[RD] Abortion is either murder or not. You can't have it both ways.

It's not free. Nothing that moves the zeitgeist towards authoritarianism and anti-liberalism is free. We might trade it off. Like punishing almost entirely mens rea in situations of conspiracy(flirting with heresy), or actus reus alone with strict liability(sometimes punishing the genuinely duped for being stupid, exactly that). In this instance, we're just arguing that we like what we're getting when we're on the winning side of forcing people to do whut's gud fer 'em.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. Faith, trust, decision making, following the leader; showing cruelty and love both work. Psychopaths and lovers seem to be the most willing to be unspeakably cruel. Some in service to self, some in service to other. Some will not comprehend the depth of the harm they commit, others will.
 
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20/80, don’t fetishize the seatbelt when we banned abortion?
 
I'm not disagreeing with you in the slightest. I just think rights are not something that can be traded, certainly not without the agreement of the individual affected. Now if you're talking about limit access after the point of viability, I think that's a fair compromise. Very, very few abortions are performed after 20-24 weeks, so using that at the point where fewer options are available seems the way to go.
very few abortions are performed even after 13-15wk, something those opposed to them at 20-24wk don't really talk about enough. late 2nd trimester abortions on a whim at scale isn't a thing.

i am not talking about "trading rights" from one to another, i'm talking about tradeoff in policy wrt rights. we generally accept laws that suppress total individual liberty when those laws prevent the "liberty" of one person from infringing on the "liberty" of others. this is why the personhood question is imo central to abortion policy from a legal perspective...if we treat the fetus as a person, it has some basic rights (including to life). if we don't consider the fetus a person yet, banning abortions at that stage is *strictly* a violation of the mother's rights.

i wind up in the same spot as you in terms of policy (20-24wk). i am not thrilled by bans in the 15-20 wk range, but those are already extremely rare and i might be wrong about personhood, so i won't quibble with states that go that route. banning abortions in 1st trimester comes off as arbitrary, in the legal sense. for me to be comfortable with that, i would need clear evidence to support a claim of personhood/undue suffering we don't have that differentiates it from contraceptives or morning after pill.

note that aside from any timeframe above, if we're talking about major health risk to mother or confirmed non-viable fetus abortion bans are callous and unjustifiable. asking people to die for no reason because they have a medical complication crosses a line whereby "pro-life" advocates can't call themselves that any longer when they take such a stance.

20/80, don’t fetishize the seatbelt when we banned abortion?
"we" didn't. most states still do not ban abortions.

there are fundamental questions of individual liberty at play wrt to the seatbelt argument. indeed, it's not clear where the line can be drawn in terms of state deciding for people on pain of punishment "for your own good". frankly, few institutions seem to have someone else's best interests factored reliably in making choices, and nobody more so than that individual (on average). the state is (in practice) even less beholden than most. it can both lie and enforce selectively, without recourse for victims.

the seatbelt battle was "lost", but imo it's unquestionable that it's an example of the state exerting influence in a context which implies a *lot* of intrusion is similarly "justified" (using same standards). it's not clear to me why it can't dictate what foods you can eat based on that "logic"...it already dictates foods you can't because it feels the risk to you is too high (regardless of your own wishes), while allowing sustained consumption of a huge number of harmful products.

color me unimpressed when the same organization simultaneously bans sale of food products with full disclosure while also not banning products which *guarantee* things like cancer and copd risks are many times above normal. maybe as a matter of principle, we should regulate disclosure about product risks, but not try to arbitrarily and inconsistently compel action/inaction on people and use the government as a tool to favor some individuals (or more realistically, lobbying groups) over others.

the only reason the abortion question has merit for the state is when it (successfully) alleges it is protecting a person who can't otherwise protect themselves (once the fetus is considered a person). it's not immediately obvious perhaps, but it's true that the state having an interest/controlling "pre-personhood" abortions and having an interest in compelling seatbelt usage is on the same spectrum of authoritarianism.
 
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20/80, don’t fetishize the seatbelt when we banned abortion?

Sure. But this is who we are. It's who we've made ourselves to be.
 
I couldn't agree more. It's what I've been arguing. Fancy that.
 
So, seatbelts good, abortion good.
 
I'm behind the idea of a federal law.
 
A fetus has no more right to life than a starving person to a loaf of bread or a homeless person to a house. In basically no circumstance does a quote-unquote generic "right to life" trump another person's rights to life, liberty, and property. Simply by existing, a fetus is a tax on another individual's life, liberty, and property. We must accept the individual's right to alleviate themselves of the burden of another's life. As Descartes once said, "By my life and my love of it, I will live for no one else, and ask no one else's life to be for mine."

Otherwise, you're heading down a slippery slope where the state can force anyone to give their property to anyone else, just to guarantee their mystical "rights to life" in a thousand obscure knock-on categories. Bought a new plasma screen tv? Too bad, little Timmy needs it because we can pawn it and pay for his new plasteel tibia replacement, which will really help him screw off on that soccer field before we need to replace it when he outgrows it in six months. Clearly, you need a system! So if you really want to improve anything in the generic category of guaranteeing one's life by another's sacrifice, you have to introduce new bureaus and bureaucrats and formal procedures to apprehend who exactly is justified which re-compensation from whom, and to administer that fairly and efficiently. And then people start complaining about actually having to pay for that, so they just vote for the Mad Max option and then the kids don't learn how to read.

We've been up and down this road so many times that now we stand at the gates of women being executed by the state for owning their bodies. No compromise is possible or acceptable. Abortion must be guaranteed, and for good measure we should annihilate the political basis of, you know, Men in general.

I am Red Diamond Serious™ so when you report this post, you have to write more words explaining to the mod why I should be infracted for this.
 
My local State puts a hard limit on the level of violence I'm allowed to inflict upon someone to regain my property, and then there's a very strong difference if they originally gained my property with my consent or not.

I will grant that I have a very different heuristic when it comes to the abortion discussion than many, which means that we'll sometimes not understand the gist of someone else's paradigm.
 
I accept that some states limit this, but the fact that any state in this country executes women for having abortions is a serious and direct threat against the rights of all of us.

We should have no desire to understand the paradigm of the anti-abortion crowd.
 
The hard fact is that giving a fetus adverse rights against its mother leads to a situation where women are treated as third-class citizens under a quasi-totalitarian system of social control. No other outcome is possible.
 
Hardliners are indeed a threat.
 
I accept that some states limit this, but the fact that any state in this country executes women for having abortions is a serious and direct threat against the rights of all of us.
I'm in a different country, I was speaking about my local government. So, if I'm to agree with your statement, I would have to spread it to countries. I'm not sure I agree, we are quite happy to ignore the worst atrocities elsewhere, and they don't seriously risk our freedoms.

Americans are under a federal government, so in that case I would agree with you in principle for Americans, especially since you included 'execute'.

We should have no desire to understand the paradigm of the anti-abortion crowd.

This is a subjective moral argument. I think you're wrong. Somebody can understand without agreeing, even if never perfectly.

Practically, I need Liars on the side of the pro-choice side. I need people who are willing to lie about the political opponent. But I also need to know who the liars are, and I can't know that unless I have information you think I should avoid.
 
I'm in a different country, I was speaking about my local government. So, if I'm to agree with your statement, I would have to spread it to countries. I'm not sure I agree, we are quite happy to ignore the worst atrocities elsewhere, and they don't seriously risk our freedoms.

Americans are under a federal government, so in that case I would agree with you in principle for Americans, especially since you included 'execute'.



This is a subjective moral argument. I think you're wrong. Somebody can understand without agreeing, even if never perfectly.

Practically, I need Liars on the side of the pro-choice side. I need people who are willing to lie about the political opponent. But I also need to know who the liars are, and I can't know that unless I have information you think I should avoid.
First, I don't want you to avoid any information. I want you to stand for what is right. This is not a matter of hiding your head in the sand, but denouncing evil when you encounter it.

Second, fair enough, a different country - but in fact, this sort of thing does spread between countries. Sit on your laurels and admire your own nation all you want, but do you remember the reactionary waves of the Interwar period? Do you recall how they spread like wildfire among the Catholic nations? Do you recall how the fascist movements installed the Nazi government? You do have an obligation to stand against injustice anywhere, actually, whether you acknowledge it or not. You can choose to oppose the behemoth before it arrives at your gates, or at the very least before it is too late.

Third, I am not quite happy to ignore the worst atrocities elsewhere. You may be, but I am not.
 
it's one thing to claim you don't ignore atrocity. observed actions beg to differ though, there are too many and suddenly the scope of "atrocity" seems to be awfully narrow and specific to issues one cares about.

"what is right" is at issue here, people disagree on that part directly. killing people is broadly considered "evil", and there is a question of when/if that is happening that is relevant.
 
There are a lot of people who believe in the self empowerment of lies.
 
Second, fair enough, a different country - but in fact, this sort of thing does spread between countries.
Oh, absolutely. I've written before, it makes sense that I even care about the abortion movement in the United States, despite the scale of human rights abuses to be found elsewhere, because I have to even run defense on the trickle down effect of American cultural influence. I did find it interesting that I didn't know that (say) Germany gave Constitutional Rights to a fetus and severely limited abortion freedoms compared to what the American Pro-Choice movement was fighting for, so in some sense I was sitting on my laurels.

My point when talking about my State was when I was responding to what you've written about depriving other people of property. We impose hard limits on the level of violence we're allowed to use. Your logical chain seemed really weird with that understanding.
 
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