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Re: What is your political stance?
You're never going to argue somebody into or out of a strongly-held belief. Polemics serve to influence people on the fence, and very few people are on the fence about abortion.
There are a few misunderstandings of history involved in the debate, though. Socially (and legally) acceptable abortion did not begin with Roe v Wade, it's as old as human ethical codes. Life was held to begin at the quickening (not the one from Highlander -- roughly the end of the first trimester) and self-aborting by means of various homespun remedies was simply regarded as restarting a woman's period. It isn't until the rise of the state bureaucracies and their monopolization of medical licensing that this issue even became an issue about life at all. The "abortion" debate is an artificial creation of the state and the medical establishment. It has nothing to do with religion or ethics.
Secondly, sexual activity by unmarried couples has never noticeably spiked or declined in the West. There was no "sexual revolution" -- it was another one of the self-absorbed declarations of the Boomers thinking they invented sex. There has always, through all history, been the idea that our morals are in decline and that we have fallen from an age of chastity and self-discipline to one of decadence and laxity. That's simply selective perception -- we know most of us are sluts, but we don't know that our parents and grandparents were sluts, too. They seem above that, and they talk endlessly about responsibility (just as we do once we have kids, who will then worry they have fallen from our high moral standards). The majority of babies born in the Plymouth Colony, that great bastion of Puritanical purity, were out of wedlock. 'Twas ever thus.
Facts won't change anybody's mind, but they might raise the debate above the old false narrative of "the decline of our morals." There has been no such decline. In human psychology, nothing ever changes. Living generations always think they are "different," either better or worse, but they aren't.
You're never going to argue somebody into or out of a strongly-held belief. Polemics serve to influence people on the fence, and very few people are on the fence about abortion.
There are a few misunderstandings of history involved in the debate, though. Socially (and legally) acceptable abortion did not begin with Roe v Wade, it's as old as human ethical codes. Life was held to begin at the quickening (not the one from Highlander -- roughly the end of the first trimester) and self-aborting by means of various homespun remedies was simply regarded as restarting a woman's period. It isn't until the rise of the state bureaucracies and their monopolization of medical licensing that this issue even became an issue about life at all. The "abortion" debate is an artificial creation of the state and the medical establishment. It has nothing to do with religion or ethics.
Secondly, sexual activity by unmarried couples has never noticeably spiked or declined in the West. There was no "sexual revolution" -- it was another one of the self-absorbed declarations of the Boomers thinking they invented sex. There has always, through all history, been the idea that our morals are in decline and that we have fallen from an age of chastity and self-discipline to one of decadence and laxity. That's simply selective perception -- we know most of us are sluts, but we don't know that our parents and grandparents were sluts, too. They seem above that, and they talk endlessly about responsibility (just as we do once we have kids, who will then worry they have fallen from our high moral standards). The majority of babies born in the Plymouth Colony, that great bastion of Puritanical purity, were out of wedlock. 'Twas ever thus.
Facts won't change anybody's mind, but they might raise the debate above the old false narrative of "the decline of our morals." There has been no such decline. In human psychology, nothing ever changes. Living generations always think they are "different," either better or worse, but they aren't.
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