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.
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.
Precisely! And more than that, even if propensity to rape is both heritable and highly variable in the population (I've no idea if this is true), it doesn't follow that by culling some children of rapes the total number of rapists will go down.
Rapists can have children in normal marriages, like everyone else. And I've read somewhere that most rapists commit more than one rape; if true, then the mandatory abortion policy must be enforced in almost 100% of all rapes to drive the numbers of rapists below replacement rates.
Also, since the postulated rapist gen...
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.