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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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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-zombieswomen, 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.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
commitmentmoney at them in the same way women throw bags ofsexflesh [i.e. themselves] at their celebrities.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.
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.
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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.
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They DO extend it to cover unfortunates all across the world.
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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.
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.
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Perhaps Christianity's telescopic philanthropy was adaptive in pre-modern and early modern Europe but has become maladaptive in a globalized world.
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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.)
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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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:
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.
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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."
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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".
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.)
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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.
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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.)
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.
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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!"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Now what in the wide world are you talking about?
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I don't entirely agree with this for reasons I can't fully articulate, but I'm nominating it for an AAQC anyway.
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I don’t want Baal empowered by sacrifices.
Exactly, don't sacrifice your children to Baal. Vote Moloch.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Yes
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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."
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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
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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.
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