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VoiceOfRa comments on [LINK] Joseph Bottum on Politics as the Mindkiller - Less Wrong
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This one is a rather good example of my original point tbh
All the Scandinavian countries did just this in the 60s and 70s when abortions had become a reasonably safe procedure and all of them ended up with some variant of:
No questions asked in first trimester Medical reasons in second and third trimester Induced birth and adoption if foetus is viable.
And since around 1980, there has been zero controversy on the subject, mostly because just about everyone is happy with things as they are.
Given the Swedish attitude towards free speech, are you sure that's a case of "just about everyone is happy with things as they are" and not, nobody dares challenge the consensus for fear of the "anti-fascist" thought police?
This genuinely threw me because I had no idea there was anything wrong with freedom of speech in Sweden. This because I get consistently less flak when I express controversial views among Swedish friends than when among Americans. My handful of Swedish friends appears not to be representative.
On the other hand, the same is true in Norway, Denmark and Finland and they have quite significantly less issues. Also, I realise 'everyone is happy' was poor wording. A better one would be 'everyone has agreed this is a workable compromise that it's not worth fighting over, for a value of everyone that is approx. 95% of the population'
Most people in the US would be happy with those arrangements. The abortion controversy in the US is manufactured - those opposing abortion focus their rhetoric almost entirely on second-and-third trimester abortion, those who support it focus their rhetoric almost entirely on first-trimester abortion, and both sides pretend the other side is talking about the same thing they're talking about.
The controversy, that is, is produced by the opposing sides asking different questions.
~70% of people don't care or want the first trimester to be legal (AFAIK it's legal in all states). ~65% want the second trimester to be illegal (no idea what the legal status is). ~80% want the last trimester to be illegal (It is illegal in all but 8 states).
~75% want abortion to be legal for medical reasons, regardless of trimester.
About 30% of the US population would be unhappy with the Swedish arrangement. http://www.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Compare that to the manufactured controversy: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/03/10/cnn-poll-58-percent-of-americans-oppose-abortion-in-all-or-most-circumstances-n1806283
And yet look what happens when people try to bad third trimester abortions.