Abortion--a two-edged political sword

Whether you're for or against it, you need to realize what abortion means as an issue.

First, it has little or nothing to do with saving lives, however you define "life." Advances in medicine mean that abortion is now safe and easy--at least as easy as the average trip to the dentist. Which means that even if if were banned, most people--apart from the poorest and most ignorant--would still be able to get safe abortions (often chemically).

That is, it's like alcohol consumption and Prohibition. Unless America became a true Police State--beyond even what Iran is today--banning abortion 

Second, the importance of the abortion issue to the Republican Party's biggest donors also has little or nothing to do with saving lives, however you define "life." For them the importance is that it's a highly charged issue that can help elect people who will then help them get more money, while abortion-hampering legislation is "profit-neutral."

That's a two-edged sword, though, as the GOP's paymasters discovered when it cost them control of the Senate in the last election, through anti-abortion fanatics winning primaries who could not win a statewide election.

More strategically, anti-abortion fanaticism is part and parcel of a range of the GOP losing its more educated members even as it cements its bond with its base (thanks to Nixon's Southern Strategy) of undereducated rural Southern white men and their wives. Former moderate Republicans are now indepenedents, whose vote is far from guaranteed.

Now the GOP's paymasters have gotten alarmed. They set a fire and are now having trouble controlling it. Especially since many who voted in Republican legislators in 2010 in hopes of getting more jobs and less taxes wound up getting mostly anti-abortion legislation.

And even many who would like to see fewer abortions happening are also alarmed by the extreme language of the Christian Taliban that you can see in abundance in newspaper comment threads about abortion.

Criminalizing abortion works about as well as Prohibition did.

The anti-abortion movement--you know, the people who flatter themselves by calling their movement "pro-life"--really comes out of the woodwork with cases like Dr. Gosnell's.

This is a strange bunch. First, although they showcase the clinics they set up to compete with Planned Parenthood, their overwhelming focus is on criminalizing abortion.

But only where it's convenient, and with little actual effect. The number of abortions didn't change significantly after Roe V. Wade legalized abortion within limits, nor did they get safer for the most part, because an abortion is, medically, a minor procedure with low risk for the pregnant female. It doesn't require surgery or taking potentially dangerous drugs whether it's done legally or otherwise. It's only dangerous when people resort to folk remedies.

By "only where it's convenient" I mean that even with Dr. Gosnell, he was just the hired hand. The girls and women who came to him hired him to abort their fetuses. If that's murder, then the pregnant females are guilty of capital murder, and Dr. Gosnell was just their assistant.

Yet if you look down comment threads on articles about Dr. Gosness you don't see a single anti-abortion activist calling for these females to prosecuted for premeditated murder. Nor do any call for banning in vitro fertilization and prosecuting those women--desperate to become pregnant--again for capital murder, since in vitro fertilization involves fertilizing many eggs but then destroying most of them.

This isn't just hypocritical--it's grossly sexist. Those women. They're just mushy-brained females who only do what big strong men tell them to do.

It's as if we've been teleported to a fundamentalist Muslim village in rural Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

What we see here is most anti-abortion activists being tightly focused on getting revenge on the men that women hire to do abortions instead of doing things that would actually reduce abortions, starting with proper sex ed & providing contraceptives to one & all....See More

 

Dr. Gosnell the baby killer vs. the Pro Lifers

What we see in "Pro-life" comments about articles about Dr. Gosnell is the luxury of moral posturing without regard to real world consequence.

It's so inconvenient to see how often idealistic policy turns into horrors as it plays out.

Consider China vs. India. China implemented its One Child policy--including forced abortion for miscreants--in 1979. India tried something of the sort but, being a democracy, was forced to give in to the opposition of people like the anti-abortion crusaders you see on this thread.

Today the consequences--and contrasts--are stark. Individual Chinese hate having to obey the policy. Selective abortion of female fetuses has produced millions of excess males. But nobody's starving.

India now has hundreds of millions more people than China. In "pro-life" India, 7,000 Indians die of starvation every day, including more than 5,000 babies below the age of one--babies who never knew a moment of living without suffering. In a land where mothers saw their children's legs off to make them better beggars. Or simply abandon them, as the heartbreaking film "Salaam Bombay" shows.

In the real world Dr.Gosnell was a piker compared to India's "Pro-Lifers."

Abortion morality on Lifeboat Earth

re: should moral policy be based on science, not religion?

Every religion espouses a unique set of rules for living. There are Many hundreds of religions with active congregations. It would be impossible to find a subset of rules they all agree with.

Science can encode morality to a degree because of basic principles that are hardwired into the human brain (humans violate those rules every second, but they pay a heavy inner price for doing so). Of course science has its limits, and we're only starting to grasp the nature of consciousness.

The Bible ascribes consciousness to the fetus of John the Baptist, but doesn't say whether that was a special case--he being a prophet and all--and elsewhere gives babies no legal rights until they've survived 30 days out of the womb.

We can say, though, that "life" can't be said to begin at the moment of conception--monozygotic twins and chimeras along disprove that--along with the fact that so many fertilized eggs have zero chance of turning into a born, survivable baby. Even the inception of a heartbeat or brainwaves are arbitrary, with nothing linking these events to what we know as consciousness.

The only sure measure we have is survivability without modern medical care out of the womb. I'd be willing to sign on to that as a measure. Survivability with hi-tech care is morally appalling, since it excludes all those denied such an opportunity.

But for me the overpopulation crisis trumps all these considerations. That's why I say the morality of a land with infinite elbow room, infinite drinkable water, infinite arable land, is different from the morality of the lifeboat. The movie Life of Pi explores this BTW.

India has literally hundreds of millions of "food-insecure" people, many literally starving to death, and their land cannot sustain their current numbers. China does not, though it's close to a water crisis even so. China's morality vs. India's morality illustrates what I'm talking about.

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

Abortion provider Dr. Gosnell is the anti-abortionistas' red herring

Americans are split on abortion overall but not on the extreme positions: about a quarter of Americans believe, like me, that abortion should be legal in all cases--but only one out of ten Americans believe it should always be illegal.

And that tenth are anything but true to their beliefs. If they were, they'd be clamoring for prosecuting women who get abortions for first degree murder--after all, the abortion providers are just people hired by the women. If a woman hires a hit man to kill her husband, I guarantee you the women will be prosecuted.

And the anti-abortion crowd should be clamoring for having fertility clinics closed and the parents desperately trying to have children prosecuted for first degree murder as well, since nearly all of them choose to have the embryos they don't use "discarded."

This doesn't mean the anti-abortion crowd are hypocrites. They might just be the sort of people who don't think about what they're doing before they do it. Shallow people swayed by sonograms.
Like the Republican congress that tried to "save" Terri Schiavo because they were certain she was alive because of their interpretations of her movements--then it turned out she had no brain left. Ooops.

Likewise these people are certain about the nature of human embryos with no scientific basis at all. Not to mention no biblical basis for their nutty ideas.

Lastly, anti-abortionism totally ignores the fact that humanity is in the throes of an overpopulation crisis. Earth's total population is increasing at the rate of over 140 people per minute. Already a billion humans are starving at any given time. The anti-abortion crowd acts as it the Earth in general and America in particular have infinite resources, or that Science will fix everything.

They still haven't figured out how immoral their "morality" really is here on Lifeboat Earth. In the long run, they're actually "pro-death."

Abortion and Christianity

What's moral in an abundant, empty land overflowing with trees and streams and plains is different from what's moral in a lifeboat.

Christianity enshrines the human race's instinctive urges to "be fruitful and multiply." Those urges made sense until the abundant land that Earth once was turned into a lifeboat with no rescue in sight and more people on the boat than supplies to sustain them.

Today it would take at least two planet Earths to sustain even the people we now have in the circumstances they now live in, yet we only have 1.0 Earths, and humanity's numbers are currently swelling at the rate of 140 more people total every single minute. 

For example, within this century the world's coral reefs will be extinct, along with the rich ecosystem that depends on them, thus denying the main protein source for many millions of people who live in the tropics. This is because the oceans are becoming acidic, due to all the C02 humans are producing. With the coral reefs all the oceans' shellfish will also go extinct from the same cauise, denying us another important food source. And there's almost certainly nothing we can do to reverse this process at this point. 

Already many millions of people don't have access to potable water. They drink filthy water and get terrible diseases as a consequence. China is running out of water, pumping its wells dry, and so it will dam the Mekong River that today sustains Vietnam. This will turn much of Vietnam into something close to a desert. Futurists predict that the next major wars will be over water, since so many rivers flow from one country into another. We already did that to Mexico when we dammed the Colorado and destroyed Mexican agriculture in the Colorado delta. 

The price of staple foods is soaring all around the world. Anyone who shops for their family has noticed it, but we can absorb the price jumps. In the third world many can't, and consequently more and more people are moving into the "food-insecure" category.

The world had a billion people in 1804. It has 7 billion now, and that is double what it was just a few decades ago. 

The agricultural production revolution of the 1970s moved the cliff farther away, but humanity didn't use the respite to mend its ways. Now the cliff is getting nearer and nearer, and there won't be another tech revolution to save us this time, wishful thinking notwithstanding.

So talk about abortion must take place in the lifeboat, not in the Eden, and what was moral and even desirable in Eden is a very different matter in the lifeboat.

Christianity thus far has totally refused to face this. Understandably. Because it entails agonizing choices that go directly against instincts honed over millions of years. But it is intellectual and spiritual cowardice not to face things as they are.

Christianity thus far is acting like someone who's been told they have cancer. You know the drill: denial, rage, bargaining, grieving, acceptance. 

Christianity is still at "denial." (along with every other major religion of course)

The GOP declares no abortions, no exceptions

EDIT ADD: FactCheck.org says the GOP Platform's proposed Personhood Amendment doesn't specify any followup laws--that would be up to Congress and the individual states. Could be no abortions, no exceptions, could make rape/incest/mortal mother danger exceptions or any combo thereof, with various time limits or other variables.

I'd bought off on the Obama campaign's "no abortions no exceptions" claim, which FactCheck.org said is too extreme. Such an amendment would enable a state legislature or Congress to mandate such a conclusion but it doesn't mandate such a mandate. At the same time I'd pretty sure it would make abortion constitutionally illegal except under narrowly defined circumstances, even if Blue states tried to keep the current abortion laws.

As it happens Romney has said (in the most recent incarnation of his beliefs) that he favors exceptions for rape and incest, while Ryan opposes abortion even after rape/incest--he'd only make an exception if the pregnant child or woman would die otherwise.

So from my point of view this platform plank isn't as bad as my earlier entry (below) assumes--it's only 90% as bad. And it still shows how much today's Republican Party has journeyed into becoming the political expression of fundamentalist Christianity. Even its anti-government obsession reflects its unacknowledged conviction that America should be some sort of theocracy-with-voting, as Iran is and Egypt is probably becoming. Q'uran-based government, Bible-based government...different--Bible-base would be less murderous, less misogynistic...by comparison. On the other hand fundamentalist Muslims are more honest about their goals.

What obscures this is the Party's public face, that's all about the economy, while the private face is all about other things--such as abortion--as shown by the legislative behavior of the Tea Party wherever it gains power--especially since the economic claims are false--especially as regards the deficit, because their legislative agenda's math doesn't add up according to the CBO and the fact-checking organizations.

And when the surface is contradictory you have to dig deeper to find the underlying unity. And that's a religion-driven absolutist vision

Here's the original essay, FWIW:

Well, the Republican Party couldn't be clearer. Today the Party leadership said that abortion should be illegal with no exceptions whatsoever. This rubber-stamps the official position of the Catholic Church.

Rape? Suck it up. 10 year old girl raped by her stepfather? Suck it up. Pregnant woman will die if she isn't aborted, and the embryo too? You'll both get your reward in Hevvin.

And Candidate Akins in Missouri didn't "misspeak" when he said raped women didn't get pregnant. He was just making public the Republican subculture's folk belief that raped women don't get pregnant because their body prevents it, so if a pregnant woman seeks an abortion because she claims she was raped, she is by definition lying. Mind you, educated Republicans don't believe this. But millions of Republicans aren't educated and do believe this. And the Tea Party Republicans in Congress report to them and have a chokehold on the GOP.

Well, and you know wimmen. They're too emotional to make their own decisions about important things. The men will tell them what to do. It's for their own good.

As for raped 10 year olds being forced to give birth--which is physically and mentally extremely destructive--there have been several cases in recent history in Latin America where the Catholic Church  forced this outcome upon the little rape victims.

And of course all this is based on another folk belief--that a one-celled dependent organism that might or might not be born nine months later is a little bitty man or woman. Not only does this have no basis in science, it's bad theology as well.

Because monozygotic twins and chimeras aren't formed at the "moment of conception." And many if not most of those fertilized eggs have zero chance of becoming a human being later on. Even those that would be viable in the right fetal environment don't always get that environment. Some don't implant on the uterine wall; some implant in the fallopian tubes (ectopic pregnancy), which is not viable. Some are allergic to the mother's biochemistry. Some are fine but get stuck in the birth canal, which, before modern medicine, doomed both the embryo and the woman. And some are viable enough to get born but have zero chance of becoming human, such as anencephalic fetuses, or those with other birth defects that doom them sometime between the fallopian tube being cut and a few hours or days absent massive medical intervention.

This is why the Bible assigns rights to babies once they've been born and alive for a month. If you wanted sound theology, assigning a soul to a baby when the fallopian tube is cut and it has a chance to live more than a few hours is the only merciful and logical option.

Anti-abortion fanatics uniformly insist to the outside world that their stance is entirely scientific and not religious. They talk about heartbeat and brain activity. Most of the science they quote is dead wrong. The rest is true but misapplied. What's most true is that they're lying, lying boldly and shamelessly. Most of them don't know enough about science to even make the argument.

If they were honest they'd admit that their religion teaches them that we're ensouled at the moment of conception (I don't know where the souls of anencephalic fetuses go--kidneys? gall bladder?). Armed with that belief and their church's rigid injunction against abortion, regardless of consequences to the mother and the planet, they go looking for words and images that are science in the same way that a drawing of an airplane is an actual airplane.

And most of these people got no real biology training in high school because in Red State American high school biology instruction has been gutted by an effective, nationwide grassroots offensive (both meanings) aimed at silencing biology teachers from talking about evolution and related topics.

I used to wonder how the relative enlightenment of the Ancient Greeks and Romans got supplanted by a millenium of prideful ignorance and superstition.

I wonder no more.

Defend Life!

On every anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, anti-abortion zealots demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court. Many carry signs like the ones shown here, printed up by the Catholic Church's militant social engineering organization the Knights of Columbus.

I doubt anyone who carries such placards is aware of the irony of what they're doing. Especially since nearly all of them would call themselves conservatives.

Conserve-ative. Someone who's centered on conserving.

All this is a tribute to the fact that some of our noblest instincts, instincts that evolved on a planet radically different from the one we live on today, are now instincts that betray us.

And it's a tribute to the fact that most people's reasoning abilities aren't much better than that of an adult crow.

If you hang a treat from a branch on a string, most adult crows can figure out what to do to get the treat without having to experiment. They look at the setup, fly up to the branch, and pull the string up with their claws and beak, and soon have the treat. 

But if you toss the string over a higher branch, so the crow would have to pull down on the string to bring the treat up towards them, they can't handle that kind of two-step logic.

Likewise, these people who want to "defend life" see sonograms of a fetus that certainly looks like a human being, and they want to save it.

But tell them that the human race is expanding at the rate of over 140 people a minute (after deaths are subtracted), on a planet that isn't expanding, and whose ability to sustain us is actually shrinking, so that only by supporting Communist China's One Child policy and promoting its adoption worldwide can we even start to stave off world disaster...you can see their eyes glaze over.

You might as well show a spreadsheet to a chimpanzee and expect them to understand it.

We developed the instincts the "defend life" people express when the human race had shrunk to around 1,600 fertile females plus probably an equivalent number of males, after a Sumatran volcano explosion 80,000 years ago had pumped so much guck into the atmosphere that photosynthesis nearly stopped for several years and the world's animal life was starving to death.

Back then we needed a fierce will to survive and have kids and protect them against all odds.

Today's situation demands that we deny these powerful instincts.

But most people don't even try. They deny that there's an overpopulation problem, or that it applies to us, or that if there is magical new technology will solve it, or if it won't, God will reach down and solve it, and if He won't it doesn't matter because Earth doesn't matter--only Heaven. And God told us to stop abortion--it's right there in the Bible!

Actually the Bible only confers any rights at all on children when they're a month old--thus OK'ing not just abortion but infanticide. But that's in the Old Testament. In the New Testament...nothing about abortion. Just stuff about being nice to people, which anti-abortionistas assume includes fetuses, which no one in biblical times would have imagined. It's applying contemporary ideas to biblical terms.

Elaborate justification of anti-abortionism abound, of course. You can read one here. And you can read a detailed debunking of such stuff here. Starting with the easily verifiable fact that the word "abortion" appears nowhere in the Bible.

This isn't a problem for Catholics, because they don't use the Bible as their final word on God's instructions for us. They use the Pope's official pronouncements, which routinely override what's in the Bible. What's remarkable is how they persuaded Christian fundamentalists to accept the Pope's pronouncements.

Bottom line: when I see people like the two nice young ladies in the photo holding their Knights of Columbus "Defend Life" signs, I see a pair of very nice crows unintentionally--but effectively--promoting the destruction of the only place in the entire Universe that's available to the human race for life (along with the animals and plants we share this planet with). 

Rejoinder to "pro life" pitch

I wrote this as a letter to the editor (250 word limit) in a local newspaper, in response to a letter by a Catholic couple assailing Planned Parenthood, making all the usual assertions and mistruths about abortion. In this response I chose to sidestep their talking points by making some of my own that I believe trump all of that. The headline also conforms to this local newspaper's length limits (it fits on one line of a typical newspaper column):

Overpopulation reality

Dear Editor: Anti-abortionistas like to flatter themselves with the catchphrase “pro-life” It does describe their good intentions—the kind the road to Hell is paved with.

Their validity depends on overpopulation denialism. Acknowledging the overpopulation crisis would nullify their narrow fixation on abortion. The typical’ rejoinder is that not everyone in every country is having too many children. They’re grasping at straws. Russia’s declining overpopulation doesn’t change the fact that our species would need 1.4 Earths to support its current population at everyone’s current standard of living, including the billion that are starving. And even today’s humongous population isn’t stable—it’s increasing by over 140 people a minute.

Unless anti-abortion zealots can figure out a way for us all not to have to share this one planet, or to add another half-Earth to this one, the pockets of population decline won’t prevent inexorable catastrophe—the collapse of fertilizer/antibiotic-intensive industrial farming/ranching, of trawling-based high tech fishing, potable water resources, and rapid extinction of tropical rainforests (that produce 70% of the oxygen we breathe).

And America isn’t one of those pockets of decline. Our population has quadrupled since 1900—about the same rate as the human race as a whole. Worse yet, the Bay Area has 11 times more people than in 1900, doubling just since 1962. (Yet New Urbanists believe we need more.)

The anti-abortionistas’ philosophy of endless growth is the philosophy of cancer. Slowly but surely it’s dooming us.

Planned Parenthood--helping the helpless or fortress of genocide?

A Washington Post column talked about the Republican House's efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and Title X (which they'd said they'd spare when the first went after Planned Parenthood--but it turns out they don't want to defund abortion--they want to defund healthcare for the poor. Who knew?).


As you can imagine, this article's comment threat flowered with the usual poster waving.


I said:

Consider this comment by a so-called Pro-Lifer:

/>>barbaracjohnson74 wrote:

/>>...Both poor women and rich women have two legs and can keep them locked from their respective love-making partners. All women, therefore, whether poor or rich, have to be responsible for their own conduct. In other words, put a zipper on Pauline, if not a chastity belt. The author's tears in this article for poor pregnant women are simply not persuasive.
2/23/2011 3:23:52 PM

Now consider this pro-lifer's call for people to take responsibility as you read these tidbits, all verifiable through mainstream (not wacko bloggers) information sources:

1. 32,000 rape victims become pregnant annually.

That's 88 pregnancies from rape per day in America. The number doesn't count "coerced sex" of wives and girl friends.

2. Last April 19, CNN reported that a 10 year old girl in Mexico who'd been raped by her stepfather was denied an abortion by local authorities because Mexican law forbids abortions after four months.

According to "barbaracjohnson74" I guess this 10 year old child must have been asking for it. Now she just has to suck it up--though no 10 year old's pelvis is developed enough to carry a pregnancy to term without damage (possibly lifelong), but she should have thought about that beforehand, right? [I'm just trying to think like the people who call themselves "pro-life"]

Cases like this can be found throughout the Latin American countries whose social policies are directed by the Catholic Church.

3. Last June all the major news outlets reported that the Catholic Church excommunicated a nun/hospital administrator for Okaying an abortion, saying "An unborn child is not a disease ... the end does not justify the means."

The woman, suffering from pulmonary hypertension, would have died shortly without the abortion. The fetus, 11 weeks along, could not have survived the mother's death.

Now there's one heckuva pro-life church, huh? BTW child rapists are not automatically excommunicated.

You can't make this stuff up.

4. A survey on abortion attitudes last year by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life revealed that three out of ten active churchgoers believe that abortion should not be illegal in all or most cases.

OTOH one out of four Americans with no religious affiliation say that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

So this isn't a religious vs. nonreligious--nor a political one either. One out of five Democrats oppose abortion, while 29% of Republicans support abortion being generally available.

So all the anti-lib-er-ul invective on this thread is kind of dim-bulby, eh?

5. Nearly all discussion about abortion is based on one side saying women should have control over their bodies, while the other says a zygote--a microscopic one-celled dependent organism should have exactly the same legal status as a one month old baby.

(Note that less than half of all zygotes become babies--the rest die spontaneously, or fail to implant, or are so genetically defective that they can't survive childbirth. So none of these were even potential "babies."

But there's a third opinion: that the world in general and America in particular are in the midst of an overpopulation crisis so extreme that all the world's nations should adopt China's One Child policy.

This has nothing to do with "a woman's right to choose," one way or another. People like are saying it's an emergency that trumps the moralizing on both sides.

America's population has quadrupled since 1900. Many if not most of the measures we've taken to get these people food and water are not sustainable. Porous aquifers are collapsing all over the country. Fisheries are collapsing. Hi-tech agribusiness has polluted waterways and water tables, and large scale monoculture--often of cloned plants--puts us at risk for disease or parasite epidemics like the one that will eliminate the banana we normally eat within a decade or so (as happened to its predecessor in the 1920s).

If you don't understand what I said here you are not qualified to say whether America is overpopulated or not. I realize none of this is obvious. Neither is terminal cancer in its early stages.

We are cantilevered over the abyss. Normal life seems to go on, but under the hood a bunch of really bad things are happening that will eventually make opposition to abortion look suicidal.

Overall the world can sustain about a billion people without environmental degradation. We have seven billion.

Want to see the future? Visit Haiti.

Comments on abortion legislation that the NYTimes deems "inappropriate"

On May 1, liberal NYTimes columnist Charles Blow published a column titled:

Abortion’s New Battle Lines:Legislative changes in several states — combined with less fervent support for abortion rights — could prove to be a new challenge for Roe v. Wade.

Many comments followed, not including mine, which was censored out. Note that I wasn't in disagreement with Blow. In fact I was criticizing those who disagreed with Blow.

Here are the comments I commented on:

#6, from PKBenham:

Speaking of sanctimonious...Ms Burns assumes that poor women are well-served by abortion. Poor women want help to support their children...not a dead baby. The tragedy is the simplistic thinking that assume poor women need abortions or else it is discrimination. The real discrimination is the mindset that promotes abortion of poor unborn babies.

#10, from Nandarini [the NYT removed this comment later; and while I disagree with everything Nandarini says except for the words "the" "and" and "a," I don't understand why he was censored out either]:

The woman who was in the center of the Roe v. Wade case utterly changed her mind later - this is indisputable fact. She may even have become Catholic. I think I recall that, but would not want to state it as fact. So many many young women are in agreement that abortion is killing and more than that, are actively campaigning for life. A wide spectrum of people are clued in to the truth about Margaret Sanger and her targeting of populations she considered unworthy to live, the myth of eventual over population, and disturbing trends involving demographics in developed areas of the world. China is changing its policy. In the US being "pro choice" especially when you are young, is no longer prevalent. Talk with young women. They do not feel oppressed instead honored. You cannot think just a blob of tissue while watching what happens in an abortion with ultrasound. Ultrasound is why Dr. Bernard Nathanson, responsible with others for the propagation of several myths many people believe are truth, as well as the creation of the term "pro choice" later renounced his support and source of income and became Catholic... all after seeing ultrasound. Dr. Nathanson, who is an excellent writer living in NYC who has produced several books, was responsible by his own admission for thousands and thousands of abortions including that of his own child, in his prominent position at a New York hospital several decades ago.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is my comment on the article and these two comments. See if you agree with the NYT that it isn't "fit to print:"

Let's examine some of the dissenting opinions voiced here. I'll refer to anyone who doesn't reveal their gender as "he" for simplicity's sake.

#6, PKBenham, justifies antiabortionism first by presuming that he can read the minds of all women--and that all of them only get abortions because they need child support and can't get it.

But many females don't want to carry a fetus to term. Perhaps you don't realize this, but it's a difficult process, as is childbirth itself.

Without modern medicine, childbirth was the most common way females died (due to the evolution of our big brains, BTW, which only slide through the pelvic girdle with difficulty, because if the girdle were any bigger women wouldn't be able to walk efficiently, and that was mandatory for our hunter/gatherer ancestors).

Women are especially likely to choose abortion if the man is nowhere to be found--and/or a rapist--and/or especially if the rapist is a relative--regardless of whether the state makes child care available.

So it's ridiculous to presume that all women want to give birth whenever they're impregnated, regardless of their situation. Especially if the \"woman\" is a child herself.

This is what gives rise to situations like the one going on as you read this in Mexico, where abortions are nearly impossible to get (except in Mexico City). In the state of Quintana Roo a 10 year old girl who'd been raped by her stepfather is being forced to carry the fetus to term.

This is the Earthly Paradise that antiabortion fanatics, led by the Catholic Church, are determined to impose on us.

Which just goes to show that the Catholic Church's quasi-promotion of child abuse doesn't stop at harboring and protecting its pedopriests--situations like the one in Mexico are repeated regularly throughout the parts of the world dominated by the Church Universal's tender mercies, or by Protestants who follow Catholic dogma where women are concerned.

PKBenham winds up with another dishonest argument, saying "the real discrimination is the mindset that promotes abortion of poor unborn babies."

But there is no such thing as an "unborn baby," neither legally, scientifically, nor biblically (the Bible give babies status only after they're a month old). Note that many fetuses aren't even potential humans.

This is what's known in debate circles as argument by definition. Instead of having the integrity to admit he's making a religious assertion, PKBenham just tries to slip it in.

Thus PKBenham postures as a person of high morals, quite superior to those of us who disagree with his assertions...but then uses cheap debater's tricks to try to win the argument, instead of coming out of the closet and admitting that he's making a purely religious (though non-biblical) argument.

I expert more morality from those who claim they're far above me, morally.

Next we have #10, Nandarini, talking like a Jesuit. He claims that antiabortionism is "campaigning for life," asserts that abortion is a weapon used against the poor countries, and that overpopulation is a "myth."

He's doing what in debate circles is called "lying" (Unless he simply stopped taking his meds and is repeating what the Voices in his head tell him to say.)

Some simple facts, easily corroborated by anyone with Internet access:

1. The world's population has QUADRUPLED since 1900. It's now over 6.8 billion.

2. The human race is increasing in number by over 140 more people per minute, 24 hours a day.

3. United Nations figures estimate that 1 billion people don't get enough food or clean water--they're starving.

4. Virtually every poor country already has more people than its land and water resources can sustain, and usually that sustainability is actually decreasing. Haiti, for example, exploded from 3 million people in 1950 to 10 million now. Its desperate people have chopped down 98% of the country's trees. The exposed topsoil is vanishing in the process known as desertification.

5. As a direct result of overpopulation, the world is currently experiencing the greatest extinction of plant and animal species since the Quicxulub asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

No one finds abortion pleasant. But antiabortionism is a culture of death on a vast scale. People like Nandarini call themselves "pro life." That is a sick joke to anyone who knows anything about ecology.

I'm not talking about women's rights here. I'm talking about upcoming suffering and death that'll make the Black Plague look like a day in the park.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are now named Desertification, Collapse of the Porous Aquifer, Fisheries Collapse, and Chemical-based Agriculture Collapse.

Did you know that oxygen isn't a natural component of the Earth's atmosphere? That 2/3 of it comes from tropical rainforests that hordes of humans are cutting down rapidly? But oxygen won't run low in our lifetimes, so who cares? It's just the pre-pre-born we're endangering...

When "pro-life" is "pro-choice"

Our local public radio station regularly runs op-ed pieces by listeners. Today's featured a 38-year old mother of one who was trying to have a second child. She got pregnant, but testing showed that the fetus had a genetic defect called Trisomy 18. Many with this defect don't even survive to childbirth, and 90% of those who are born die before they're a year old after living a life mostly of suffering.

The mother really wanted a second child. At her age her childbearing years were nearly over. She chose to abort the fetus with Trisomy 18 so she could have a chance to try again--meaning that from this mother's point of view, she chose life.

I bring this up because you can use this true story in talking with people who oppose abortion. Stories like this can help moving a discussion from the equivalent of waving posters and shouting towards more thoughtful discussion.

Let's talk about the Bible and abortion

The abortion debate has become the fulcrum of healthcare reform, so it's a good time to revisit the foundation of "pro-life" ideas: the Bible. Or is it?

Here's every place the word "abortion" appears in the Bible: [nada]

Here's what Christ said we should do about abortion, compared to the other things he told his followers to do: [nada]


So anti-abortion zealots who say they're Christians have placed their ideas above God's and Christ's.

Now the Bible does mention the one who put his ideas above God's: that's Satan.

Which makes anti-abortion zealots Satan worshipers pretending to be Christians.


PS: Anti-abortion zealots constantly state "life begins at conception." Biblically speaking this is unsupported nonsense.

It's what scientists believed in the 19th century. That's what a pope used at the time as the basis for this claim. But 21st century science has proven that this isn't so.

"Life begins at conception" is code language for "God gives us a soul at the moment of conception."

However, anti-abortion zealots don't like to be honest about what they're saying when they're not among fellow Satan worshipers. But if it isn't code words for ensoulment it's empty language, since your liver is also alive, but it doesn't have its own soul.

And we can't all be ensouled at the moment of conception because not all of us are formed at the moment of conception--particularly monozygotic twins and chimaeras--while other fertilized eggs aren't viable no matter how you slice it--so no loving God would ensoul them either.

Other fetuses are theoretically viable but the mother is unable to give birth to them without medical intervention--otherwise they'll die, often taking the mother with them.

So again a loving God would only ensoul such endangered fetuses in countries with universal health care, or whose mothers are wealthy.

Which means that the only religiously justifiable timing for ensoulment is the moment of viable birth--when the baby takes his first breath unaided--not the moment of conception.

But if you want to be strictly biblical, you'd move the goalpost to one month of age, since the Bible accords no status to infants until they reach that milestone.

You'd think people who are this passionate about the Bible would read it.

Loaded language and the unspoken opposite

Every political label delivers its opposite silently.

If I'm pro-choice, you're anti-choice. If I'm pro-life, you're pro-death. If I'm a "person of color" you're either a colorless person or, if "colored," a traitor to your, um, color. If I'm pro-immigrant, you're anti-immigrant, even if you're only anti-illegal immigrant, even if you're really only against the ultrarich who benefit from illegal alien labor.

I don't have to say it in so many words. It's a stealth attack on the other side's honor and integrity--and it also preloads the argument in favor of your side's loaded questions and proposals.

These labels extend to dressing up bills and initiatives with similarly loaded terms. If my bill is called "No child left behind" then you want to leave children behind.

The only honest response is to not allow your opponent to use these terms that stack the deck, even if those terms are now in common parlance. "Master race" was in common parlance in Germany in the 1930s. That didn't make it right. Moreover, you have to give up whatever advantage you may get from using your own side's loaded words. If you do feel you must use some of these loaded terms, tack "so-called" in front of them like Malcolm X did.

This use of loaded terms is so common, so pervasive, that it's tempting--really, really, tempting--to just give in. All I can say to that is it's actually fun to challenge them all the time--as long as you show your willingness to give up your side's loaded terms as well.

One caveat: not all political terms are loaded, but most are. You could argue that "pro-choice" and it's unspoken antonym "anti-choice" are accurate and thus defensible. But an anti-abortion activist would argue that you're against the "unborn child" having a choice. But then you can challenge "unborn child" which is an oxymoron actually, since if a fetus gets "born" too soon you just get a dead fetus, not a born child. That's what a "miscarriage" is. Which is another loaded term, by the way, because there's nothing "mis-" about it. It's usually a woman spontaneously aborting a nonviable fetus. Period.

I would defend "illegal alien." It's the legal term, for one thing. And its antonym is "legal alien," the correct term for someone who's in this country legally. And that isn't pejorative. So this one doesn't fit the model of a term that carries a stealth load of propaganda against the other side.