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May 5, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

My hope is that it helps us understand what it is we disagree about. Without this starting point there is no productive debate. There is almost no support for abortion in the third trimester, which is a reminder that much of the substantive debate isn't about whether a woman should control her body or not, but about when we should say there's a body and when we should say there are two human bodies. Or, to paraphrase CS Lewis, it is not that people don't object to killing witches, it is that people don't believe witches exist. ("You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.")

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On your question about "grave moral evil". the first thing I did was to stop thinking about people onvolved in efforts to prohibit legal abortion as involved in evil. the second was to refine the differences between the two "sides", rather that people were commited mor to one positive value more than another. The two values are respect for life and respect for women's moral agency. There may have been a time in history when ethical dilemmas came down to obvious choice between good and evil. That time is mostly over; instead we are faced with competing goods where both can not be honored. Whichever one is chosen, ther is loss and we regret the loss. It is hard to maintain this balance as it requires not thinking your value is the better one.

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What do you hope you can learn about people on the other side of this debate?

I don't live in a bubble, so I've always heard, listened to, and read, opposing views.

How do you hope this debate will prepare you to talk to people you love, who disagree with you about abortion?

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I don't tend to talk political disagreement points with the people I'm close to. The points of agreement and non-political discussions matter far more.

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founding

I find it very hard at the moment to have an abortion discussion with anyone who is unwilling to discuss the idea of men bearing the brunt of anti-abortion legislation.

As Gabrielle Blair, Mormon mother of 6, puts it, "men are 100% responsible for unwanted pregnancies". In her ages-ago twitter thread, she contemplated getting boys vasectomies at puberty, which, if you consider abortion a grave on-the-scale-of-slavery moral evil, sounds absolutely reasonable. Her excellent thread: https://designmom.com/twitter-thread-abortion/

Once you start discussing any legislation that impacts *men* or requires any sort of intervention on mens bodies, its amazing how quickly men (and women!) are repulsed. It calls to mind the many trials of male birth control that are stopped because of the side effects experienced in the trials, side effects that are minute compared to those tolerated by millions of women on birth control today.

Of course, we don't talk about vasectomies or male birth control in the context of the abortion debate. Because it's not actually about abortion. It's about state power. And specifically, it's a desire for the state to impose the will of "the Church" (catholic / orthodox / evangelical, definitely Christian).

In the leaked opinion it's about not just abortion, but nullifying gay marriage, reinstating sodomy laws, giving states the chance to ban birth control, taking trans kids to re-education camps. It's not a return to the 1950s, it's a police state on a scale that is almost unimaginable.

To answer your question - what I'd hope to learn is just how how clearly anti-abortion folks see the illiberal society they hope to impose. Are they horrified by banning birth control, or do they embrace it? How about taking away their guncle's ability to marry?

And I honestly wonder if anti-abortion folks understand the dream of what our pluralistic democracy could be. The hopes the majority of our country has for our nation's future. And the heartbreak of its destruction.

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