I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is much more important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
It does sound off for the reason you wanted to imply, but it also confused me for another reason. I don't think you meant to write "against", I think you probably meant "for" or "in favor of".
Also, I'm not entirely sure that Less Wrong wants to be used as a forum for politics. From the Less Wrong Wiki:
For all of these reasons, Less Wrong tries to avoid particular political disputes. Of course, discussing conflict reduction skills in the abstract is appropriate and encouraged! In fact, it is the best way of preserving our deliberative, rationalist focus in the face of small-scale disputes and conflicts.
I don't know what the Less Wrong community's general response to political discussion is (I'm fairly new here). I do know that I don't mind discussing it, as long as people are going to try to stay calm about it. I am pro-choice, in general. Fetuses do not seem to have much intelligence, or an awareness of life. I don't think it's a stretch to say that they aren't sentient. If that's true, they certainly still are valuable; as a general rule I would try to avoid personally killing a dolphin or a chimpanzee, and I consider fetuses to be more valuable than that. However, I don't think that they fully qualify as human, so it's not necessarily murder. It's still bad, but it's a small enough bad that abortion may be justified if carrying a pregnancy to term will be problematic.
I don't think you meant to write "against", I think you probably meant "for" or "in favor of".
Typo, thanks for spotting it.
Also, I'm not entirely sure that Less Wrong wants to be used as a forum for politics.
I posted this on LessWrong instead of anywhere else because you can be trusted to remain unbiased to the best of your ability. I had completely forgotten that part of the wiki though; it's been a while since I actively posted on LW. Thanks for the reminder.
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.