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Douglas_Knight 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 systems in the US and Europe treat infanticide and late-term abortion the same. They are quite coherent, but just don't like to spell out the rules. Infanticide by the mother is illegal, just like late-term abortion, but not much more. If the mother expresses grief at the death, people figure that there's no punishment worse than losing a child, and call it an accident. Many countries have laws on the books explicitly making infanticide a lesser crime than homicide, with a shorter jail sentence. Even when there is a conviction, the sentence is usually suspended.