I agree that a topic like abortion by default doesn’t fit well on LW. However, I could imagine some posts about abortion might be okay on LW (but wouldn’t get on the frontpage, I’m guessing, because they’d be too at risk of triggering political fights). For example, a post analyzing various abortion policies and what effects they have without making a strong policy recommendation (or making multiple policy recommendations based on what objectives one is trying to achieve) would probably be fine and interesting. A post about how [terrible thing] will befall [group x] as a result of changes to US abortion policy would probably end up too political.
One aspect of the topic I would be interested in is expected long-term effects on population growth rates, potential movements/migrations as a result, etc. I’d expect there to be some data on the topic if other nations have done anything similar in the past, and while I don’t feel qualified to analyze such topics in any depth, I can imagine it being handled well.
I agree that a topic like abortion by default doesn’t fit well on LW. However, I could imagine some posts about abortion might be okay on LW (but wouldn’t get on the frontpage, I’m guessing, because they’d be too at risk of triggering political fights). For example, a post analyzing various abortion policies and what effects they have without making a strong policy recommendation (or making multiple policy recommendations based on what objectives one is trying to achieve) would probably be fine and interesting. A post about how [terrible thing] will befall [group x] as a result of changes to US abortion policy would probably end up too political.
One aspect of the topic I would be interested in is expected long-term effects on population growth rates, potential movements/migrations as a result, etc. I’d expect there to be some data on the topic if other nations have done anything similar in the past, and while I don’t feel qualified to analyze such topics in any depth, I can imagine it being handled well.
I think there are ways to treat those kind of topics in a productive way (through ideological Turing tests for example).