Hot take: you shouldn’t subscribe to an ism.

You know what my political affiliation is? I’m an engineer. You want to solve a problem, you break it apart and fix the broken parts.

Abortion? Sure.

What’s the problem? Women are pregnant and they don’t wanna be.

Well how’d they get pregnant? They had unprotected sex, or they got raped(including all kinds here). Teach people how to use birth control and make it easy to get. Teach men about consent. Fund sex crime policing.

That takes care of the input side of the equation. What’s next? Oh yeah, they don’t wanna be pregnant. Why not? Because it could kill them, or wreck thier bodies. OK, well let’s fund research and support for maternal mortality issues (including post-partum). If a pregnancy is likely to kill a woman (like double the normal mortality rate) she should be allowed to abort, even if she’s not in immediate danger. You can’t force somebody to risk their life.

Any other reasons? Because the fetus is severely deformed and will die in pain if allowed to make it to full term? Abortion, no question. Honestly any other position on this one is fucked up. I’m sure of very little when it comes to God, but I’m sure it doesn’t want preventable suffering.

What else? Families can’t afford a kid? Free high quality childcare for everyone. Free healthcare for kids and post-partum mothers (probably for everyone but that’s a different topic).

What about adoption? Well, as they say, adoption is the answer to a different question. Just to cover all cases though, let’s fund high-quality adoption services, including counseling for the birth mother for as long as she needs.

How do we pay for it all? Taxes. Taxes are good for society. Shut the fuck up and pony up your fair share. If you use our stuff, eat our food, drink our clean water, taxes are what you owe.

These are just off the top of my head. The real answers are probably way more complicated, but it’s going to take work to figure it all out. This is how you fix a problem though. Lots of hard work to understand the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then you fix it all.

Does that make me a leftist?

Office Depot sells printers at very low (or even negative) margin, and then inflates the margins on cables, paper, ink, and warranty. If you want the best deal, get the printer from OD, and everything else you need somewhere else. That $20 USB cable they sell costs them $1 and you can get the same or better online for $2.68.