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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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"Compelled birth". Ah, the amount of new horror scare terms being dredged up by the baby-killers (you don't mind that term, do you? sauce for the goose and all that) in order to sow fear and terror is wonderfully creative, in a twisted way.

Yes, the horrible forced-birthers are lurking around, jumping out to kidnap women, tie them down to a surgical bed, do IVF on them without their consent, implant embryos in them and then wait around for nine months until they can then force their victims to deliver the baby without any anaethesia or pain relief at all.

It'd make a great B-movie.

(Because of course it's not that two people voluntarily have sex and sex makes babies and oops they were too careless in the moment and now the natural result is happening).

The Orwellian march of language is something else. Ending a human life is healthcare. Asking for normal pregnancy is forced birth/compelled birth/slavery.

I mean, I only whipped out the phrase in question because people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers, so I thought some nice harmless hyperbole would be fun.

And you can really argue with it either. The woman in question wishes to abort the fetus; anti abortionists wish she would not. She is a baby killer, they want to force her to give birth. It is what it is.

people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers

That sounded wrong to me, so I searched it. All mentions of the phrase were negative towards it, i.e. using the phrase the same way you did.

There have been plenty of comments claiming that abortionists is actual murder, but none ever just outright say "Hey did you hear what the baby killers were up to this week?" and use that as the group designation. Doing so, or calling pro-lifers "forced birthers", is an instant claim that none of your opponents have principles and all are acting in bad faith. Surely they are not actually pro-life; they disagree with me, are therefore evil, and therefore want to compel innocent young women to give birth against their wills. Surely they're not actually pro-choice, they just want to murder babies.

Using those terms is a terrible norm. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-life people are actually pro-life or just hate women. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-choice people are actually pro-choice or just hate babies.

So long as you're happy to own the name, that's fine with me.