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ZankerH comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a "you must be this rational to ride" line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.
(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide - really pro it, not just the "lol yeah delicious babies" kind we sometimes see on LW. And there's a coherent position of "the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I'm contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem". But I don't think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )
I always thought this was a pretty straightforward issue from a rationalist perspective - we have the technology to figure out whether the foetus has an active brain and can meaningfully perceive pain. That should be the cutoff point.
Maybe it's straightforward to discover when the fetus can feel pain, but it's not straightforward that being able to feel pain should be the cutoff point.
I see no reason to believe that you can in general kill a person because the person can't perceive pain. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a thing.
"Active brain" is also a term that wide open.