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Adele_L comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 24 October 2014 03:27PM

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Comment author: lmm 24 October 2014 06:30:06PM 2 points [-]

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. )

Comment author: Adele_L 24 October 2014 09:50:52PM 1 point [-]

I think for pro-abortion it is more about letting the woman decide to undergo an intervention over something which will affect her health/well-being significantly. So killing a fetus/baby might still be a certain amount of bad (maybe ramping up continuously with age), but it is more bad to not allow this choice (but this is de-emphasized by the pro-abortion movement for the obvious political reasons). I think this also explains why lots of people are ok with early-term abortions, but not late-term abortions.