26
votes
The fight for abortion pills – In the US, UK and around the world, the backlash against safe, at-home abortion medication is growing
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- Title
- The fight for abortion pills
- Authors
- Sarah Manavis
- Published
- Mar 27 2024
- Word count
- 934 words
I'm so lingeringly bitter about Roe. I mean it's reasonable that I'm upset about it, but I'm deeply bitter about the way people who spoke out were dismissed, the way that some people only started to give a damn after it was overturned and some only when their pregnancies were impacted and some only when IVF was targeted, and I have a hard time having any hope of maintaining bodily autonomy in the long term.
Because it just feels like no one cares until it's them.
I think the most straightforward way to improve society would be to teach children ethics starting from the moment they’re able to speak. My dad is a public defender for people on death row, so I was steeped in the world of ethics from a young age.
The issue is that if you start teaching children what selfishness is at the grand scale, how it’s best to sacrifice a little for others to be happy, what it’s okay to impose on others, they’ll go home to their parents and repeat their ethical beliefs in ways that shame them. Conservative rule is built on the pride of insecure men. I expect they’re most sensitive when seeing their children reject their beliefs.
The problem with this being the simplest answer is that ethics is not a single set of beliefs. (I feel like The Good Place did an excellent job of addressing this for the lay person, and it refreshed me from my college philosophy classes). And historically it has often only been from the perspective of the privileged in society. So whose ethics do you teach? And how do you avoid justifying slavery, the oppression of women and minorities and everything else philosophers have justified over time?
I do think that teaching empathy is equally if not more important. But I don't know how to get there at this point.
Agreed, but an ethical framework that is flexible on less important things and inflexible on human empathy and respect is a good place to start. I can’t see any reasonable argument against being good to others.
Sure, but you'd think that there wouldn't be a reasonable argument against teaching accurate history or treating everyone to respect individuals for who they are, and yet there is.
Sesame Street has done this for decades though, and while it's good work, we're still where we are now.
I’m under the impression that teaching kids not to be selfish is something many parents have tried to do, with varying results, since ancient times. This is a fundamental teaching of Christianity, among other things, so I suspect that there are conservative ways to go about it.
But maybe there’s some interesting research to be done about how specifically to do that?
On a society-wide scale, though, it seems more like a “boil the ocean” solution than a straightforward one. Just change the culture of all parents? That’s a really ambitious goal, and not just for the reasons you describe.
One part of the trouble is that there are many, many books giving advice about what parents should do, and probably a lot of studies too, so just popularizing a new approach to parenting would be difficult.
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It looks rather likely that the US Supreme Court won’t make a ruling because the plaintiffs can’t show that they were harmed. (Lack of standing.)
It’s probably in the courts’ interest to not allow any random doctor to go to court over medical regulations they don’t like.