowed for it in the first place? Abortion, condoms, birth control. Single mothers, add welfare and child support.

That the best of us, the people who should be producing platoons of little copies of themselves and their spouses to help our charge into space, instead have one or two, maybe three, is a tragedy. Yeah AGI is going to solve it, yeah I'm on record about the Simulacra Age and how Japan is going to be so poised for leaping ahead specifically because of their low TFR, but I think a lot of humanity is good and I want it to stick around. Pretty much all of you are pretty cool, I'd like for more of you to be around. I'd like my closest friends to stick around, to have the little copies of themselves to be friends with my kids so when they're grown they'll have some same sense of the joys I've had and continue to have. But most of them aren't having kids, and some of that is motivated by political rhetoric that functions to encourage mostly whites to not have kids, while then complaining about the economics of low birth rates and using those to in part justify dropping tens of thousands of foreigners on middle America.

That rhetoric is why I don't dignify the possibility that all the negatives above are still somehow consequentially "eugenic."

The executive-holding political faction in the most powerful country in the history of humanity derives significant power from maintaining access to abortion. This is not an appropriate interest of government; maybe it's equally inappropriate for the government to prevent abortion, but I can confidently say on the category, that of the two sides, the "Protect us from the consequences of our own actions" party will in all cases be infinitely the lesser. We are highly intelligent animals, we are meat computers, we learn and improve through consequence. Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics. These people vote, their politicians hold office. We sent men to the moon in a decade, now there's an oligarchy-appointed presidential candidate who at least at one time supported funding the transitions of incarcerated illegal aliens and a nontrivial number of her voters support her for no reason greater than her promise of protecting their "freedom" from having children. Abortion isn't eugenic, it should in virtually all cases be understood as the definition of dysgenic behavior, lest words mean nothing at all.

I agree that the sex revolution enabled by effective birth control (and abortion procedures) did have negative side effects.

But then, any important invention had negative side effects. The printing press was near the beginning of a causal chain which lead to a few bigger wars in Europe. The Internet contributed to increased human isolation. The chemical revolution enabled the horrors of chemical warfare.

It was not all sunshine and rainbows before the sexual revolution. For men, raising a family with their wife may be close to the optimal evolutionary strategy, but it can still be improved upon by impregnating a few other women in whose child-rearing you are not invested on the side.

The trope of a man seducing a virgin girl, having sex with her and then moving on, leaving her either 'dishonored' and unfit for marriage in the eyes of their society or actually pregnant, in which case her choices might be suicide, infanticide (which will be punished as murder) or becoming the sex worker society already considers her to be anyhow are pretty omnipresent in German literature, from Goethe's Faust to Mann's Untertan. Or high status men fucking their female servants (who are in no position to object) and then kicking them out of their household in shame as harlots once they are visibly pregnant.

While I agree that the number of unmarried sex-acts per capita has doubtlessly increased since then, I would argue that the negative consequences of such acts -- especially for women -- have drastically decreased since then.

Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics.

I guess you don't wear a seat belt in a car, as its only purpose is to protect you from your consequences of your decisions. Granted, sometimes the decision was just 'enter the road when you know that there are unsafe drivers', but that is just the way of life.

Those high-status men are still fucking the help, it's just now they don't have to worry about troublesome heirs. That's why men of status supported the sexual "revolution," not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted. It's David and Bathsheba replayed again and again on our entire civilization. Their beautiful wives and beautiful families wasn't good enough, so make it "easier" for the help, rather than harder for those despicable men. Remove the negative consequences from that specific act, which have indeed drastically decreased, but if I compare a maid being tossed out to the subtle and myriad horrors of modern life as a woman I'd say it's at best a tie, and a tie that favors tradition. What benefits some all too often harms most and social pressures and economic interests have a funny way of taking once-niche-choices and demanding them of the whole. Like pressure to become Strong Female Protagonist when most would rather be Stay At Home Mom.

Seatbelt laws are nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when someone gets launched through their windshield and meat crayons the road. Regardless, Big Seatbelt isn't dictating national elections.

not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted

Because it's unthinkable that a woman would ever want to casually have sex with a man.
Those groupies were all definitely raped, and they all regret it and never brag about it.

Sexual traditionalism is nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when they forget to put their condom on and blast STDs and unwanted babies out into the commons.

Indeed.

The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped. A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame. They were adolescents caught up in a wave of historically unparalleled wall-to-wall social and peer pressure. The music was good and they could feel it, but those teenage groupies had no context, they were fans of the Beatles and the Stones because they were that-which-is-most-popular. I'm sure you've seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; those girls didn't spend the entire performance screaming because they were there to hear the music. This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift. She is measurably popular because she is popular, and I say that as someone who likes a fair number of her songs and who doesn't care what she's chosen to do with her life. Back then, what would show a girl's "fitting in" more than for one precious moment being the desired object of one of the most famous men alive?

Much of this applies to the teenage girls who were legal adults, who while I would say in their case had nothing happen justifying prosecution, were nevertheless coerced with a lie. The lie of status, the story is perceived status, but it was always and only ever fake. "For that moment, he wanted to fuck me" for that moment, an immensely famous man on a world tour unsurprisingly wanted to have sex with a young and attractive girl who would do anything for him. She tells that story for the exact reason that she wasn't good enough; else she would have married one of those guys, or we would know her as a model or an actress. I'm sure we do in some cases, but those guys went to a lot of places, and those places had a lot of groupies. They weren't sleeping with future models every single night, even though they could have been sleeping with actual models every single night.

All that aside, of course it's not unthinkable, because we live in the time when it isn't unthinkable. But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened. They would see the evidence and they would know it made everything worse. And even ignoring everything else here, everyone knows we happily indulge in things that aren't bad for us, been to the store lately? Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle? Four kinds of Funyuns, ten of Doritos, several dozen flavors of Pringles? Who's that for? (It's me, and I love it. Get it?)

Sexual traditionalism is nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when they forget to put their condom on and blast STDs and unwanted babies out into the commons.

Yeah, well enough, though your point might be a bit unclear. Ultimately I'd just stake Chesterton's Fence on the subject, whatever it's ostensibly about, it sure did work for a very long time.

The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped.

No they weren't (aside from the ones that 50 years later regret the decision just as it becomes politically convenient to do so). I get that women who want the notch in the bedpost is completely nonsensical from a biological standpoint; so women who get it and then brag about it in the same way a man would do is even more bizarre. It's kind of like when older women sleep with young men- obviously, that's a malfunction (how are they going to take care of the inevitable baby) or just malicious (same thing, doubly so if they're teenaged or less at the time)... except that's not quite how the men see it.

And yet, that's exactly how it worked. Being able to just have risk-free sex is observably pretty great for women who like sex for the sake of sex.

A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame.

Because they weren't choosing 14 year old you, and you never got over that. We get it. Of course, your answer appears to me to be that it's a problem with men seducing P-zombies women, where my answer is more concerned with noticing that the conditions that allowed the average 14 year old man to get laid (and the conditions that allowed the average 14 year old woman to see the average 14 year old man as a viable option), and the average 20 year old man to start a family if they wished, appear to have disappeared. I'm not convinced the Sexual Revolution is the entire explanation why they disappeared; but I am convinced the Sexual Revolution was an emergent property of those conditions.

This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift

Really? Her songs are basically all about having male groupies (or at least, the kind of groupie the average woman would want) but I don't think any exist in reality. Contrast the rock groups, where their stock song wasn't breakup-playbook-101 and they were literally drowning in pussy.

Ironically the biggest celebrities that have the largest collection of male groupies are just particularly masculine-coded women that don't show their faces (be that because they're busy showing off everything else- not a particularly feminine trait- or because they're a cute anime girl playing video games- also not a particularly feminine trait). The men throw bags of commitment money at them in the same way women throw bags of sex flesh [i.e. themselves] at their celebrities.

But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened

What, that angry men and angry women would still be angry about it in 60 years' time? The free peoples of the past are just going to call you a square and do it anyway.

Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle?

I'm not sure why the existence of such would be sinful outside of their existence being tempting to those given to Oreos. Of course, the same thing naturally must apply to loose women given how much I hear about how damaging their emission of XXX-rays are claimed to be.

Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics.

Again, people say this, but all of society is basically to find "freedom from consequences" whether it's penicillin, germ theory, or better ways to keep a building warm or cold. You just don't like this way of a avoiding a consequence. You take antibiotics? Why are you trying to avoid the consequence of dying of a minor cold like millions, if not billions of people had to do for the entire history of the world until incredibly recently?

The mitigation of risk is the natural result of technological progress. It isn't always bad, penicillin and the whole of medical research being obvious examples, it's also not always good, see my above comment. Contextually I thought I was clear, it seems not, that I was describing specifically "protection from the highly predictable consequences of poor choices." A person who does something unjustifiably foolish and knows it's foolish if for no other reason than its possible consequences, deserves whatever they get. Living in society means you're going to get sick, it's not unjustifiably foolish to live and go about among other people. Living in temperate climates is a hair different as maybe it would be ideal if most humans lived in a climate like Southern California, but there are resources we need that come from harsh climates, and we've long since adapted to living in climates that require heating in some parts of the year and cooling in others. It's also not the same sort of risk, not today; two hundred years ago if you were unprepared by say, not bothering to get enough wood to burn to keep yourself warm in the winter, you'd deserve whatever happened.

And I say this, people say this, because the American Democratic Party would operate in a categorically different manner if it couldn't campaign on protecting its voters from the consequences of their poor decisions. What would they be if they couldn't deliver on abortion and welfare? What would they be if they couldn't back the mass importation of foreigners who will be dependent on government subsidy? For my money they'd be far stronger, as remaining options and ideological inclination kept them as the natural allies and champions of domestic, native-born labor — the platform they once owned.

They DO extend it to cover unfortunates all across the world.

Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.

That moral system is called Christianity. Precious few have any problem tolerating the cognitive dissonance

Traditionally Christianity has taught an order of charity, expounded most famously by St. Aquinas, formulated by synthesizing the teachings of the epistles. To cut through the scholasticism talk, it went something like: immediate family, immediate neighbors, extended family, coreligionists and countrymen, distant neighbors (eg people in Malawi), and then enemies.

The modern progressive version of "all biomass is equally loved by God, buy mosquito nets for Ndugu rather than a toy for Johnny" is not eternally the Christian moral system, but something that appeared rather recently.

If a progressive Christian comes at you with the Good Samaritan, ask them why Jesus sent out the twelve telling them to not to go among the Gentiles or enter Samaritan towns.

Modernist entryists or Nietzschean reactionaries have an equal tendency to quote scripture out of context and not holistically. Let me suggest gently that you do not know scripture as well as Thomas Aquinas, other doctors of the church, or the great theologians of the middle ages. I am sure that if radical self-mutilation becomes a trend in the year 2500, similar people will be quoting Matthew 5:30 and saying Christians are being inconsistent for not cutting their hands off.

As for these specific errors, the meaning of Matthew 8:21-22 is that God comes before family in the order of charity (this is a part of Christian virtue theology I did not mention because it was irrelevant to the point at hand).

Luke 18:18-23 was a rich young man called to a vocation in the priesthood, but he rejected the call because of earthly attachment. Jesus does not demand self-penury of many other people who ask for salvation in the gospels; it was particular to the rich young man's circumstances. Every soul has need of its own mortifications. Some of Jesus's closest friends feast, drink wine, and anoint with three hundred denarii oils. To address your specific point, the "poor" in this instance that the rich young man would give to are members of his tribal ingroup; his family is ostensibly already well taken care of, thus obeying the order of charity.

You're discussing early in his ministry (Matthew 10:5-6). Later on Jesus has no problem healing Gentiles (e.g. Matthew 15) and ultimately he sent the disciples out to Save literally everyone (Matthew 28:19-20):

Yes, this is exactly my point. He went first to his in-group, and then to all nations. When a member of the out-group appeared in need before him (immediate neighbor), he ministered to them. But he observed the order of charity. In parable, first the Lord invites his family and friends to the wedding banquet, and when they refuse, he goes into the streets to summon others.

Perhaps Christianity's telescopic philanthropy was adaptive in pre-modern and early modern Europe but has become maladaptive in a globalized world.

The subset of American self-identified Christians who actually believe in Jesus Christ uncomplicatedly do believe that Christian charity extends to unfortunates all across the world. American charitable spending on 3rd world development is the highest in the world about 0.23% of GDP and most of that goes through Christian charities (WorldVision is the biggest, and is widely respected as effective in the development NGO world even if people don't like their links to American Christianity). This doesn't count spending on missionary work, some of which ends up being diverted into philanthropy as well.

The cognitive dissonance only affects the people who self-define as "Christian" for Red Tribe identity politics reasons without accepting Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and saviour. Regrettably, this is not a small group, and the churches that welcome them are therefore able to make a lot of noise.

Enjoy your updoot; this is not said enough. You know that 10% giving pledge Scott promoted? I know plenty of Christians who give 10% just to their church (and aside, as much as people like to call this "paying for services", it's really not, even when a lot of it does go to paying the pastor and maintenance -- the priest/pastor has a real role in serving the people who are not financing the operation, and most churches turn around and donate to both local poverty relief and international aid and/or missions), plus more to international charity. (Not to toot my horn but because it's the only numbers I know exactly, my wife and I give 10% of our gross to our local parish, plus about 1% to US charity and 2% to international charity, and we plan to increase the last one in the future.)

I dislike my political enemies, I don't hate them so much that I wish they were dead. I don't consider lethally culling their members or potential members in order to decrease their voting base to be a worthwhile tradeoff even if it's easy or even free. If you gave me a button which would cause all of my political opponents to instantly drop dead, I would not press it. Even if you gave me a button that only caused 20% or 5% or whatever percent would be enough to swing an election in my preferred side's favor, I still would not press it, because while I do think the right would make better policies than the left, I don't think they would be so much better as to be worth the lives of that many millions of people. Except via abortion, because that actually does cost millions of lives. But conceding abortion in order to eugenically cull the left over generations in order to win in order to outlaw abortion is circular and ridiculous and wouldn't work that way.

If we are willing to invoke eugenic methods, either to reduce the number of lefty voters or just decrease the number of degenerate criminals, why not do it non-lethally? How about free birth control? Same long term outcome, but nobody has to die.

What about a button that would disappear all murderers? Or thieves? Or whatever? I'd push the button.

Would you want more life, no matter what, at the margin? Even if adding these lives made everyone miserable? That's just the repugnant conclusion. It elevates mere breathing over quality of life and I reject it.

Murderers, probably. Thieves? Probably not. There's a reason we don't have the death penalty for theft: it's less bad than dying.

Also also, people who have abortions are only weakly correlated with being murderers or thieves. If I had a button that would predict the future and abort only fetuses who were guaranteed to become murderers in the future, I'd probably agonize over the morality of punishing someone for a crime they hadn't yet committed, but if guaranteed of the accuracy of the prediction I'd probably reluctantly press it. If you give me a button that kills 10 completely innocent people in exchange for each murderer it kills I would not press that button. And that's what we have.

Also, the repugnant conclusion is about trying to maximize total quantity of life, while most sane versions of utilitarianism is about trying to maximize quality of existing people. Once a fetus exists, it's a person, and so its quality of life matters too. There's a huge moral difference between failing to bring people into existence, and literally killing them

(World with 10 billion happy people) > (World with 100 billion struggling people) > (World with 10 billion happy people and 90 billion corpses)

Couldn’t the argument be made that it’s not about increasing volume of life, but rather just about not ending life that already exists? Prevention =! Elimination after all. He even gave the birth control argument (though many conservative Christians would oppose this as well).

Why would we distinguish these scenarios?

I think choosing not to count potential lives rules out a lot of really stupid gotchas. It brings utilitarianism closer to something usable.

Because actively destroying something is fundamentally different than preventing its creation? This is one of those things that is so intuitive I do think the onus would be on you to prove the inverse, but:

  • The end result is not the same. Things that are destroyed leave ghosts, things that were never made do not. Memories, physical damage, emotional attachments, etc are all left behind and change the calculus.

  • The process is obviously different, and processes have by-products and side effects. In the case of abortion, a case could be made that normalizing abortion weakens norms around the inherent value of human life, or the value of facing the consequences of your own actions (I don’t necessarily believe this, but it is just an example)

  • Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.

  • Different subgroup impacts. Sex education will likely have stronger impacts on the more educable, and abortion on the more avoidant.

This applies to basically every instance of prevention/elimination. Why prevent cavities when we can simply fill them? Why prevent infections when we have antibiotics? Prevention and elimination are only the same in the most spherical-cow utilitarian nonsense world imaginable.

At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.

The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.

The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*

I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.

*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.

But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signaling. What would help is to win some fucking elections.

This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that

This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court,” President Joe Biden said. But he added: “This is not over.”

As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.

One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.

While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.

So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.

I want add to your edit another falsehood I often see repeated: That the wider western world also has free abortion laws similar to what the american left wants. As it turns out, 12-15 week bans are the norm, and if I talk with women here about it they also feel strongly about it not becoming longer. The 20 weeks+ I often see from the american left (and unfortunately even our own left is starting to propagate it) is almost as extreme as the Evangelicals ban on abortion except for medical reasons.

All Western European abortion laws have late-term exceptions you can drive a truck through, and also, abortion is far more easily available in the first two trimesters.

For all the talk of European laws and how moderate they are, any Democrat in a red state who proposed them as a compromise would be called a baby killing radical all the same.

Atlantic article on it - (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/roe-overturned-europe-abortion-laws/670539/) - Use archive.is or whatever.

This is exactly what I'm talking about tbh. The spin in that article makes my head hurt.

I'm a german parent, I know german abortion law, I've talked with german doctors about the issue. By american conception, our abortion laws - both by law and in practice - would be considered at best center if not far-right, and is quite similar to what moderate GOP politicians are proposing. Abortion is strictly illegal here, punished with prison, except for four cases:

  1. The abortion happened in the first 12 weeks and was done after thorough consultation with a certified professional
  2. There is a life-threatening medical emergency
  3. The pregnancy is the product of a rape
  4. Seriously debilitating exceptional circumstances (also only done after an even more thorough consultation)

As a side note, I quote the purpose of the consultation by the literal text of the law: "Die Beratung dient dem Schutz des ungeborenen Lebens. Sie hat sich von dem Bemühen leiten zu lassen, die Frau zur Fortsetzung der Schwangerschaft zu ermutigen und ihr Perspektiven für ein Leben mit dem Kind zu eröffnen" (rough english translation: The consultation has the purpose of protecting the life of the unborn. It should strive to encourage the woman to continue the pregnancy and give her a perspective of life with a child.)

That's it. I don't doubt that there are some doctors somewhere who wink wink nod nod and spuriously claim medical emergencies and/or exceptional circumstances, but the average doctor takes this quite seriously. By the text of the law, the purpose of the fourth criteria is strictly to be used if the fetus shows signs of serious developmental issues that would preclude a fully realized adult life. Afaik it is also occasionally used for people who are not of sound mind, i.e. pregnant children and the mentally disabled. But strictly speaking this is not supported by the text of the law.

In both our pregnancies our doctor made very clear that she would not support late-term (in germany, late-term generally means the second trimester) abortions unless this criteria has been fulfilled beyond reasonable doubt ( which was actually a point of contention since we would have liked less strict criteria). A rough translation of a quote from her, concerning us asking for the more modern genetic testing for trisomy, as opposed to the traditional, more strict ultrasound testing: "If you can't see the trisomy (down syndrome) in the ultrasound, it usually is less bad. And even the disabled can lead a happy life."

I know enough people from other european countries - and have lived in one other for a while - to know that they generally have very similar laws, some slightly more strict, some slightly less.

Public opinion is extremely malleable. As recently as 20 years ago, it was the abortion rights side that his from the issue. It seems that the main way to change public opinion is talking about it, on as big a stage as you can get. To quote myself (https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/a-parallel-campaign) "If pro-life views are quiet, especially when abortion is at stake, but pro-abortion views are not, the pro-life view will only become more unpopular. Whether you agree with gay marriage or not, consider its example. Even after repeated defeats of initiatives to legalize gay marriage including in blue state California, its proponents did not back down and within a decade or two, public opinion completely changed."

Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.

Full credit for noting this - I think it's an important observation. For all that abortion is presented as a women's issue, and much of the rhetoric around it seems to presume a gender gap (men shouldn't tell women what to do, if men could get pregnant abortion would be legal instantly, etc.), historically trends have been pretty much the same. It's generally around half-and-half irrespective of gender. There's recently been a spike in the female pro-choice rate specifically, likely attributable to Dobbs and its immediate aftermath, but I'd bet that this isn't a permanent realignment and it will even out again given time.

I believe the people who feel the most strongly about abortion, both pro- and anti-, are women. I feel strongly about it, and even my feelings don't compare to the female pro-life activists.

And that's not surprising -- the sides in the abortion debate can be summarized as "get your hands off my uterus!" and "save the babies!" which both seem rather female-coded.

But also, any man who expresses a pro-life opinion gets shouted down by "you misogynistic rapist pig, get your hands off my uterus!" So pro-life women, who can't get shouted down like that (though they can get shouted down with "you've internalized misogyny"), are more vocal and willing to stand up for their values. It's the same with, for instance, opposition to casual sex -- a man does that, he gets labeled an incel, a woman does that, she doesn't get hated as much.

I'm inclined to agree - there's a kind of reservation of certain issues to the female realm, whether for better or for worse, which is almost bipartisan. I don't think it's as simple as saying that choices that exclusively or disproportionately affect female bodies are reserved to women, since that in itself involves a questionable judgement about male involvement in sex and reproduction, and a decision to minimise that involvement, but certainly those choices, around sex, birth, child-rearing, etc., have been moved into that realm. So even though there are just as many pro-life men as women, the pro-life movement has made the probably correct tactical decision to make women its most visible leaders.

Although... the problem they sometimes run into is that the pro-life movement is heavily Catholic, and the leadership class of the Catholic Church is predominantly male. They can't just set aside Evangelium Vitae or something, which is unavoidably by a male pope, so they have to face this accusation. I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".

I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".

One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)

Two points:

First, abortion being a losing issue is way more true post-Dobbs than it was before. I think pro-life people need to focus more on taking wins that they can keep (in a close state, enact the three month ban, not the 6 week ban), because otherwise it'll be extended to birth and more people will be murdered. Yes, this is unjust, but it may be necessary.

Second, the pro-life movement is driven by women to an extent unusual among conservative causes. Women care about babies more, and men sometimes feel out of place—at least, those are the causes, I suspect.

You need female voters

You're still not taking the abortion-is-murder worldview seriously enough.

Try to imagine that you are sincerely convinced that abortion is murder. Suppose further that, as you say, the pro-abortion position is so popular among women that the only way to have a non-negligible chance of winning a national election is to stop being publicly anti-abortion.

A natural followup question is, why is the pro-abortion position so popular among women? What explains this fact? The way I see it, you have two main strategies for explaining this fact:

  • One is to accept the popularity of abortion as evidence for the claim that abortion is not actually murder after all. If we accept as a starting point that most people (including most women) aren't particularly morally heinous, then the widespread popularity of X is evidence that X is not isomorphic to "murdering lots of innocent people for no good reason".

  • Alternatively, you can go the route of claiming that most women (or at least a large enough number of women to matter for a national election) actually are morally heinous, because they support the unjustified murder of innocent people. In which case, that's a problem, and you have bigger issues to deal with than who wins the next election. That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.

The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.

(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)

That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.

This is, for what it's worth, the line that I think I most often see from pro-life organisations and activists. This might be just a factor of mostly encountering it in Catholic contexts, but the line is usually not that we just need to change this law, but rather that abortion is a symptom of a wider 'culture of death'. This sort of idea. However, evangelicals also make a similar argument (see parts three and five), emphasising the importance of shifting the moral vision of the country and building a culture that values life as such.

This would also be the argument against meduka's claims about eugenics - that is, even if we were inclined to believe the claim that abortion is eugenic, life is life, and we don't believe in killing people over a few points of IQ or a skin colour or a genetic disease. Human life qua human life is sacred, and the fact that there are people who would see to quantify and judge the worthiness of any particular life on criteria like these is just evidence of how far we are from a true culture of life. The rot runs deep.

This is a really good and concise treatment of the issue. @Goodguy's post to me (a pro-life right winger) reads like saying;

"It's justifiable to rob a bank if you're definitely then going to give the money to charity." Leaving aside some literary inclined young people, anyone can see the quandry that comes up. And that's how a lot of pro-lifers feel. "Just a little bit of abortion" is literally "Just a little bit of murder" to us.

But I will agree with @Goodguy on the issue of the centrality of the abortion issue. I think it is talked about too much. You can be morally resolute without always talking about how morally resolute you are. I'm in favor of never using the "A" word in politics. Simply say, "I want more stable families and more babies." If a pundit asks "How do you feel about [route into Abortion topic]" you respond with "Comply with the laws at you state level. I want more babies!"

And to me the answer when I see murder isn’t “let’s do something that won’t reduce murder” but “let me do what I can to reduce the number of murders.”

So I take wins where I can get them and then try to work on changing hearts and minds.

The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.

(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)

I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure how you land at the conclusion that uncompromising activism is the natural course of action. It's certainly one plausible course of action, but so is trying to dishonestly and cynically win elections in order to gain power to enforce one's intentionally hidden agenda, but neither strikes me as more natural than the other, and more importantly, it strikes me as even less likely to work than trying to win elections. If winning just one election isn't enough, then surely that calls for winning even more elections, rather than pivoting to uncompromising activism, which has a rather questionable track record. I think this primarily points to politicians, activists, campaign managers, etc. are really just not all that rational or competent and tend to follow what makes them feel good in the moment rather than what increases the odds of bringing about a future that they prefer.

Uncompromising activism, to the point of bombing abortion clinics, has been tried in the US and it failed. There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote. And in this context, the only thing one can do as a pro-lifer is to use convincing arguments and electoral politics. If a strong anti-abortion position prevents one from winning in electoral politics, it stands to reason that one should a adopt a less strong anti-abortion position, since it is better to win an election and then do at least something against abortion than it is to lose an election and merely imagine what strong measures one would have taken if one had won it.

There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote.

And yet there is a whole arena of lawfare around protesting / demonstrating outside of abortion clinics, and a second one around crisis pregnancy centers.

It only takes a few hundred to a few thousand truly dedicated activists to do that though. The Westboro Baptist Church has under a hundred members and was able to grab national headlines and led to tons of lawfare.

In my experience, I don't think you're wrong that bringing up abortion in campaign ads is a bad strategy. But I will say that the loudest pro-life voices I've encountered in life have been women, mostly Catholic ones. I believe the stats bear out that women tend to have much stronger opinions on the issue (in both directions!) than men. I think one thing the left gets wrong is assuming that pro-life advocacy is primarily male-coded, even if the politicians in question tend to be men.

I think one thing the left gets wrong is assuming that pro-life advocacy is primarily male-coded

Is that something they get wrong, or a deliberate rhetorical trick to strengthen their own position in the public eye? Granted, "deliberate" is certainly putting in a lot of work there.

The right needs female voters.

The western world created the most mentally ill women of all time. We have the most stressed women that sleep the least and have the most mental problems of any society. Women are having far fewer children than they say they want, are obeser than ever and more addicted to psychiatric medication than ever.

The sexual revolution was a disaster for women and defending it in order to be pro women isn't a viable strategy. Hookup culture, hyper sexualization and the breakdown of family is not something that will help women.

Rather than pushing issues that are hurting women the right should focus on how the left is terrible to women. Defund the police saved criminal black men by throwing women under the bus.

I recall a poster a while back talking about how non-Anglophone Western Europe has much lower rates of mental illness and higher life satisfaction among women, despite being even more sexual-revolution-y than the Anglosphere. I believe the sexual revolution is wrong, but not because it inherently makes women unhappy.

I think the far right has something to say about women’s unhappiness, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the sexual revolution.

It's the same thing when you look at stuff like suicide rates among the youths - if it's all Instagram and phones, then it's not showing up in various countries in Europe. There's something more, but the real reason isn't probably something as easy as "capitalism sucks" or "feminist and immigrations sucks."

But here in europe we do have the same problems, we are merely lagging a few years behind - in both social media usage and teen mental health issues. I agree that it's almost never just one thing, though. The social contagion theory also seems extremely hard to deny from our vantage point - we can literally watch how american social problems spill over here through the (american- dominated) media.

I can't speak to experience, but I've often wondered how the cultural milieu on the Internet differs for non-Anglophones. English as the default seems ubiquitous enough culturally that it seems like a bit of a "fish describing water" question to ask what everyone else sees.

Is the, say, Francophone Internet (or culture more broadly) quite as, um, gestures broadly at The Internet frenetic and self-hating? That alone seems like it might make people happier.

Maybe, maybe not. But that is tangential to my argument. Whether that is true or not, it does not matter, because the 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed. If you want to win elections in the United States, you need to try to get women to vote for you.

This is also why I’m pro-abortion.

Abortion getters are disproportionately composed of those low in IQ and high in time preference, those of a population high in violent criminality and net-tax consumption, and/or those who favor practices and policies that are negative to me and my descendants. If there are some means by which these people create fewer additional versions of themselves, I’m more than happy to have such means be common, and I mostly only care if such means are safe and legal to the extent it helps them be common.

Exquisite.

"You support abortion because her body her choice, I support abortion because I don't want you to breed."

As impressed as I am, I would still advise keeping this opinion under wraps and maintaining good opsec. Few people are more hated than the outgroup that shares the same opinion for entirely different reasons.

If there are some means by which these people create fewer additional versions of themselves, I’m more than happy to have such means be common, and I mostly only care if such means are safe and legal to the extent it helps them be common.

How far does this extend? I bet plenty such people would at least occasionally, circumstantially be happy to off their two year olds.

Why would it need to extend? Abortion and infanticide are not necessarily a packaged deal.

Infanticide does strike me as more distasteful than abortion, but I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant. In any case, such people Cleganing-away their offspring or leaving them perishing to neglect is no skin off my back.

Not my circus; not my monkeys. Especially when such offspring would be deleterious to me and my own family, and families like us.

I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant.

Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.

Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.

Baby farming - i.e. infanticide for profit by plausibly deniable neglect as a service - was commonplace in the UK until we got rich enough to be concerned about it in the 1870s-1890s.

The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.

Having read the link, the baby farmers neglecting or killing the children they adopted was not societally acceptable. That wasn't the point, the actual point was a decentralized societal foster care system. It certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of children fostered this way were not deliberately killed or died of neglect.

The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.

This strikes me as absurd, and thankfully @FlyingLionWithABook already came by to say why.

But I wanted to thank you for the link about baby farming. New to me.

I dunno, one of the main things that marked Christians out in the first and second centuries was that they took in babies left out to die. That's a long time before 1890.

When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy.

Turns out when your enemies don't have children of their own to ruin, they turn their attention on yours. It's somehow an even worse status quo.

I got permanently banned from Reddit for saying literally this.

No slurs, no mean language, no violent rhetoric. Just the forceful and clear eyed observation that people without children still naturally seek to reproduce their memeplexes, and will use other peoples children to propagate it in the absence of their own. In basically that exact language.

Funny the things you can get banned for saying. What’s that saying? “A hit dog hollers?”

Why would you expect someone you call an enemy to not act like one?

Oh this was years ago, and by the time I got banned I had very little illusions about most social media being in the hands of the enemy. The ban was merely amusing at that point, and not a surprise.

For a while they had to have at least some sort of plausible deniability that bans had to be related to rule breaking but in roughly the last four years they dispensed with even the slightest appearance of being rules based. They don’t even bother anymore, it’s easy to see when you have Reddit archives that allow you to read the comment or posts that people get banned for.

Now what in the wide world are you talking about?

I don't entirely agree with this for reasons I can't fully articulate, but I'm nominating it for an AAQC anyway.

I don’t want Baal empowered by sacrifices.

Exactly, don't sacrifice your children to Baal. Vote Moloch.

Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.

I mean, if your god is anti-murderist, you’ve got an obligation to save your enemies from themselves. Save the babies and let God make them Republicans.

I don't think God's track record is very good when it comes to generating new Republicans. With the possible exception of Hispanics.

That's a very grey tribe take. I don't think either party is ready to look at abortion through the prism of "fewer urban youths is a net win/loss for the wider society".

IMO, you can make any normiecon suffer a brain lock by starting to wax poetic about how much more excellence would America have had the dastardly democrats not allowed the blacks to abort that much.

IIRC the number works out to having double the present population. Also IIRC half the abortions in America are done on black women.

IMO, you can make any normiecon suffer a brain lock by starting to wax poetic about how much more excellence would America have had the dastardly democrats not allowed the blacks to abort that much.

Perhaps you and I have different definitions of “normiecon”, but IMO an important facet of normieconservatism is quasi-religious devotion to 90s-era “content of their character” colorblindness, perhaps coupled with a dose of “Democrats are the real racists”/“soft bigotry of low expectations”-ism as mentioned below. So the fact of racial disparities is, in the normiecon’s eyes, either irrelevant or further evidence of Democrat villainy.

This only works on normiecons who are bullshitting when they talk about Democrats being the real racists. My dad would often trot out this line (about abortions being a tragedy in part because they've halved the black population) in full sincerity. Many Republicans whose families have been Republican for generations take pride in having been on the winning side of the Civil War, and see their place in the national mythology as being deeply tied to doing right by blacks. The so-called Southern Strategy is far from universally accepted; my uncle believed in the party switch, and became a Democrat over it, while my father didn't, and remained a Republican.

Are there truly people in the US, who aren't senile, who live in or near a black area that's not say, purely military, who think the black community is basically doing okay and there are no problems with it?

That is, they full believe the entertainment media image of blacks as just a reskin of white liberals or something along those lines ?

My town is 25% black and you'd think the black community is doing just fine if you went by it. But you only have to look one town over to see problems.

You're thinking in an entirely different moral and historical reference frame, probably closer to what Nietzsche called "master morality" and further from what he called "slave morality". The poverty and criminality of the black community just makes it more sympathetic for someone who sees them as victims of Democrat policies designed to keep them as an underclass. I'm guessing you'd agree with "Democrats are the real racists" Republicans that Democrats are encouraging blacks to commit crimes - but they'd think of that as an anti-black policy while you'd think of it as an anti-white one.

They understand that blacks generally act and live differently than whites do. Their noticing this does not lead them to an HBD position.

The poverty and criminality of the black community just makes it more sympathetic for someone who sees them as victims of Democrat policies designed to keep them as an underclass

You mean they believe the lack of policing and the lax standards the democrats are okay with are designed to keep them poor and clients and are harming the black communities, and that they believe a higher amount of paternalism would make the situation better ?

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but the amount of control and cultural change needed is rather higher than they'd likely think is needed.

You mean they believe the lack of policing and the lax standards the democrats are okay with are designed to keep them poor and clients and are harming the black communities

Yes

and that they believe a higher amount of paternalism would make the situation better ?

No, they generally believe that it's mostly welfare's fault that the poor black community is screwed up. The standard narrative is that blacks were doing well and making their way up in society before LBJ's Great Society ruined them by trapping them on the dole. So the general solution is to get rid of the dole; when they have to work for a living they'll actually have an incentive towards virtue.

I suspect there's cognitive dissonance also in being in favor of eugenics while calling abortions "sacrifices to Baal".

That particular phrasing was meant in jest. I had considered drawing a parallel between some hypothetical Romans clutching their pearls over the plight of Carthaginian infants but couldn't quite make it work.

Or, and hear me out here, abortion is not the major break between the dissident and the mainstream right, that would be foreign policy.

The dissident right has plenty of hardcore Catholics, who are happy to call abortion "sacrifices to Baal" with no cognitive dissonance.

The dissident right has plenty of hardcore Catholics,

Most of the DR twitterati tradcaths are as tradcath as the IRA was regular Catholic- the church to which they do not go is in Latin. That’s not to say there’s no overlap but your typical rad trad is a very conservative Republican with fairly typical very conservative Republican views.

Traditional Catholicism is popular on the DR because it’s a distinctively western community of real-life reactionaries with a coherent philosophical system. That popularity does not, in many of these cases, extend to actually going to church all that often.

Ok, but that still leaves them with the ability to believe abortion is sacrificing your child to Baal, without cognitive dissonance.

I didn’t even perceive it as tongue in cheek. I used to read the Bible and be incredulous that anyone would participate in child sacrifice. Seems to be absurd in so many directions: so cruel, paints the sacrificers in the worst possible light, is evolutionarily unfit.

I forgot when I read someone make the parallel with abortion, but it was a great insight. People sacrifice their children because they perceive them as burdensome and just want to have fun. Moloch is fun! Sexy parties and no annoying babies!

This maps onto nearly every abortion. We just have the technology to more or less reliably kill them ahead of being born.

I didn’t even perceive it as tongue in cheek. I used to read the Bible and be incredulous that anyone would participate in child sacrifice. Seems to be absurd in so many directions: so cruel, paints the sacrificers in the worst possible light, is evolutionarily unfit.

Remember that until the 2nd half of the 19th century, "Not all the children will make it, child death is just part of life" was one of the harsh truths of life in a fallen world. "Save every child!" was an absurd blasphemy against Gnon until it wasn't.

Given that child sacrifices peaked in times of drought and famine, I suspect it was a way of putting a positive spin on "I will share my limited supplies of food between the subset of my children that I can expect to keep alive."

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

Surely it's not a sacrifice if it's fun, any more than "giving up doing the chores for Lent" would be an act of devotion.

OK, maybe I'm completely out of the loop, but what exactly are they doing in Minnesota and why doesn't this article explain that at all?

Are late second trimester/third trimester abortions legal in Minnesota? Are they really doing them under conditions where the fetus is NOT suffering from a condition incompatible with life?

Because essentially, what they are performing is an emergency early term induced birth (which is done - and only done - in many places around the world when the life of the mother is in danger), right?

To an outside observer, this just sounds like "if a serious genetic/developmental defect incompatible with life is discovered late in pregnancy, abortion remains legal. In this special case, doctors are no longer forced to get an incubator contaminated for literally zero gain (since the malformed early birth baby will die under any and all circumstance anyway).

If this is the case, I personally would support all this. It would be cruel (and needlessly dangerous) to force the mother to carry a dying baby to term and birth it. It would be wasted equipment and medical labor, if doctors where forced to use an incubator for the dying baby in a case like that.

Because literally nobody is getting an elective abortion late second trimester and going “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” when the fetus turns out to just keep on living, right?

Are late second trimester/third trimester abortions legal in Minnesota? Are they really doing them under conditions where the fetus is NOT suffering from a condition incompatible with life?

Yes and yes.

Because essentially, what they are performing is an emergency early term induced birth (which is done - and only done - in many places around the world when the life of the mother is in danger), right?

In the 6 states (including Minnesota) and DC where there is no term limit, patients are free to have an elective abortion at any time for any reason, including at 38 weeks or later if they so desire.

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/11/abortion-laws-bans-state-map

Because literally nobody is getting an elective abortion late second trimester and going “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” when the fetus turns out to just keep on living, right?

Information is scarce but this study indicates that elective abortions of healthy babies are a significant proportion of all third trimester abortions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9321603/

The introductory conclusion is really quite shocking when translated from academeese:

The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy.

"People are often too dumb to recognize they're pregnant until the 3rd trimester."

The logical follow-on to that, implicit in the author's writing, is "And you can't hold somebody accountable for being a real dumbass! Let 'em kill that baby"

This actually points to a something I've never heard a great answer on. How, in a world with ubiquitous condoms and the pill are we hitting 1 million abortions a year.

People may think this is inflammatory or vulgar, but I think certain ethnicities or cultures just have such little time preference or otherwise truly enjoy orgasming inside a woman. They have no self control to not do it. I recall overhearing a conversation a few years ago around Valentine’s Day where a group of men were high fiving each other about “nutting” in their girl as some sort of gift. This would match up well with racial stats on abortion.

I very rarely in my life used condoms. The withdrawal method works perfectly assuming you have the ability to do it. The whole myth that precum can inseminate women is another lie we were all fed as children.

Then you get the stupid suckers like me, who were genuinely biologically compelled to 'nut' in a perfect mate but thought abortion was like plan B and we could just make another baby later

The whole myth that precum can inseminate women is another lie we were all fed as children.

It technically can, if you had sex already recently and didn't urinate between then and now. So yeah, pretty damn unlikely.

Ah, to be young again.

It's a dilemma. If you want to avoid having kids, you have to pick between diminishing the sensation of sex overall, diminishing the moment of orgasm or relying on pharmacology that isn't 100% and does a number on your girl's hormone system.

The wife is on a copper IUD, is there a downside to that which I'm not aware of? I mean I feel it on occasion which isn't pleasant but compared to all the other options it is always seemed strange to me that this wasn't the default. edit: asked the wife last evening, it is apparently a hormonal iud and not copper, which has less bad symptoms.

Erm, this is strictly an anecdote, but my wife experienced several downsides over time from the copper (paragard) IUD. The most immediate downside was longer periods which progressed to chronic bleeding and endometriosis. The second was more frequent to chronic yeast infections. None of these were official side effects but internet wisdom said that they were in fact side effects and when she finally had it removed after a couple of especially painful episodes of dysmenorrhea the doctor acknowledged these as side effects from the copper IUD and indeed, these issues disappeared afterwards. If your wife ever starts experiencing any of these symptoms, I'd strongly encourage her to have it removed as it can and does get worse over time.

Turns out I was wrong and that it is a hormonal IUD which according to her has less of these problems. She had just referred to it as an IUD before and I incorrectly assumed copper. But I guess it has potentially serious side effects is the exact answer I was looking for so thanks for your anecdote.

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I wouldn't know. The common sources (Wikipedia) do seem to rate it as the highest-satisfaction contraception method. I admit it didn't come to my mind as I was thinking of contraception, probably because of how long-term it is.

This actually points to a something I've never heard a great answer on. How, in a world with ubiquitous condoms and the pill are we hitting 1 million abortions a year.

I genuinely can't think of an answer to this other than "a lot of people really like raw-dogging, and a lot of women really hate the side effects of the pill, and a lot of people are just really fucking stupid and don't know how pregnancy works."

Part of it is that condoms seem to be extremely high-variance in how much people tolerate them. With the exception of a few gay guys with pretty specific kinks, no one likes condoms, but I know some people who seem to have slightly reduced sensation, some who it's meh, some who take forever to get there and not in a good way, and some who can't stay hard or perform with a condom period. Ymeshkout's written about about polyamory and condoms that suggest it's got a lot of revealed preference sorta stuff going on.

((The Standard Explanation for condom shyness is too much masturbation, somehow. The conspiracy theory level answer is that the FDA has historically been extremely restrictive about what types and especially sizes of condom are acceptable, for ease of testing, and this leads to a situation where being even slightly off from the average in one of any dimension leads to a condom that's always slipping off or like wearing a bad cock ring. And very few people are average. But I'm not sure.))

This is part of why 'normal use' statistics for condoms end up really close to effectiveness with the withdrawal or rhythm methods, where even perfect-use numbers aren't great.

The Pill has different problems; complex drug and food compatibility, highly dependent on keeping a good schedule, the interactions with weight are a mess, and the personality changes are... not great.

There's a lot of hope that (especially copper) IUDs have/would solve a lot of this -- they're not without their religious opponents, but less so than even the morning after pill, and they skip almost all of the above with a shockingly high effectiveness -- but it's still kinda hard to get buyin from (non-Planned Parenthood) doctors for women of childbearing age, and they're exceedingly painful for most women who haven't been pregnant before.

very good comment, reported for quality.

I think an actually effective sex ed class would involve trying on different condoms to see how they feel and find one that you like. But admittedly that's not possible with the low-trust world we live in. So instead we get a gym coach screaming at us about STDs and maybe, if we're lucky, putting one on a banana.

Here's my half-joking conspiracy: all condoms are the same size because I've tried every size and they all fit the same until "after"

I mean, even if you assume perfect usage of contraception, a 1-5% failure rate over tens of millions of people over lots of sex will lead to some legitimately accidental pregnancies.

I love it. If this were the honest popular answer, the whole conversation would be different. Instead, we have the often used euphemism of "I wound up pregnant!" like it's winning the lottery or having a pigeon shit on you.

I like to bring up the old MTV sex ed ads: sex is no accident

"Your honor, I was roller blading while fully erect!"

"Case dismissed!"

Nothing in the author's writing implies that they are in the group of people thinking of what is being aborted as a "baby". Both sides regularly fail theory of mind over this - blues can't imagine someone actually thinking that an abortion is anything like killing a human (and therefore conclude that pro-life must be mental gymnastics for wanting to punish women who have sex for fun), and reds can't imagine someone not thinking that fetuses are human (and therefore think pro-choice is mental gymnastics for cynical murderism).

If there's any implied argument, it's just something like "you can't commit to ruining the life of some dumbasses just to make concessions to the outgroup" - like most people, the author has sympathy and there-but-for-the-grace attitude for way more dumbasses than outgroup members. Forced motherhood = ruined life incidentally is yet another blue outlook that reds often don't believe is real.

Forced motherhood = ruined life incidentally is yet another blue outlook that reds often don't believe is real

I believe that's real. And I believe that basic human moral obligation means that you ought to care for the child. 1) It'll probably give you purpose and meaning. 2) If you don't want to accept the consequences, don't take the action. Nobody ever dies from not having sex.

If you don't want to accept the consequences, don't take the action.

How much of the "forced motherhood" narrative revolves around the idea that she didn't take the action--her male partner did and she was just a passive participant who now has to deal with the consequences?

At least in Texas, that's entirely possible.

Yes, rape is uncommon. But we're down here because some pundit blamed Walz for eight infant deaths. Surely there's some justification to plan for edge cases?

And at least in the entire US, underage boys are responsible for their children even when raped. What's your point? Forced fatherhood isn't seen as a problem in the slightest. "That sucks, but you're still responsible for the child." is the response we give men who are raped. Why should we treat motherhood differently?

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There's all sorts of "natural" consequences we've gotten rid of thanks to technology and science. Why is pregnancy different?

I still believe in God, gauche as that may be in our circles for the last few hundred years.

Right, just like how Samuel Colt got rid of the negative psychological consequences of holding a grudge. Progress!

Human life.

Up until 2023, Minnesota statutes restricted abortion under the viability standard, generally understood to be 20-28 weeks, with a not-especially-clear exception for health-and-life-of-mother. There was actually some weird legal status for the law due to an older federal court decision floating around, but the official story is that abortion providers weren't doing those types of abortions and the state enforcement pointedly wasn't going to go asking about it.

In January 2023, the PRO Act was passed. While this did not overturn the previous law on abortion, it did create a statutory right to terminate pregnancies that prohibited enforcement of any restrictions outside of that specific section. I don't know if anyone's been able to litigate the difference in court, but my understanding is that this has largely been understood to effectively allow abortion regardless of trimester.

A separate law passed in May 2023 did... a lot of random things, some abortion-related, including formally repealing the older abortion restrictions; after this point there are no situations where abortion itself was banned. It also modified an older born-alive statute:

Recognition; medical care.

A born alive An infant as a result of an abortion who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant care for the infant who is born alive.

Ostensibly, this was meant to remove some politically loaded text -- the born alive statutes were very much a pro-life slogan -- but the strict reading removes a lot of requirements for medical practitioners to actively keep the infant alive, rather than ameliorating pain. But to social conservatives, that's basically just letting the child die of exposure: while the mother may (often) be no more interested in keeping the child, all the safety and medical concerns for the mother are kinda done with by that point, and no small portion are within (and sometimes well within) the ability of modern medicine to keep alive.

There's a perspective where the point of abortion is more about whether a mother is stuck having had a child, where someone who has an elective abortion in the late-third or early-second trimester wants to kill the fetus when it turns out to just keep on living, but... uh, it's generally one seen as politically suicidal to spell it out. (And a highly social conservative framing).

The prevalence of third-trimester (and late second-trimester) abortions that do not involve a nonviable infant or a dire threat to the life of the mother are... controversial. There's a lot of progressives that claim it literally never happens, but that's pretty clearly absolutely not true. Social cons often point to the Guttmacher Institute-driven research that said "... data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment", but this includes a lot of late-second-trimester abortions and Guttmacher is really not great about allowing general access to anonymized data to narrow it down further. It's rare as a total of all abortion, but depending on source and where you split the categories you can get anywhere from a substantial minority to a slim majority of late-term abortions.

wasted equipment

This idea is just fundamentally incompatible with my morals. Where does this lead?

Just about everything about your life is a “waste of resources”…but human life is valuable.

If you have a heart attack and need an ambulance to take you to the hospital, isn’t it a waste of diesel, and an inconvenience to everybody having to wait for the ambulance to go through lights?

This idea is just fundamentally incompatible with my morals. Where does this lead?

This idea is ubiquitous. One of the point I realized this, was COVID era argument: we have to lock people down in order not to overburden healthcare system. It was one of the most stupid arguments I have heard - my purpose and governing principle in my life is now supposed to be not to overburden healthcare system? This amorphous system is actually more valuable than human life as it is embodied in my daily activities and pleasures. I exist for the benefit of this system - not the other way around. No more dangerous activities such as skiing or anything else. By the way the same goes for other similar arguments: smoking and being fat and chronically ill is terrible for the healthcare system, so you should stop doing it.

It reminded me of the old Monty Python skit.

I find your comment really strange.

The impetus to not overload the medical system during a given situation is not to benefit “the system” but rather to benefit human life.

E.g., if you get sick enough to need medical care then you’ll be likely to receive that care.

During the early days of COVID when it quickly overran hospital resources in places like Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, etc., this was a very present danger and the likelihood in some cases tipped towards being that no, you might not be able to get a lifesaving treatment had you needed one.

This was all fake unless you put up some evidence otherwise

Tone matters. The point of this place is to encourage discussion and let people test their ideas and conclusions, which means thinking can be challenged, but preferably in a way that invites dialog, not just seeing how pithily you can dismiss someone.

"I don't think that's true; do you have any actual evidence that that happened, because I think a lot of it was hysteria and false reports during the pandemic" would be perfectly fine to say. Essentially calling someone a liar or just summarily dismissing what they say as "evidence or it's fake" is not.

You get it, if you reduce and equate “human life” with medical system in your assumption, then the rest of the stuff follows. You treat the system as human life, so everyones perogative is to serve the human life medical system. I refuse this equivalency to begin with.

But I am not surprised that for instance utilitarians think this way, it is the same idea to sublimate/identify values into something else like utils, and then just follow the calculation to its inevitable and logically sound monstrosity.

The medical system is human life.

How can you not equate those two?

If the medical system goes down, you immediately get loss of human life.

See, for me the human life is about enjoying life, meeting your family and friends, being able to grieve for your lost parents or even putting yourself through some tough events subtracting some supposed utils to achieve one of the myriad of goals you may have. Medical system is down there on the chain of what human life represents to me. I thought most people implicitly understand it, but that is apparently not the case.

I’m having trouble distinguishing your responses from just garden variety selfishness to be honest. Of course you like the good things in life.

The people who die due to lack of medical care usually like the same things too, so we don’t have to redefine the meaning of human life or anything here. It’s just that since they (in this example) have died due to lack of medical care that now they cannot enjoy those things.

Me behaving slightly differently for a few weeks during a triage event in the local hospital is a pretty small price.

A small bit of sacrifice for the wellbeing of others is a relatively common human characteristic, but there are definitively also a number people who don’t come equipped with that chip.

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You can make anything sound stupider if you stop halfway through the reasoning. Preventing the collapse is valuable if it prevents massive amounts of unnecessary suffering. Doesn’t that sound like something people might want to avoid?

I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat. There is legislation to make them more difficult, especially smoking, but the reasoning is more “to reduce the bad thing itself” than “to prevent healthcare collapse.”

I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat.

One of those things was banned during COVID lockdowns, the other two were exempt. Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.

Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.

I mean, I agree, but that’s because I think you’re the one stopping early.

Do you think the average lockdown enthusiast would have said defending the healthcare system was their purpose and governing principle?

Yeah, the whole "flattening the curve" slogan by measures such as social distancing and lockdowns was based on not overburdening the healthcare system as the primary argument. Were you living under the rock? Elective surgeries were cancelled, medical screenings were postponed and more - all in the name of "the system". I had a friend working in a hospital during lockdowns, when self-isolated people were beating on pots from their balconies, giving praise to heroic doctors, while she was sitting in empty hospital doing nothing. She thought it was stupid. And I really think that the system was the primary concern, stupid halfway-thinking people just substituted "human life" with "healthcare system" and then went from there.

So yes, I do think that "saving the system" was the primary concern, with some vague nod to "human life" to justify it. And as I said, this thinking is now pervasive and it will get worse.

I saw the same actions you did, but I don’t believe people stopped reasoning at the vague nod. It was all “one hopes, resulting in fewer deaths” and think of the children. Those are pretty explicit substitutions for human life!

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Do you think the average lockdown enthusiast would have said defending the healthcare system was their purpose and governing principle?

Only in the UK would it be the modal response. But it was common in the US as well.

The idea is that overburdening the health care system risks other people's lives, so you're actually still comparing your life to lives, not your life to an amorphous system.

Of course, even this version can be criticized in the way that socialism in general can be criticized.

Sure, but there is more to the life than just your pulse. Should we ban kids skating, because they can break their bone and thus be the burden on the system? What I found more scary is how readily this thing was accepted without question. Ask not what the healthcare system can do for you, ask what you can do for the healthcare system. And again, this is nothing new, I just realized it at that point. For instance in the UK there is heated debate if immigration is good or bad thing for their National Health Service. The NHS is like a sacred cow, people accept it without thinking and put such an importance on it, that it is almost as if NHS has agency of its own, and we need to think what will harm NHS. It is just weird.

It’s just a garden variety situation where you’re asked to pitch in so as to avert larger scale hardship.

Was that so alien to you beforehand?

For example, during the world wars people had to ration their goods so that everyone can eat and so that the soldiers could be supplied.

Would you have pushed back and eaten a second sandwich at lunch because you’re not going to sacrifice your personal enjoyment for some “system”?

Say you’re in a house with 3 other people. You all want a hot shower because you just got back from a long trek. You get the shower first. Are you really going to use ALL the hot water just because you like long hot showers? Or do the preferences of others enter into the mind at some point? Because if so, well it’s just the same logical process.

I know where I was at during COVID, the hospitals weren’t at capacity, but there was a time when it stayed right at the edge of capacity for a few weeks, and they had to roll up a few mobile morgues during that time (air conditioned shipping containers) to process the extra bodies.

I did personally see it as valuable for me and the community I was in to take at least some small sacrifices to make sure that those morgues didn’t fill up too quickly during those few weeks.

Britain could have just not fought the world wars and not rationed, next

Why am I in the house with three other people? Are they my immediate family? If yes, then obviously I will let them shower and skip my entirely because I love them.

If no, then I will pay for my shower and everyone else will pay for theirs, as befitting our agreement. Next.

I know where I was at during COVID (WTF is that? who came up with that? It's like Kyiv) and it was trying to get my dad an "elective" surgery that they cancelled because all the doctors wanted to televisit

Then he died.

Think about him please before the next time you start lovin' on 'the system' -

WTF is that? who came up with that?

Ah, diseases used to be named by places where they are first discovered (Ebola, Marburg, Spanish flu, West Nile virus, Zika, MERS, Lyme, etc.) But when the deplorables started using "Wuhan flu", the left declared it racist because naming anything bad after anything non-Western is clearly white suprematism, so they renamed it to COVID (which is an awful name since it means "coronavirus disease" and there are tons of coronaviruses which can cause all sorts of diseases, but anything not to be racist). They also renamed "monkeypox" to m-pox because mentioning monkeys is somehow racist too (don't ask, I have no idea).

BTW can confirm denial of medical services during the pandemic panic. Fortunately, in my wife's case we were able to find a less insane provider and also the services we needed didn't require a lot of personal attention, most of it could be managed by email, so it ended up well, but the state of utter panic and disarray which was everywhere among people who were supposed to know better and serve as guardians for the masses (I know, way too naive) is something I will never forget.

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That’s a shame to know that your father died due to inability to access medical care

However it’s illustrative that the medical system is obviously important, and of what happens when people cannot access it

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Just about everything about your life is a “waste of resources”…but human life is valuable.

No, it’s not. I contribute to the world around me in many very tangible ways, and I’m certain that everyone in my life would readily agree. I barely even interface with the healthcare system, I have never taken one cent of welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. I just don’t know which resources you believe I’m wasting.

If you have a heart attack and need an ambulance to take you to the hospital, isn’t it a waste of diesel, and an inconvenience to everybody having to wait for the ambulance to go through lights?

The reason I’m on the ambulance is so they can take me someplace where I can get better. The health condition I’m suffering is, hopefully, temporary. This is fundamentally different from an infant with anencephaly or cyclopia or some such condition. That child will never ever recover from this; their body has failed to develop in a way that is necessary for life. There is no chance whatsoever - barring medical technological advances that we can’t even currently imagine - that such a child will live long enough to even make it out of that operating room. Such a child is often in significant pain - it lacks lungs, so it can no longer breathe once removed from the womb, etc.

If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs. These children are set up to die; whether they die on the operating table, or they die a few hours later in an incubator, there is nothing we can do to keep it from dying very soon after birth. I don’t think you’re really grappling with the question of what it even means to say that such a life “matters.”

I don’t think you’re really grappling with the question of what it even means to say that such a life “matters.”

What if the existence of that child - just its existence, no concern for it's "productivity" - brings unquantifiable joy to its parents?

Do you know how many people I know? Less than most of them. Like, I might now a couple hundred people. Most of human productivity is completely disconnected and alien to me. Sure, you can make the argument about the man downtown who puts peaches in a can that I then enjoy, but that's a very transactional exchange of value. And zero exchange of meaning.

I get meaning from a subset of the group of people I know. You do too. We all do. We call these people close friends and family. We like that they exist and just that they exist.

What if the existence of that child - just its existence, no concern for it's "productivity" - brings unquantifiable joy to its parents?

This is not the case for a baby with anencephaly or cyclopia. These babies are, besides being very obviously deformed in a way that is highly distressing to look at (go look for yourself if you want to see what I mean), an unequivocally disastrous result for a pregnancy. Again, they are absolutely unable to survive for more than a few days at absolute maximum, because their bodies lack basic components required to sustain a human life.

This slippery slope argument in roughly the shape of “If we admit that the life of an infant who literally never grew a brain doesn’t matter, we have to admit that no human life has inherent value” is, in my opinion, obviously specious and not worth taking seriously. No, I’m perfectly capable of believing that the lives of normal, functional, reasonably healthy people have inherent value, while rejecting the idea that there is significant inherent moral value in a clump of human-adjacent body parts which are not animated by a functioning human brain, or which are missing parts so crucial that its impossible to survive without them.

This is not the case for a baby with anencephaly or cyclopia. These babies are, besides being very obviously deformed in a way that is highly distressing to look at (go look for yourself if you want to see what I mean), an unequivocally disastrous result for a pregnancy.

That's just, like, your opinion, man!

But, seriously, you understand what I was trying to do there and with the rest of my comment; the "worth" of a human life is dependent upon its subjective relationship to other humans. Of course I can see that maybe a majority of parents with a child with those conditions you listed would be distraught. I also believe that some portion of them would treasure the fleeting moments with their child as worth it nonetheless (try to detect the anecdotal experience I'm insinuating here...).

The only remedy to this is to draw a line on when human life starts versus when it doesn't. I'm happy to have that discussion because I think it is unresolved at various levels (scientific, philosophic ... not religious, however). What I'm saying is that your rubric of "usefulness" or "worthy enough life" is specious because you're trying to apply an objective rule to what is a subjective problem.

What if the existence of that child - just its existence, no concern for it's "productivity" - brings unquantifiable joy to its parents?

Then by all means, don't abort, just no endless media campaigns asking for money keeping Johnny who's sick with Fucked-for-Entirety-of-Brief-and-Stunted-Lifeitis alive for one more year, please.

Yeah but the tribe that's generally pro-abortion also tends to be pro public healthcare spending and bottomless purse spending on life extension for the elderly and/or their pets.

Which is the confusing issue here since based on all other Blue Tribe beliefs you'd think they'd really be the pro-lifers and vice-versa for the Conservatives. The whole script gets flipped essentially for this one issue.

No I don't think that follows, blue states (and canada) are implementing right to die and red media is calling it forced suicide of undesirables. Terri Schiavo case was all right wing people trying to keep a vegetable with no brain matter left alive. I don't see right wingers actually taking their parents out back when they get demented. I see a lot more DNRs being set up by my blue family and old school repubs as opposed to the MAGA ones who are leaving it in Gods hands (Gods hands being extraordinary medical interventions at end of life).

Yes, it's almost like we're legitimate when we talk about choice and freedom when it comes to health care choices that doesn't effect other people - want a baby, great we think the state should support you heavily. Don't want it, great, here's state funding for abortion. Want to rage against the dying of the light? Let's use public health to do so? Don't want to be a burden, that's cool too.

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This is a fair and valid opinion, albeit a touch indelicate.

It’s not that fair. What if those donors get some amount of joy from helping fund Johnny’s life extension treatments?

If you don’t like the media campaigns, just tune them out. Heaven knows conservatives have had to do it for decades.

I think you realize that this line of argument applies to you as well should you suffer a stroke that renders you a net drain on society for the rest of your life. You might fall back on “my family would be sad if I were left to die,” but there are millions of Christians saddened by the availability of abortion and especially infants born and left to die.

Utility-based moral systems tend to have these problems.

Yes, I have had this conversation with my family multiple times and made it very clear that I would like to be euthanized/taken off life support if such a thing were to happen to me. I do not believe that my physical body is so sacrosanct that it should be kept alive, at great expense, if and when my mental faculties are gone. My mother feels the same way, and as her power of attorney I may one day need to make that decision for her; I plan to honor her explicit desire.

This is part of why I advocate so strongly for eugenics: I would like to eliminate, to the greatest extent possible, congenital conditions which have a strong likelihood of rendering humans mentally inert or broken, such that they become (or just are, from the very beginning of life) a pure burden.

Still there are going to be grey areas where you have retained enough mental faculties to not be 'gone' but you are still nonetheless a burden in the utility scale.

Most of us would trust our immediate family to make the correct decision in these grey areas more than we trust the legislature. Given the general views of conservative Republicans on family values and the trustworthiness of the government, it is odd that the conservative movement thinks that this particular deeply personal decision needs to be taken once-and-for-all by politicians who don't have to live with the consequences, but the nature of American coalitional politics is what it is.

If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs.

Creationists say there would be no such mistakes were Adam not to have eaten a specific delicious fruit. There would be no mutations, humans would live a thousand years even without eating the fruit of the tree of life, and T-Rexes would still be vegan to this day.

Christian evolutionists have a much simpler answer: God used the death-churn of evolution to make us, so we should have no complaints about the problem of evil/suffering.

Both of these answers are equally batshit. I fail to understand how either of these answers is compatible with the Christian idea of a God who so loves humanity that he sent his own incarnate son to be tortured in order to redeem us. Such a loving and powerful God could surely come up with a plan for humanity that does not involve this level of utterly wanton suffering and ugliness.

A woman had to nurture and grow that fetus inside of her for months, eagerly and lovingly expecting to bring into the world a beautiful new life full of possibility, and at the last possible second she discovers she’s actually growing a broken, functionless monstrosity within her. It’s the stuff of body horror science fiction. It’s the kind of thing that makes me very sympathetic to the Gnostic urge to overthrow the sadistic demiurge.

The point of believing in a God is that you don’t understand every decision He makes, because God is too far above us to understand.

That sounds more like Cthulhu than the God any Christian I know seems to believe in.

"If you treasure the life and well-being of your colonists so much, why did you start a RimWorld game in a challenging location?"

Then what is the point of praying to Him? Do you think he loves you enough to make sure you get that promotion at work, or that your football team wins a game, but doesn’t love those mothers enough to prevent them from having catastrophically deformed children?

I’m all for a Deist conception of an inscrutable alien intelligence who created the basic rules of physics and then sat back to passively watch the simulation play out. What I cannot understand is a conception of a loving God who made humanity in his image, who intervenes positively in quotidian human affairs, and yet who allows, either through direct control or negligence, things like catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns.

I’m all for a Deist conception of an inscrutable alien intelligence who created the basic rules of physics and then sat back to passively watch the simulation play out. What I cannot understand is a conception of a loving God who made humanity in his image, who intervenes positively in quotidian human affairs, and yet who allows, either through direct control or negligence, things like catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns.

Is it specifically the catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns that raise the objection, or is it in fact any form of suffering at all?

I observe that suffering is highly useful, even from a materialist perspective. We suffer hunger and thirst, and it motivates us to eat and drink. More abstract and generalized suffering provides the contrast necessary to recognize the difference between good and bad; if you agree that the "experience machine" is repugnant, that necessarily requires suffering and pleasure to be different from good and bad. From there, general acceptance of suffering, even of natural disasters and anencephalic newborns is not a large step: suffering is a reminder that there is a reality outside our selves that must be grappled with, and this is an insight we cannot dispense with.

Then what is the point of praying to Him?

The point of praying to Him is to build a relationship with Him. When we encounter suffering, we ask for his help, and when we encounter joy, we thank him for it. A similar process can be observed in the parent/child relationship; young children suffer greatly for reasons they do not understand and their parents cannot explain to them, but their parents mitigate some of this suffering and comfort them in the rest, and without gaining any insight into the causes or reasons for the suffering or indeed the reasoning of the parents, children hopefully learn that their parents are not its ultimate source, even when they are the proximate source. My eldest reliably starts screaming and crying when I turn off Cocomelon, but still lets me pick her up and soothe her until the discontent passes. So it is for me and the greater sufferings of pain and sickness and weakness and death.

There's a sense in which none of the above is rational, but then, rationality is a spook. Your rage and disgust at the evil of pain and suffering brings you no closer to solving them, and my acceptance of them produces no additional obstacle to fighting against them. Certainly sterilization or euthanasia are not general or even notably broad solutions to the problem. Humans will continue to live and die in pain no matter what you or I choose to believe or to do, short of complete extermination of the species. Nor does it appear that suffering is, in fact, in any fundamental way connected to material circumstances. Perfectly healthy, rich, comfortable people frequently demonstrate that suffering expands to fill the available space of one's psyche, regardless of material circumstances. The most concrete quantization of suffering available, the experience of physical pain, observably expands and contracts dramatically, and possibly without limit, based solely on how we engage with it, and particularly with choices we make when engaging with it.

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I don’t claim to fully understand the problem of evil in the same way a two year old doesn’t fully understand why he can’t have candy for dinner. But the issue of original sin ensures there will be bad things until the end of the earth as the fault of man; that much I can say.

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https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

The idea of 'wasted equipment' is omnipresent and simply emerges out of scarcity. There is only so much time, energy and resources to allocate. Organ recipients are ranked according to how likely they are to survive and thrive if they were to find a donor. MIT allocates seats to those who are most likely to thrive in that educational environment, rather than 'wasting equipment' by admitting affirmative action students who are more likely to drop out. Spending maximal resources irrespective of the background of the recipient results in worse outcomes.

The other poster's hypothetical situation is one of a baby with a severe genetic defect and unlikely to survive. To completely ignore the reality of the situation leads to 'The Hartley Hooligans' with a delusional mother keeping her kids with microencephaly alive, despite the fact they're effectively braindead. Or any number of needless procedures to extend the life of the terminally ill.

I really have no idea about the legal basis of what is happening here, or even the details. That's why I asked for clarification. But since late second trimester abortions are only legal in a handful of severe cases almost anywhere, I assume it all plays out like this:

A women presents around the third trimester for the first time. They discover the baby to be severely malformed, e.g. anencephaly. Since the baby would not survive its own birth for even an hour (and is likely to die in utero before birth), an abortion is performed. This late in the pregnancy, the abortion is indistinguishable from an emergency induced birth. The baby lives briefly after the procedure. Apparently, legally, a doctor in Minnesota would have had to put it into an incubator before 2019. Everybody knows this to be in vain.

I'm happy to be corrected here. If they leave the baby to die from exposure in cases where the 1 year mortality is comparable to that of a heart attack before 40, I strongly oppose everything about it. But since neither the article nor you have explained any of the details of what they are doing, I'm starting to think this is a pretty poor attempt at propaganda, and it's trying to exploit the emotions of people who also don't understand what's going on. Because it sure sounds inviting to just believe they are double-tapping cute little preemie babies because mom didn't want them.

This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.

Ironically, I think Trump uses this (maybe unintentionally?) to his advantage. He can say something that sounds outrageous, and is indeed only half-true. But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad. And now they have that information in their head, and it makes them marginally more likely to vote Trump.

By making his puffed up lies that have a core of truth so ridiculous-sounding, it basically invites someone to be like "NO WAY that is true" and actually look up information.

People here have talked about how Trump lies like a used car salesman whereas most politicians lie like lawyers, and that's an example. Same with him making claims about dogs and cats getting eaten. Maybe not literally true, but a bit of research will bring other things to people's attention.

The problem is that he overdoes it. This strategy might work well if he toned it down just a bit, both in content and in how he talks about it. When he gets heated and raises his voice and starts talking in word salad while randomly inserting these kinds of things into the conversation, like he did in the debate last night against Harris, it just makes him look like a crazy homeless man ranting on a street corner. Personally, it does not bother me, but I do not think that it is the best way to reach swing state voters.

If there's a good way to reach swing state voters then each party would implement it. I'd suggest that the 50k or so undecided voters who will probably end up determining the election outcome aren't going to decide it based on something that would seem rational to an informed voter.

This strategy is at the heart of Trump's approach to the truth. It presents the media with a difficult dilemma. In response to a lie from him they can either:

(A) Helpfully clarify the grain of truth in what he said and in so doing help Trump use bald lies to manipulate audiences to where he wants them.

(B) Issue a denial of what he said without drilling down deeper, and in so doing fail in their duty to provide basic information audiences are seeking.

Both approaches are journalistic failures. It should be possible to find a middle way but most of the time media orgs struggle to do so. Or can't do so in a way that generates clicks.

As a result, the media orgs that choose route B provide extra ammo for Trump's claims of media bias, while those that choose route A really are tilting the game in his favour.

It's sort of a smart strategy but ends in tears for everyone.

This strategy is at the heart of Trump's approach to the truth. It presents the media with a difficult dilemma.

It is notable that Democrat lies do not present the media a similar dilemma, given that we can observe them simply backing those lies to the hilt, unquestioningly, no matter how brazen.

The idea that the media is in any way interested in the truth is, at this late date, entirely unsupportable, and I am not comfortable allowing it to pass unchallenged. The media has now normalized rewriting their own archived output to match Democrat talking points in real-time. Large, well-coordinated lies from the Democrats last decades, result in obvious, devastating real-world outcomes, and generate zero accountability for those responsible. Truth was never a part of this process, and I do not believe that you or any of the other commenters decrying this issue are actually interested in the truth any more than the media is.

I think this is too huge a topic to litigate here but I do think journalists are pretty committed to technical truth-telling, and are moderated somewhat by norms of not being too shameless about their omissions. This immediately opposes them to Trump's different style of deceit.

How might we test this theory?

"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.

Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?

Ding ding.

An honest press would resolve the problem to a large degree, but an honest press wouldn't be able to shift public perception to where THEY want it.

…so, motte and bailey as a (formal?) strategy?

By making his puffed up lies that have a core of truth so ridiculous-sounding, it basically invites someone to be like "NO WAY that is true" and actually look up information.

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but in my case I would absolutely still resent Trump for lying about it. Why not just tell the actual truth? Why should I have to automatically discount any claim he makes by 30%, and go digging around for the 70% that’s true, when instead he could have just said 100% of the truth up front? Why are people giving him a pass for wildly inflating so many of his claims?

I still agree that lying like this is bad and he shouldn't do it, but it doesn't seem like you've interacted with the core of the counterargument. The fact that his statements are exaggerated makes them bait for the media to debunk and therefore signal boost them.

Do you resent any other politician for their lies?

Anyone who pays attention knows politicians tell tactical lies nonstop.

If you hold Trump to a special standard I think that's ridiculous. Otherwise yeah, resenting the lie is probably the most rational response possible.

As to WHY?

when instead he could have just said 100% of the truth up front? Why are people giving him a pass for wildly inflating so many of his claims?

IT WORKS. CONSTANTLY. Because when it comes to politics most people are fully prepared to accept lies from their team.

This is my great frustration. I have the superpower known as "a functioning memory that recalls events older than a week" so I know how much all politicians are lying at all times, and they count on people forgetting or forgiving things that happened too far in the past. And I'm doomed to watch the voting public fall for this every time.

Do you resent any other politician for their lies?

Anyone who pays attention knows politicians tell tactical lies nonstop.

If you hold Trump to a special standard I think that's ridiculous. Otherwise yeah, resenting the lie is probably the most rational response possible.

I don't agree that Trump is lying is most cases like this. Almost worse, it's that he doesn't care to know if it's the truth. It sounds good to him to say, and the truth of it is irrelevant.

How many things does Trump say during debates and his speeches that are merely poorly remembered memes he saw on X or Truth?

IMO, it should behoove a leader to care to make the best case for their argument, and that includes understanding and optimizing for the biases in the medium through which the argument is presented. If Trump knows he is going to be mercilessly fact-checked, it's on him to make life tougher not easier for the fact-checkers. He makes valid arguments sound like lies because he doesn't bother to make them sound as true as possible, and that's unforgiveable.

But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad.

Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to. You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves. Then all the actual independents who did their own research get siloed into a "misinformation" or "conspiracy theorist" bucket. And then, if you manage to break through all those barriers, if you try to share what you learned with anyone, they've been so conditioned they'll still act like you are the weirdo for putting that much effort in or caring so much, and discard what you say.

Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that

In some ways, that's the beauty of it. It only has to work once per person. A person who has seen the media gestalt lie its ass off once willl probably develop amnesia and remain a goodthinker. Eventually though, the statement "the media lies its ass off" will lodge in their memeplex like a grain of sand.

And, like a grain of sand it will grow into a pearl that takes up increasingly large amounts of space whenever the topic rears its head

You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves.

Even this works to Trump's advantage. I'm sure you've seen all the pearl-clutching opinion pieces about how conspiratorial thinking is destroying democracy. It's all the same pipeline. After a certain point, realizing that the media can and will bullshit you means that there's no going back to those outlets. The only way is forward, even if forward sends you to (or through) crazy town.

Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to.

I've already heard two independent reports that some person watching the debate heard the claim about eating cats and dogs and Googled it, thus finding out that there is some controversy over Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio and the disappearance of house pets. At that point, they aren't thinking "Trump lied to me!" they're thinking about the crazy story they hadn't heard of yet.

It does happen. Whether it makes a difference? I don't know.

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