Blues, Greens and abortion

Snowyowl

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.

Wait... that sounds off.

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.

I'm not sure if I'm in the category you call for, but I feel that this comment ought to go somewhere under this post, and this seems like the best fit.

I consider killing an arbitrary person much, much worse than killing a random person, because the latter cannot be used as a weapon to silence people you don't like. Abortion generally doesn't discriminate against the baby (although there are cultures where sex-selective abortion is popular, which makes me uncomfortable, and which will be more of a problem as they get more than one bit to discriminate on); a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn't want to have a child at all.

I don't like the idea of killing babies, but as long as it's done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby, the only important moral difference from abstinence-as-birth-control is that it's painful to a creature with about the consciousness of a small animal.

Ultimately, I think that monoculture is more dangerous than infanticide. (As a corollary, I have to support the "right" of religious parents to let their toddlers die of easily-curable diseases because they don't believe in evidence-based medicine. Though once children are able to ask to get out of their parents' households, they should be offered political asylum if necessary.)

For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can't afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it's horrible and cruel to someone who's already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it's still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.

Ultimately, I think that monoculture is more dangerous than infanticide.

We can't afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy.

I'm not sure you understand how long Biology would have to remain in the driver's seat for these things to remotely matter...

5wedrifid15y

(A claim the evaluation of which does weigh 300 wedrifid-subjective pounds! I don't care much at all what you do to yourself but what you do to other people against their will I do consider to be my business!) [...] Apart from me finding this personally morally repugnant in its own right it is clearly inconsistent with your earlier statements about selective abortion and assumes a consequentialist evaluation that is too superficial to even correctly support your own terminal values. You write a whole paragraph about how it is important that "it's done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby", because "a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn't want to have a child at all". You don't want a women to be permitted to discriminate on bits of information about their own potential child but propose to enforce a discrimination based on one bit of information about one of the parents. The DNA of the fetus (necessarily) gives far more information about possible future behaviour of a child than a single instance of behaviour of the father - particularly when the father takes no part in raising the child. But far more important is the effect that such a mandate would have on the outcome of rape. Rape is already grossly under-reported (citation is, I assume, not needed). There are strong psychological pressures against reporting it, even aside from the additional trauma from being involved in extensive legal proceedings. Making a gross abuse of her person the consequence of reporting a rape would (and should) make rape even more under-reported. If you are a women living in a mandatory abortion dystopia then the right thing to do is to refrain from reporting a rape until a) you can confirm that you did not conceive or b) you decide for yourself that you want an abortion. If necessary, lie. "Oh, I said yes. I wanted him bad and I just love it rough. And if I wanted to stop I would have said 'flugelhorn'!" A rape victim

10JGWeissman15y

How genetically heritable is the property of being a rapist? This seems like an important empirical fact to nail down before advocating this sort of policy.

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Blues, Greens and abortion

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Blues, Greens and abortion

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