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shminux 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. )
The pro-life/pro-choice argument seems to be, as it tends to be in many other cases, about where to place the Schelling point. Is all sperm sacred? Is Plan-B evil? Should a fetus with likely very poor quality of life be forced to develop, anyway? Should we take any and all measures to reduce the incidence of "natural" miscarriages? How much risk to the pregnant woman's life is acceptable in the name of saving her future baby?
The problem is that different Schelling points seem unique to different groups. When you say "(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide", what you really mean is "I see no Schelling point past the conception stage", whereas someone else (like ZankerH) sees brain activity as such a point, or the heartbeat, or a fixed number of weeks, or birth.
There is very little difference between your position and theirs, except one number.