This isn’t getting the “On Changing Opinions” tag of my last few posts because, well, it isn’t a new opinion. In fact in this post I’m not even going to spend time on my actual opinion, which is that immigration shouldn’t be illegal at all. Alas, that’s not likely to happen. So instead, I want… Read More: How do we enforce immigration law when children are involved? »
Over a year ago, I wrote a post about the process of opinion-changing. At the time, I intended to follow up with a series of posts about specific things I had changed my opinion on for various reasons. I never ended up writing any of them, mostly out of laziness. Well, now I’m writing about… Read More: On changing opinions: Climate Change »
I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of changing one’s opinion. It’s not an obvious process with clearly defined stages; it happens in fits and starts, sometimes making leaps in one direction and sometimes backtracking to an earlier place. It can be motivated by education, argument, persuasion, emotion, social pressure, or even simply the… Read More: On changing opinions »
I’ve noticed a consistent pattern from both sides of the abortion debate in the specific terminology chosen to refer to the target of the abortion: Those in the pro-abortion camp invariably refer to it as a “fetus”. Those in the anti-abortion camp invariably refer to it as a “baby”, or sometimes “child”, often with “unborn”… Read More: A note on terminology in abortion debates »
I almost always see pro-abortion arguments framed in terms of the rights and desires of the mother. The argument is essentially that a woman should be allowed to have an abortion because it’s her body and she should have exclusive control over her body. But at what point during pregnancy does a baby get its… Read More: When does abortion become murder? »