It's so unsettling seeing anti-abortion rhetoric from young people

I like to remind these people that the success rate from zygote to blastocyst is around 50% meaning that over half of all conceptions end in miscarriage.

I never really found this to be a good argument, honestly. You could use the same logic to say that it's okay to commit murder because people die in accidents all the time. That success rate could be 100% and abortion would still be fine because a fetus isn't a person.
- Yeah a lot of attempts to debate pro-lifers end up conceding to them the idea that abortion is murder but then just try and debate that actually it's justified. The real argument is that no it's stupid to act like destroying something that has the potential to become a fully developed person is the same as killing a fully developed person, if it was jacking off and having a period would be mass murder.
- It's not a standalone argument. It says that if you believe that life begins at conception, then you believe the vast majority of people who have birthed children are guilty of manslaughter. And I think that illustration is a good way to open up how preposterous it is to equate a handful of cells to a breathing, dreaming, social human being.
- Yeah I agree, using that argument seems like more of a “gotcha” attempt than an actual logical comparison.
  
  It would be a good argument against criminalizing miscarriages tho, which is something that we have seen being pushed in some US states.
- I agree. It's less an argument for abortion, and more an argument for ourselves to show that they don't actually care about the lives of the unborn.
Or as I like to call it, God’s abortions

When I was young and radical I thought all young people were radical and when we took over the world would swing left.

Turns out there's every political position in every age bracket. Always has been.

I live rural so I get to see lil genA slur me because that's what they were taught. The whole rebellious forward-thinking youth concept isn't a universal social construct.

. It’s indoctrinated by mom n pop.

These kids learn this shit from somewhere. At home.

As a great theoretician once said, these kids didn't fall out of a coconut tree!
As someone who grew up in the southern US, kids are told to be anti-abortion by the Christian churches. There's lots of churches that have youth services and after-school programs. They entice kids from 13-18 to attend with promises of free food and access to sports equipment. Many teens choose to attend the churches because they have bad home life or by peer pressure. Then the churches tell the teens that all sex before marriage is sinful, that being LGBT is wrong, and that abortion is murder.
Hasn't there been a rise in young people who were raised in more "liberal" or even mildly progressive homes who take a right wing shift in their youth? I was kinda under the impression that's were dudes like Kermit the Peterson were getting most of their fanboys.
- Yep and it's because the fascist media is well funded on social media, it's hard for them not to click on a video.
Yes. I’m actually gonna push back on the assumptions in this thread that’s there’s a significant amount of young people who are not religious or were raised without religion and are somehow turning against legal abortion. Support for banning legal abortion tracks very strongly with certain religious persuasions. I have never seen anyone under 40 - IRL or online - who has espoused anti-abortion views who wasn’t already religious.

And young people ARE increasingly less religious, the statistics are pretty stark. That doesn’t lessen the risk of rising fascism of course. But young people are either not raised with religion or turning away from the one they were raised with in droves. There is no statistically significant number of young, irreligious Americans who are all of the sudden turning to religion, especially more conservative versions like Traditional Catholicism or White Evangelicalism.
It's not just mom and pop anymore. Kids (and adults) spend far too much time online and not enough time touching grass and legitimately talking to real people.

When I was in community college (pre Trump era), there was a girl about my age (early 20s), who had a speech class with me. One of the assignments we had was to go up and tell the class what our greatest ambition in life was. We all gave mundane answers, like when I went up and told everyone I wanted to teach history to high schoolers. The girl went up and told the class her greatest ambition was to see abortion outlawed throughout the country. This girl interned with members of the state legislature and possibly does the same sort of work in the state Republican machine today. I never did see how Trump changed her. She was one of those Abigail Shapiro types so, it would be interesting to see how her brain processed seeing a godless pig-man like Trump delivering on her greatest desire.

Having known those types seeing a grotesque mockery of their professed morals like Trump do something like outlawing abortion would have them serenely saying "the lord works in mysterious ways."
- Yep. "He's our Cyrus the Great, a modern Messiah". It would be either that or going full NeverTrump, and that's quite hard to maintain for 8 years when he's racking up victories for them.
  
  But, either way you could easily see her supporting someone slightly more presentable with the same policies, like DeSantis.

I think a lot of right-wing positions are the result of people consciously deciding to stop thinking about a given issue. Someone gives them a simple black and white explanation for something, and then they never have to wrestle with it again. Human life has to begin somewhere, and birth is probably too late, so let's just make it conception. Done. Free speech is something you either have or you don't, so you have to respect nazis. Economics is nothing more than supply and demand.

That's a bingo.

I'm never surprised by the complete lack of intellectual curiosity of some ppl. Everything was answered in the 6th grade.
The central intellectual problem most Americans wrestle with is how to present themselves so people don't think they're gay. Being mistaken as gay is their worst fear and it extends to every aspect of their political ideology.
- Ha! I think this accurately describes a lot of the most toxic characters we have for sure.

Patriarchy is collapsing in on its own contradictions, revealing gender fascism. By 2050 the gender binary will become political transsexual lesbians and raging incels. power-genius

Why are you surprised? Conservative/fascist propaganda has a strong grip on the online spaces. They have all the funding in the world.

Teenage me saw Bush-era anti-conservatism, New Atheism and statistics showing young people were coming much more gay and much less religious and naively assumed conservative Christianity was done for

I just assumed things would continue to develop in that direction

I'm old enough to remember when people waxed poetic about Millennials being saviors.

spoiler

The kids are never the revolutionary youth everybody hopes for.

Abortion is the perfect Spectacle of politics for the non-political. It's always the idealism of "outlawing" abortion, but never looking at anything theoretical, material or historical (1, 2).

These very same people will turn around and say "people need to be responsible" whenever any kind of basic welfare policy is brought up. And what strategy do they offer?

(the only mandatory choice, all others optional)
picketing a Planned Parenthood building
Aggressively tell everybody they are pro-life/anti-abortion to reinforce their self-identity
Devolve into infighting as any such policy inevitably does not fit the fickle members' all-or-nothing ideal solution.

Finally, George Carlin nailed these people harder than Pilot did Christ.

spoiler

Boy these conservatives are really something. They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born you're on your own (sticks up middle finger). Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that they don't want to know about you They don't want to hear from. No nothing! No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing! If you're pre-born you're fine. If you're pre-school you're fucked.

You're Fucked!

Conservatives don't give a fuck about you until you reach ... military age! Then they think you are just fine. Just what they've been looking for! Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life... Pro-life... These people aren't pro-life; they're killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? Anti-women. Simple as it gets. Anti-woman! They don't like them. They don't like women! They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a broodmare for the State.