Wow, you definitely found some fertile ground with that response.

I think you strongly switched gears somewhere between your first and second sentence. It's seems as though you are leaving the notion for "from each...to each.." in favor of another core value: Equality. Unless of course, the thing that relates the two ideas is that the driving force behind "from each...to each..." is not actually fairness (as someone might assume), but the pursuit of a certain type of equality (which is often called "equality of outcome")

Here would be an area where we do disagree. Probably quite strongly. I believe in all my heart with equality, but to me equality means three things:

1. Equality of value: Every human being has the same rights, dignity, and inherent worth

2. Equality under the law: Every human being gets treated fairly

3. Equality of opportunity: This is the natural result of the second point, but it's worth listing on its own

I am strongly against equality of outcome because it conflicts with another core value: Liberty.

You can't have liberty and equality of outcome. It's absolutely impossible.

I actually thought there was an op-ed out of Australia that made this point really well from someone on the other side from me. She was arguing that it should be illegal to be a stay at home mum (you know she wasn't American because she didn't say "mom").

She made the point about that feminism isn't about choice (i.e. liberty), but equality (i.e. equality of outcome)

To me, this is a crazy argument. Yes, It's great that we live in a world where the professional sphere has opened up to women. But telling women what they should value so that the genders splits look good on national statistics is misogyny on par with telling women that they have no place in the workplace.

My wife was told by a coworker that if she didn't come back to work after having a baby she would set the womens' liberation movement back 50 years. When she told me the story, I quipped that if the womens' lib movement was so threatened by a woman making her own choices, it deserves to be buried in the past.

It's interesting that in the USA, we have this slogan "believe all women." It essentially means that if a woman claims she was raped, we should prosecute the accused without due process (especially in the court of public opinion). But if a woman says she wants to be a homemaker, the "believe all woman" line vanishes. All of a sudden, everyone freaks out that there is a woman who is "brainwashed by the patriarchy." How dare she be brainwashed by the patriarchy? Doesn't she know that she should be brainwashed by compassionate, enlightened liberals? After all, she's only free if she obeys people whose values she doesn't agree with. Because that's a sentence that makes sense.

You mention that capitalism relies on a family unit that has inherent inequalities, but no matter what socialist policies you propose, those inequalities will never go away. Men will never get pregnant, no matter what the laws say. I always tell my wife, you should never keep score in a marriage, but if we were going to keep score, it's 4-0 you and that gap is never going to narrow.

I also find it interesting when people bring up equality of outcome, they tend to restrict it to a suspiciously narrow scope: "250 of the 500 fortune 500 CEO's should be female!" Okay, when do we stop? Is society still equal if 90% of inmates are men? How about 90% of plumbers? 90% of electricians? 90% of garbagemen? In the US, we have Title IX. If you want to give sports scholarships to men, you have to give an equal number to women. Do we extend that to everything? If you want to file a sexual harassment complaint against a man, you better file one against a woman to even it out. What's that? More men commit sexual harassment than women? Doesn't matter. Just like it doesn't matter that most of the people psychopathic enough to actually want be be a fortune 500 CEO are men. All we care about here is the output, not the inputs.

But let's bring it back to abortion. I find this sentence very fascinating: "Reproductive rights are a fundamental enabler for a truly equal society."

1. "Reproductive rights" is not a good euphemism for abortions. Mother's don't have the right to kill their child, they have the responsibility to care for their child. It's also not a good euphemism for abortion because...

2. Except in cases of rape, women can still determine their own destiny reproductive destiny without abortion. In fact...

3. Abortion allows for gender discrimination in a way that normal family planning does not. That's why there are so many more men than women in China. Regardless of what you mean by equality, abortion is fundamentally at odds with it because it introduces the possibility of sex-based discrimination

4. What exactly do you mean by "equal society" here? If we mean equality of outcome, I'm out. I'll take liberty. All day, every day.

The other point I want to bring up about abortion relates to to that fourth point. It's often pointed out that conservatives tend to want less government control in every area...except abortion. Likewise, liberals tend to want increased government control in every area...except abortion.

Are they both just being inconsistent? Should both parties switch platforms on abortion and the world would make more sense?

Personally, I don't think so. Conservatives are almost always strongly against the most extreme form of small government out there: Anarchy. The rule for conservatives is that the government should mostly stay out of our affairs to preserve liberty (and because the government tends to make things worse, not better). But they strongly believe there should be a government. And what is the most basic function of the government? To uphold law and order and to protect it's citizens as well as anyone else who may find themselves within the country's borders. Now in America, you could argue (based on the 14th amendment) that an American child doesn't become a citizen until the time of birth. But the back half of the 14th amendment is designed to protect everyone, not just citizens. The most basic function of government is to protect people.

And it still seems to me like "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" is a strongly anti-abortion slogan. Yes, it cuts against equality of outcome when you talk about men's vs. women's roles, but it's biology that's doing that, not capitalism or socialism. The woman can carry a child, so that is her "ability." The child's father has a need for a woman to carry the child, because he can't do it. And of course, the child has the most obvious need of all. One which only the pregnant mother can meet.

So it seems to me that for socialism to be at all internally consistent, it would have to be strongly against abortion. Childbirth doesn't produce equal outcomes, but that's not a capitalist or patriarchal conspiracy, it's just reality.