What's new
Frozen in Carbonite

Welcome to FiC! Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Abortion In The US

Horton

Cat
Administrator
So recently in Alabama, it's been decided to ban abortions from contraception. I can understand why some people might believe that as such, the issue arises when discussing how effective bans are:

"With the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade (1973) case legalizing abortion, a review of abortion practices pre-Roe is instructive. Abortion became criminalized in the US around 1870, yet many abortions were performed. While estimates for the yearly number of pre-Roe illegal abortions roughly resemble today's number of legal abortions, the difference between legal and illegal abortion rests in the difference between the large number of women who died or were injured then, and the very few women who now die from illegal abortions."

In this circumstance we've got a law that not only alienates massive parts of the population, but also is utterly ineffective at actually preventing what the GOP see as immoral occurring, if a law doesn't stop what it's supposed to prevent, then why have it?

I suspect it's because something being legal or not doesn't have as much as an effect on peoples views of morality. So the people that are against it wouldn't get it if they could and the people that are in favour of it get, if it if not it's on the law; because being forced to have a child is a lot stronger incentive then prison is.

So IMO: Why?
 
Well, Demographics are Destiny, and I suspect a lot of people have seen how Russia, China and India are all facing demographic crises right now. Even in Europe and Japan, with the various social welfare systems are facing demographic strain, and the "Immigrants will solve this and bring variety of dinnerplates!" option has crashed and burned. Meanwhile, Nigeria, who will have a greater population than America by 2040, is tipped as being a potential great power.

Abortion restrictions tend to be more on the extreme end and do not bode well.
 
Well, Demographics are Destiny
That's a bold claim.
I suspect a lot of people have seen how Russia, China and India are all facing demographic crises right now
Ah, the Russian demographic crisis which has ended a decade or two ago?
Meanwhile, Nigeria, who will have a greater population than America by 2040, is tipped as being a potential great power.
By who exactly? The same people who say India is going to be a superpower in ten years?
 
That's a bold claim.

Going by the numbers, there's a reason China suspended the One Child Policy. Meanwhile, there is a serious concern about Pensions overwhelming the welfare state as Boomers retire en masse and there isn't enough money in the welfare systems to support them. Largely unintended consequences of the Overpopulation panic.

Ah, the Russian demographic crisis which has ended a decade or two ago?


Still ongoing from the look of things.

By who exactly? The same people who say India is going to be a superpower in ten years?

It's got the soft power, strong demographics, solid industrialisation.
 
Anti-abortionism isn't about any kind of practical consequences, it's Republican virtue signaling.

nah if it was just virtue signaling it would have died in commitee or something.

It is three parts religious fanaticism, one part gut reaction and six parts power game.

IE "JEEEESUUUSSS" "TEH SLAUGHTERS OF THE INFANTS!!!" "HOW DARE YOU FILTHY WH@RES THINK YOU HAVE FREE WILL!!!:"
 
Religious fanaticism is just virtue signaling though.
Is it at all virtuous if you have to go all ugly face screaming followed by cackling at how you stole away those rights from people? More of a base level dick slapping than virtue signalling.
 
Anti-abortionism isn't about any kind of practical consequences, it's Republican virtue signaling.
I think the modern GOP has basically gone that route, they've taken single issues like abortion or guns and used the fact that those are such hot button issues for parts of the population, that they'll override other concerns with regards to policy. The long term effect of such a policy though is often that the system is more suspect-able to polarisation with heightened emotions, something they don't seem to care about looking at Gringich and the way they treated Obama/Hillary.

It doesn't just work as virtue signalling in this case though, that's more the prima facie reason and likely the biggest, and the reason most of their first order voters on the issue are against abortion, but it has a far more subtle consequence when playing the long game, that most observers don't notice, but I suspect is likely known by the inner tiers in the Republican Party due to a lot of their scarily high end academic records.

The Party at this point has a major problem, they need to adapt to growing demographic shifts and changes in the population, as it's obvious at this point their days are numbed if they keep up with only pandering to white male Christian evangelicals and rural voters. They can bang on about "bringing back jobs", but comparative advantage would imply to me that in the long run such ideas won't work as MNCs will just switch the the EU/China for profit CBA wise or at least if they do work somewhat like agriculture protectionism, it won't be very efficient.

A good solution is actively working to fuck stuff up at this point, macro trends like this are often operating on some form of lag, so the cause is often not clear as it takes time for the result to vibrate throughout the system. As that fact is pretty obvious to any social scientist at this point, it's almost certainly known by the guys at the top of the party. So what causes conservatism? Usually there's always going to be some segments of the population that are more conservative then other parts, as every brain and life time experience is going to be different in some regards. But poverty and education are often the biggest impacts on it, though I'd mention they're also both heavily interlinked variables and display a high amount of colinearity.

Banning abortion has historically resulted in massive increases in poverty, death in childbirth and overall damage to the quality of life. Neglected children are often at higher risk of cognitive decline and other defects, which put more strain on the system and increase chances of gaining conservative views as a result; they are certainly more exploitable in regards to propaganda, which the GOP are experts at to the point that it's actually smart...in a sick way.

Building upon that, I have almost the frighting theory that a lot of the GOP might be doing that in many other things to save themselves. One of Trump's FR picks literally was in support of raising interest rates in a through and increasing them in a peak, ideologically that makes zero sense and there's nothing conservative/free-market about acting like that. Eliminating that would leave political pragmatic reasons and these reasons I ponder are causing as much economic chaos as possible in order to blame things on the Dems in the short run and also mess the country up enough that people are more inclined to become conservative/populist long term, which means they fuck things up even more and then so on and so forth...
and the "Immigrants will solve this and bring variety of dinnerplates!" option has crashed and burned.
How has it crashed and burned exactly? Demographic changes can only really be looked at over the next few decades with immigration. I'd say this though, if we didn't have them here, nobody would drive the Taxis, the NHS would be in an even worse state and we'd be a lot less wealthy. If you're referring to the initial 50s round I'd say it was a great success. We've seen that it works over a lot longer period of time then we've had with the likes of Merkal and Germany.
 
@Horton

Except the UK now is becoming a political dumpster fire because of immigration politics, and going "They are an underclass that makes our lives easier because they are undercutting local employment and bring variety of dinnerplates!" has not helped one bit. Look at Europe now, look at how Australia is behaving worse than Trump in Nauru.
 
@Horton

Except the UK now is becoming a political dumpster fire because of immigration politics, and going "They are an underclass that makes our lives easier because they are undercutting local employment and bring variety of dinnerplates!" has not helped one bit. Look at Europe now, look at how Australia is behaving worse than Trump in Nauru
No, they're becoming a political dumpster fire because the right wing have blamed the fucked up economy on immigration, if they're already suspectable to propaganda like that...then what good does stopping it mean? That they just find a new target and when you ban that, another and then repeat?
 
No, they're becoming a political dumpster fire because the right wing have blamed the fucked up economy on immigration, if they're already suspectable to propaganda like that...then what good does stopping it mean? That they just find a new target and when you ban that, another and then repeat?

Immigration was sold on the promise that it would bring a vibrant beacon of harmony and that there would be zero problems whatsoever a we follow the unstoppable march of progress. From 1991-2016 people went along with that by and large even if they disliked immigration (look at the Tories pre-2010). Except that has come crashing down over the past few years. Turns out The End of History wasn't exactly the end. "muh dinnerplates!" wins out in good times, but we aren't living in good times anymore. But I think this merits its own thread.
 
@Horton

Except the UK now is becoming a political dumpster fire because of immigration politics, and going "They are an underclass that makes our lives easier because they are undercutting local employment and bring variety of dinnerplates!" has not helped one bit. Look at Europe now, look at how Australia is behaving worse than Trump in Nauru.
Immigration was sold on the promise that it would bring a vibrant beacon of harmony and that there would be zero problems whatsoever a we follow the unstoppable march of progress. From 1991-2016 people went along with that by and large even if they disliked immigration (look at the Tories pre-2010). Except that has come crashing down over the past few years. Turns out The End of History wasn't exactly the end. "muh dinnerplates!" wins out in good times, but we aren't living in good times anymore. But I think this merits its own thread.
Of course, in the real world, UK didn't get much immigration compared to the rest of the European Union, a lot of its immigration came from the European Union (and the EU share of immigrants increased massively compared to the non-EU one over the last few years) and the British population is much more positive towards immigration than a lot of the EU countries.

UK Migration.png

It's not immigrants who caused political issues in UK, it's Britons.
 
Last edited:
I have no idea where the notion that the anti-abortion hardliners are in it for the demographics comes from. Well, something similar does exist, e.g. the Quiverfull movement, but they're pretty negligible compared to the bulk of anti-abortion advocates.

'Drinking themselves to death'. Uh-huh. If you're concerned, according to the latest WHO Report [pdf; p. 345], Russia's per capita alcohol consumption went below a lot of European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. That's not to say that the alcohol situation is necessarily better than Western Europe given different context of health care, but things can change a lot in five years, much less forty. Anyone that thinks they can predict the demographics of a country in forty years is trippin' something.

Speaking of health care, while Russia's is not great, the comparison of nominal per capita spending in the article is just dumb. To see this, consider that, say, a typical appendicitis operation costs two-thirds as many rubles in Russia than dollars in the US, i.e. an overall two order of magnitude difference per exchange rate (prices a cursory google look found was 20k rubles, 33k dollars). Obviously, for OECD this isn't quite fair because the US is an outlier, but the point remains that these numbers mean diddly-squat by themselves.

Western demographic crash predictions especially have a long history of turning out wrong and completely unable to predict even 15 years onward, much less 40; meanwhile, RosStat was at least relatively much better at predicting things on the shorter end of that time-scale, and they're nowhere close to that dire, though they're not good either. RosStat's historical better performance might be because they have some idea of what the government policies to address the issues are.

The primary mistake in these kinds of things is that countries aren't particles in a void, and actually do things to address their problems.

Well, that specific article is more BS than usual. The thing that clinches it is the usual Ruskis so xenophobic that righteous Westerners can't be safe there that the Anglophone media pushed so hard for years leading up to FIFA 2018. Well, that came and nothing much happened inside the country except people having a good time. It's so transparent that the actual purpose had nothing to do with real concerns and everything to do with minimising any public relations success of the event. ... But there's plenty more things wrong the kitchen-sink approach of things that partially work against each other (say, low retirement age and low life expectancy, as the article can't decide whether it wants to focus on workers or total), no consideration for direct solutions or overall trends, say, that retirement age can be changed (and was raised recently), the trends in life expectancy, alcohol consumption, and so forth. Again: it's as if countries actually do stuff.
 
So IMO: Why?
If one comes from a worldview with non-consequentialist morality, I don't think an appeal to effectiveness would be very convincing against the prohibition in itself (at best, to revise it). That's probably what it comes down to, though the Alabama law is remarkable in its utterly biting the bullet on the consequences. That used to be a moral puzzle against anti-abortionists: if abortion is murder of children, what moral sense do exceptions on rape and incest actually make? So according to Alabama, it's just flat wrong.

That it alienates a bunch of people, to the point of many anti-abortion advocates being very unhappy with it and its utter political ineptitude, is another issue. It's simply too dumb to not be honest, which makes it highly implausible that much consideration has gone into it besides drinking the kool-aid on the logical consequences of the core moral claim.
 
It is quite hilarious that a governor justifying her decision by claiming that each life id a god from God is the same person who signed many death warrants.
 
I have no idea where the notion that the anti-abortion hardliners are in it for the demographics comes from. Well, something similar does exist, e.g. the Quiverfull movement, but they're pretty negligible compared to the bulk of anti-abortion advocates.
Ah, I don't think I made myself clear since we're citing Quiverfull here, let me explain:

My comment was a response to Heliostorm's idea that abortion is virtue signalling, that by logical implication means it has to be in reference to politicians, as voters are virtue signalling for who exactly to that extent? Unless it's then for a "who wants to be a good Christian contest", but arguably not many people are good at doing that, so that would seem like a self refuting interpretation of events from my perspective, guess it could be semi done psychologically if you're cherry picking, but people like that don't tend to be devout.

So that put into play, we're looking at politicians here. Some might have strong religious motivations in relation to abortion, that is certainly true, but seeing as only a segment of the Republican Party are in it for abortion, then we can expect the politicians in support to quasi represent that in their own numbers, not that is an 100% accurate metric of things, but does so for now in this case. If only a segment of the parties supporters are in it for it, then why do all the Republican politicians seem to vote in line with it? Likely they're mostly doing it for their constituents more then strong personal beliefs, which is admittedly the obvious here, as politicians always do that to some extent. Even people like Sanders have gone for that tactical route in some circumstances, as much as his supporters like to play him off as always sticking to the same views. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing, as if the other side are legit harmful or at least you think they are, then it often becomes a matter of moral considerations and balancing good/evil to do so.

My point being that when applied to politicians, there's a long term motive for it, as well as a short term virtue signalling one. Certainly not the largest motive, but it does subtly apply. However I might be overestimating the intellectual capacity of the Republican Party here, as I don't get the impression from their policies that some of them are that bright.
If one comes from a worldview with non-consequentialist morality, I don't think an appeal to effectiveness would be very convincing against the prohibition in itself (at best, to revise it). That's probably what it comes down to, though the Alabama law is remarkable in its utterly biting the bullet on the consequences. That used to be a moral puzzle against anti-abortionists: if abortion is murder of children, what moral sense do exceptions on rape and incest actually make? So according to Alabama, it's just flat wrong.

That it alienates a bunch of people, to the point of many anti-abortion advocates being very unhappy with it and its utter political ineptitude, is another issue. It's simply too dumb to not be honest, which makes it highly implausible that much consideration has gone into it besides drinking the kool-aid on the logical consequences of the core moral claim.
Not very knowledgeable in philosophy like you, so I'm probably going to put stuff with existing counter arguments forward, but I'll bite.

Non consequential 100% is rather...nonsensical in itself as a position? I mean taken to extremes, you can start arguing that you didn't murder someone, you just pulled a trigger after pointing a gun, like there has to be some consequences or in effect there is going to be none, because that's literally the nature of reality. But lets ignore that and say there's some type of logically and consistent ethical system, let us call it x, that means it's wrong in the style we brought up above and so handwave that issue away.

Then I guess we go to the problem that pushing for banning something is in itself consequential, it's not like the anti abortion people are doing abortions themselves, like what sense does engaging in a consequentialist act and engaging in political opposition against it do? That's not waving a wand, it's pushing in an overall direction and that direction isn't working, then why do it?

And I agree it doesn't make sense if it's the murder of children, without going into the line of reasoning that different people are worth more then others, which might be popular with a certain segment of the GOP (lol), but that's no means a majority of them. I guess some anti abortion people even though they think as such on the surface, subconsciously don't actually think that as human beings tend to display a higher level of altruism and empathy towards living people then featuses.

If I had to ponder myself, a good logical argument I can see for that ethical system would be that even though a fetus isn't as important as a full blown human being, it's still of some value and should be classed in line with intelligent animals like elephants or dogs. It thus being wrong to kill them for no serious reason, but in emergencies humans take priority...I don't think they go for that one though, as that'd also be an argument for vegetarianism and I don't see many vegetarian anti abortion people.

I guess it's more the logical consequence of politics. One side wants something, the other wants something. The other use a certain argument lots and lots against the first, so the first basically stick up a bill, which gets what they want 99% of the time and kills the ammo of their opponents, heh. That pushes the equilibrium towards that discourse position in the long run.
 
Back
Top Bottom