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Via Supergee: Evidently under the impression that the Onion piece “I’m Totally Psyched About This Abortion!” is for real, “Pete” of anti-abortion weblog March Together For Life delivers its author, “Miss Caroline Weber,” a stern talking-to.
Almost as funny: his subsequent attempt to recover.
Well, I guess being raised on a steady diet of absurd lies grants the ability to swallow them without choking...or even chewing.
"Who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
His excuse-conversation with a woman who thought it would be OK under some circumstances to strangle a little girl would be pretty appalling—if I believed any such conversation had actually occurred.
That's almost as good as the fundie groups that cite the Onion article about how Harry Potter has led to a boom in children studying witchcraft and performing grim sacrifices when they try to get the HP books pulled from school libraries and such.
I can imagine someone giving a deadpan "sure, I think it would be fine for a mother to strangle her own five-year-old child" response to a pro-life evangelist who Just. Would. Not. Go. Away.
Oh, I'm sure the conversation occurred. I think the young lady was, como se dice, taking the piss.
Citing an Onion article? I think it was Jon Carroll who, a couple of weeks, wrote a column saying that people can't recognize satire anymore. He went on to say that IS difficult to tell, considering what's going on with the Current Assministration.
The best bit:
Hmm, let's look up the term satire:
“witty language used to convey insults or scorn; "he used sarcasm to upset his opponent"”
I think you looked up the wrong word there, my friend.
I think 'satire' is the word that he used, Tom. Maybe it was 'parody'.
For reference, someone has commented stating she was the woman in question (although it's equally likely he has these sorts of conversations all the time).
"As the woman in question here --
Yes, I was being obviously snarky in my conversation with someone whom I thought was a stupid and insane wingnut.
Now that I know I was right, I regret nothing! Just keep in mind that we have here a person who cannot tell reality from satire even when given obvious clues.
For example, when I said it might be o.k. for a woman to strangle her annoying child, I made an exagerated face like I was being choked. In no way did I keep a straight face until I realized this guy was insane and just couldn't 'get it'.
Keep in mind that the person I was talking to became quite agitated, so some of my replies were attempts to find ways to end the 'conversation' and get back to my peaceful day.
And no, Pete didn't turn 'our' satire right back at us. He just looks like an insane person on the internet. Not a great accomplishment.
Pete, I'd say get some psychiatric help. You cannot distinguish reality from satire. That is an extremely bad sign. And no, I'm not being sarcastic"
Ah. OK. That makes sense.
I go back to my statement about being fed a steady diet of lies. You wind up unable to pick them out.
He's a wacko for sure.
It's too bad there isn't an in-utero test for stupidity, or sheer lack of common sense.
Then one could respond, with great gusto, "Yes, it most definitely IS the best thing to do. It's too bad your mother didn't make the best choice for society."
Rachel, yes, retroactive abortion has been the dream of the stupidophobic for ages.
But, as to the Onion's credibility, there is the classic January 2001 article:
"Bush: Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over".
His excuse-conversation with a woman who thought it would be OK under some circumstances to strangle a little girl would be pretty appalling—if I believed any such conversation had actually occurred.
Oh, I believe it. I've participated in conversations along those lines myself - let the "pro-life" rapist-fascists think they have a live one and then go into raptures about how cool it is to see all those pictures, since never in my nineteen abortions had I ever gotten to see them before they were chopped into little pieces, etc.
Freaking the nutjobs is less amusing nowadays when it feels like they're winning. Or maybe I've just gotten old and sedate.
My local paper (The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which received its moniker when "Democrat" meant something rather different in the South) published a sidebar last year on "Fixin's Added to the Food Pyramid," lifted straight from THE ONION. To their credit, they published a rather red-faced apology the following week. We're still waiting for a similar retraction over "WMDs found in Iraq."
What this maroon also doesn't get is that pro-choice is not pro-abortion. No one goes running around like the chick in the article from The Onion happily chirping that, oh boy, she's going to have an abortion, what fun! Pro-choice is just that -- choice. The right to make decisions about one's own reproduction. Sometimes those decisions are extremely, shatteringly difficult. Having them made for us by theocrats wishing to impose their own morality on other people doesn't make things any easier.
Thing is that when you get someone who is that attached to one single idea that becomes central to his life, nothing is going to move him from it, especially if he thinks his idea is from God. He's going to twist anything and everything to fit his own preconceived ideas of the world. Hence, on finding the outrageous article in The Onion, he pounced on it as proof positive of his own outrageous ideas about what pro-choice is all about. On finding that it was satire, well, he turns it around so it's still somehow true for him, and still supports his position.
In my salad days (ranch dressing, please), I always used to wonder how these brave writers in various totalitarian countries could get away with writing plays or what-all that everyone (except the totalitarians) recognized as thinly veiled satire of the regimes.
The answer of course is that totalitarians cannot see past that veil, no matter how thin it may be. They have no awareness of satire. It's completely below their radar. Some things can't be joked about, you see. The power and authority of the totalitarians, for example. The very possibility of doing so is inconceivable.
All you young American writer turks coming up out there, keep that in mind.
The March for Life writer first assumes that "Caroline Weber" is unmarried; then, promising us a definition of satire, quotes the definition of "sarcasm" instead.
This isn't the best they've got, is it?
"...the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments... and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.... in short, ... protective stupidity."
George Orwell, defining "crimestop" in "1984."
Annals of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
...and even if you could, they wouldn't believe that you had.
Oh, perfect, John-from-Tucson.
The March for Life writer first assumes that "Caroline Weber" is unmarried; ...
Because it couldn't possibly be a married woman who doesn't want a child.
The horror -- !
Emma: The March for Life writer first assumes that "Caroline Weber" is unmarried....
The writer assumes that "Caroline Weber" exists, instead of being a fictitious name created by the Onion staff, paired with a photo taken from clip art.
The writer also nakedly displays the pro-life agenda: That women should only have sex for procreation purposes.
Why do I have the feeling that the writers and editors of The Onion live for this sort of thing?
Gah!
Gah!
Last night I was mulling over the idea "A Modest Proposal" for Iraq, but this morning I realized that some people just wouldn't get it.
Goodness, Pete is both hilarious and terrifying. I imagine in person he's mostly the latter.
Hmm, I wonder what would happen if some of his fundie brethren would stumble upon this piece from the Onion? I suspect that this was ghost-written by Reverend Fred Phelps.
Someone with greater wit than I (that's a lot o' y'all) needs to write up some religious propoganda, Chick Tract style, along the lines of "Yes, I believe! I believe in CAROLYN WEBER! I believe in her Satanic glee! ...Sign up here to join the pilgrimage!"
...Take it away!
I am soooo going to have to send this to my co-workers. They will get a kick out of it. I am a sexuality educator, and my office is located in a clinic with also houses an abortion clinic, so we get a lot of these guys hanging out outside protesting. (Today's looney proclaimed to us that contraception was also murder.)
Forgive me, friends, for I have participated in his comment thread. I pointed out that the existence of "Pete" only proves that Pete is a moron, and the intelligence of the non-Pete segment of the anti-choice movement can be seen in the fact that they mostly stayed away from the whole thing.
I also noted that the hostile comments he quotes in his second post are nowhere to be found in the comment threads. (Maybe the lurkers are shredding him in e-mail.)
I have to find better hobbies. I even went and watched one of Pammy's "vlog" entries. Atlas Shrieks!
Wow.
Not only does he totally, absolutely not get it, he doesn't get that he doesn't get it.
He can't even quit while he's behind. Streets behind.
Whose prayer was it that went "Lord, make my enemies appear ridiculous"? Voltaire?
I feel slightly sorry for him - can you imagine the next time he goes for a job interview? Or at this rate, the next time he pokes his li'l head out of his burrow? Even the other anti-choicers will want to bludgeon him, at this rate.
Emma asks:This isn't the best they've got, is it?
Very possibly. One of my friends is a volunteer clinic escort in Houston and one of our regular weekly protesters wrote a book to promote his beliefs. His 86 page epic was published by Canadian POD shop Trafford and makes Pete look like a genius.
Luvrhino reviewed Involvement in Pro-Life Ministries starting on April 4, 2003 and finished up on May 23rd. I've read the book and Luvrhino has reproduced it faithfully, and added his own and his friends' comments. Warning: it's really poorly written, and we're not nice to the author about either his book or his mission.
There was once a real-life Vice-President whose last name was that of a bird. Had a problem with another fictional character whose last name was a color when she decided to keep the baby out of wedlock. Same problem with the reality disconnect. It must be a social-conservative thing.
Or as Bill Engvall says, “Here’s your sign.”
Same problem with the reality disconnect.
BTW, this does not dispute the main point of showing another conservative who treats fiction as if it were reality. However, in this case, the former VP whose name is a homophone for a kind of bird did realize that he spoke of a fictional character. In fact, when his quote made it into the show in question, they had to do some judicious editing around that.
(Perhaps this just says that Pete is even more clueless?)
I guess this is ultimately the sort of attitude which gives us things like the Hays Code. I saw a production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's ASSASSINS where, afterwards, an audience member berated the theater company's artistic director because the actors on stage were not exhibiting proper gun handling techniques. Nevermind that the characters they were portraying would not have. Of course, they were also not using real guns. e.g., solid barrels. So no one was risking anyone else's life in at least the obvious ways by behaving as recklessly as the characters would have.
I remember the outrage over the song "I Want a New Drug" by Huey Lewis. The people who were so outraged by this obviously hadn't listened to the lyrics, which are an extended catalogue of all the bad things recreational drugs do to you, and wherein every verse ends with '...one that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you."
People are so stupid. I want a species transplant.
I guess I was making the connection between berating fictional characters for character flaws as a Social-Conservative trait. There is a whole argument to be made, besides cluelessness, about how a sizeable segment of American Society hold the belief that everything they read, see, or hear must be true. My own unscientific survey of these people shows that they are all Social-Conservatives. Dan Quayle’s (BTW, the homophonic confusion was a satire on Potatoe, I accept it was a weak connection, but was the basis for not using names) argument was based on this belief, and his attempt to discredit the show Murphy Brown (which admittedly fired the first shots) by claiming it raised the character up as a bad role model. As if being smart, witty, and highly successful in a chosen career following one’s bliss was negated by this one act.
Those that are confused by the truthfulness of fiction (there’s a masters’ thesis topic) are the same people who rail against other books, shows and most notably in current culture, Dan Brown. Admittedly Dan blurs the line and refreshes an old heresy, but the book is sold as fiction. We then can watch the Social Conservatives struggle with the conundrum, “But he says this is true, but this is fiction, but this part is true, but this is a lie.” Then, just like Norman from Mudd’s World on the old Star Trek, a little puff of black smoke rises up from their head and you can hear the cog-wheels slip teeth.
So, I guess I’m making the argument that this goes beyond the simple, “He doesn’t get it.” There are people who are constitutionally beyond being able to get it. I don’t think there’s a name for this condition, yet. I mean a scientific name with a whole categorization and drugs/treatment specified in the PDR.
In my salad days (ranch dressing, please), I always used to wonder how these brave writers in various totalitarian countries could get away with writing plays or what-all that everyone (except the totalitarians) recognized as thinly veiled satire of the regimes.
The answer of course is that totalitarians cannot see past that veil, no matter how thin it may be. They have no awareness of satire. It's completely below their radar. Some things can't be joked about, you see. The power and authority of the totalitarians, for example. The very possibility of doing so is inconceivable.
That's likely part of it. There are other reasons. For example, the individual bureaucrats making the censorship decisions may be sympathetic to the art in question. As long as they have plausible deniability--they can claim with a straight face that they didn't see the implicit criticism, and it at least superficially complies with all formal rules--there's a good chance they can pass the work. Pretending to be stupid is a valuable skill in a repressive society.
Another possibility is that the totalitarians themselves don't mind being criticized. Hungary during the Cold War had an odd filmmaking system; the director was required to submit a synopsis for approval before getting funding, but once he had the money he could film whatever he liked. However, the country's only distributor was state-owned, so if they didn't like the film, it would sit on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. Every so often, the regime would decide (for example) that enough time had passed since the 1956 revolution that it was okay to talk about it, and a bunch of movies that had been held back for years would start to trickle out.
I'm afraid that this episode (which has now extended to a third post in defense of his original idiocy, dated Wednesday, June 12) illustrates another fault of the American, or perhaps modern, mental process. There is a strong tendency to believe that the more opposition there is to a stated opinion, and the more unified the content of that opposition, the more likely it is that the opponents are in cahoots with each other, and that the original opinion is both correct, and strong enough to bring down the power elite if left unopposed.
I'm sure that there's a simpler way of stating that, but at the moment I'm trying to devise a way to replace the sub floor under the kitchen sink in one day, using no money, inadequate tools, and two men who are primarily computer techs. It's interfering with my ability to be reductionist.
Steve Buchheit, that reminds me of people who say "Shakespeare said..." and then quote a line from one of the Bard's villains or fools. No, he didn't say "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." Polonius said that! I always want to say "Yeah, and he also said 'I cannot speak your England.'" But they wouldn't get it.
JESR, "They laughed at Galileo!" "No, they charged him with heresy. But they did laugh at Mortimer Snerd."
There is a strong tendency to believe that the more opposition there is to a stated opinion, and the more unified the content of that opposition, the more likely it is that the opponents are in cahoots with each other, and that the original opinion is both correct, and strong enough to bring down the power elite if left unopposed.Otherwise known as, "If I've managed to bother this many people, there must be something to what I've said!" Or, briefer, "With this much opposition, I can't be wrong!"
It is related to a phenomenon surrounding urban myths, which I saw most memorably play out like this: In the wake of 9/11 2001, an urban legend sprang up that Nostradamus had predicted the attack. An aggressively flakey member of a mailing list I was on posted about it (on, predictably, email with lavender stationery and purple text). Shortly thereafter several people pointed out that no, Nostradamus didn't predict 9/11, and that quatrain that supposedly "proves" he predicted it is actually couplets taken from unrelated quatrains and jammed together in a most dishonest way, look, go read the snopes page about it. Our flake posted back--and you could almost hear her batting her eyelashes as she "said" it--that "but given how widespread the legend is, don't you think there's some truth to it? LOL! :) :) :)"
Aggressive flakiness is contagious. Well, not exactly. Exposure to aggressive flakes makes me feel aggressive towards the flakes.
"They laughed at Robert Fulton."
"Sure. Did you see the coat he was wearing?"
I think perhaps there should be a March of Dimes for the reality impaired. "Little Pete will go to bed gullible tonight, unless you help."
Nicole LeBeuf-Little:
Aggressive flakiness is contagious. Well, not exactly. Exposure to aggressive flakes makes me feel aggressive towards the flakes.
Madeleine Robins:
I think perhaps there should be a March of Dimes for the reality impaired. "Little Pete will go to bed gullible tonight, unless you help."
This is so much better than what's under the kitchen floor, I give you both my undying fealty.
"NOW I know it's satire but I'm too busy decrying its inherent despicability to acknowledge that I knee-jerked my way to the top of the public idiot list."
LM effin' AO!
Checking back with Pete, he's finally figured out what he did wrong! He's now turned off comments.
He's also now claiming that his articles were a joke, and we clueless baby-murderers are so dumb we didn't get it.
Riiiiiiiight.
That there's some funny stuff, Pete. Got any wife-bashing jokes?
. . . this goes beyond the simple, “He doesn’t get it.” There are people who are constitutionally beyond being able to get it. I don’t think there’s a name for this condition, yet. I mean a scientific name with a whole categorization and drugs/treatment specified in the PDR.
Not quite, but the phenomenon has been studied:
Kruger J, Dunning D. Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999 (December) 77(6):1121-1134
Not only are the really clueless completely unable to see there's any clue there that they're missing out on. No. It turns out that if you educate (or train or clue in) such people on the subject about which they know less then nothing, so that they then are at least no longer unaware, well, surprise: they stop being unskilled, as well.
There seems to be an unfortunately narrow band of knowing just enough of it, whatever "it" is, to know that you don't get it.
Must...resist...urge...to...read...all...comments...
I just came across this gem, from one "frac": Wow. Your mother should have had one.
She probably did. After she found out what this one turned into, she didn't want to take any more chances.
John from Tucson's Orwell quote is brilliant: "...the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments... and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.... in short, ... protective stupidity."
But it's like "the unexamined life is not worth living" -- everybody who reads it, whether conservative or liberal, reflexively thinks "Yeah! A perfect description of the way THOSE morons think!"
When I teach Clarion, I always tell the students to remember that a character can be diametrically opposed to them in politics, religion, and even a lot of morality, and nevertheless not be a fool, or a liar, or a villain.
Anyway:
Describing the pro-choice position, Writerious says, "Sometimes those decisions are extremely, shatteringly difficult."
If the fetus isn't a human being, why should the decision be so momentous? If it's not a human, then an abortion is less drastic than a vasectomy.
If the fetus isn't a human being, why should the decision be so momentous? If it's not a human, then an abortion is less drastic than a vasectomy.
Why is the breakup of a relationship painful, even if you both realize that it's the best thing and there's no way you'd be able to make the relationship work? It's perfectly possible to know that you're making the best choice possible, yet still feel sorrow at having to make the choice.
An analogy: I feel sad that the choice my husband and I made not to have children means that my mother-in-law will not have grandchildren. That doesn't mean we made the wrong choice.
If the fetus isn't a human being, why should the decision be so momentous? If it's not a human, then an abortion is less drastic than a vasectomy.
The decision is momentous for many people for among many other reasons there may never be a do-over.
Fear there may never be another chance for a child of that partnership. This applies particularly for the family where e.g. the wife was just accepted at a major graduate program and the husband just got travel orders.
Why is the decision momentous?
In addition to the other reasons given, there's the medical one. Abortion is minor surgery. Even minor surgery is dangerous.
Also, the moral state of the fetus is not a binary thing. It is not a case that the fetus must be either fully human or it's insensate tissue. I think of the fetus as existing in an in-between moral state, like a domestic animal.
But none of these factors explain why I am pro-choice. I am pro-choice simply because this is a moral decision that it is up to each person to make. Not the government, not strangers--each person. More specifically, each woman, in conjunction with the man with whom she got pregnant (assuming he's around).
I am pro-choice because the logical extension of the pro-life positon is that sexual intercourse is immoral, except for purposes of procreation.
I am pro-choice because of the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement. They are up in arms about abortion and fetal stem cell research, and yet silent about fertiliity clinics, where embryos are routinely fertilized for the deliberate purpose of being destroyed.
Since ol' Petey disabled the embarassing comments section, commence retailation:
Mitch, you say, "I am pro-choice because the logical extension of the pro-life positon is that sexual intercourse is immoral, except for purposes of procreation."
Well no, the pro-life position is the (not grossly unreasonable) idea that abortion is the killing of a human being. The logical extension would be ... I don't know, making it illegal to kill animals that might arguably be rational.
How does "Fetuses are human" logically lead to "Sex must be done so as to maximize the likelihood of fetuses"? I'd think it would logicially point the other way.
I don't think anybody believes that sex is immoral except for purposes of procreation. At that rate couples past menopause would have to be celibate!
Your idea of the fetus existing in some in-between state only adds to the difficulty -- how much of a "percentage of human" would it have to be, to be protected? And how on Earth would doctors be able to tell when that point had been reached?
You say, "I am pro-choice because of the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement. They are up in arms about abortion and fetal stem cell research, and yet silent about fertiliity clinics, where embryos are routinely fertilized for the deliberate purpose of being destroyed."
Certainly they're hypocritical if they ignore that extension of their argument! They should be objecting to that too. Especially if they're correct in this debatable question.
Pro-life leads to the idea that sex is only acceptable for procreation purposes only when you're talking about the people who are against both abortion and birth control. There are a lot of people who hold that position, but it's not the logical extension of the belief that a fetus is a human being. Logically, anyone who wants to reduce the number of abortions in the world should be for increased access to and education in the use of effective methods of contraception, so that the number of unplanned pregnancies will decrease. Unfortunately there does seem to be a significant segment of the self- appointed moral police who think that people should stop having sex, and are therefore not only against abortion but also contraception and any kind of social program that will help the mother if she skips the abortion and has the child. These people are more anti-choice than pro-life. If you have sex you should suffer, seems to be their motto. It's hard to have any respect for them, while those whose sole argument is that the baby's rights should be considered as well as the mothers at least have an arguable point.
Tim Powers: I don't think anybody believes that sex is immoral except for purposes of procreation. At that rate couples past menopause would have to be celibate!
They exist. I've known some of them (fortunately of the variety of Roman Catholic who felt that it was not their right to impose that view on other people). And I've mentioned before friends of mine who went to a fmaily wedding and were subjected to thoroughly unpleasant remarks by the priest during the sermon about the purpose of marriage is procreation, and adopting children because you're infertile doesn't count.
I'm glad I don't know that priest, Julia. "Local Gay Beats Priest Senseless With Dildo, film at 11."
Tim, I think the decision to have an abortion is momentous, even if one is firmly pro-choice, because almost all of us would agree, we don't really know where that line is. We may think we know, but even the Church, which appears so certain and inflexible from the outside, has not always held that the fetus is a person from conception, and only the most rigid anti-choice person believes that women who have abortions should be treated as we treat other deliberate murderers. People who would keep abortion legal may nevertheless regret it when it happens and support efforts to make it as rare as possible. People who would make it illegal may (and I think, should) have compassion for the people who choose it, whatever their circumstances.
Although I am Catholic, I find myself most in sympathy with the position of Orthodox Jews in this matter. I am also pro-choice, mostly because I cannot justify, in a plurastic society which does not share my faith, requiring others to obey doctrines of my church which they do not hold. But I am very well aware of my Church's position, and I realize that I may simply be wrong, theologically speaking. But that's between me and my conscience...
Hello, Lizzy! Very reasonably put, thanks! I agree that people who have abortions or facilitate them shouldn't be treated by anyone as murderers, because they clearly maintain and believe that it doesn't involve killing a person.
I'm Catholic too -- good to meet you! -- but I like to leave that out of it, since, as you note, it's no good in a debate saying, "But the Catholic Church says thus-and-such!" to people who could reasonably answer, "And Mormons forbid coffee, so what?"
It's a situation where things readily get emotional or pointlessly religious, and so I like to discuss it as logically as possible! -- which we've probably now done.
Sara G.L: Pro-life leads to the idea that sex is only acceptable for procreation purposes only when you're talking about the people who are against both abortion and birth control.
But birth control sometimes fails. If you believe the fetus is a person, and abortion is murder, and you have sex without intending to procreate, you're gambling with another person's life.
Plurastic = pluralistic. Sorry. Late night.
If you believe the fetus is a person, and abortion is murder, and you have sex without intending to procreate, you're gambling with another person's life.
Mitch, I guess one can look at it this way. And if this is the way you look at it, it's your choice -- don't have sex unless you intend to create a child.
But you don't get to make that decision for anyone else, sorry. No Sex Police.
Lizzy L - I'm pro-choice. My point is that the position I described is the pro-life position taken to its logical conclusion.
Tim Powers: If the fetus isn't a human being, why should the decision be so momentous? If it's not a human, then an abortion is less drastic than a vasectomy.
What makes you think the decision to have a vasectomy is never a drastic, difficult, or momentous one?
Hello, Avram. I said that if a fetus isn't human then an abortion should be _less_ drastic, etc., than a vasectomy. That implies that a vasectomy _has_ those qualities.
Neither procedure was descirbed as "never drastic, difficult or momentous." It was a comparison. If I say, "losing your job is less difficult than losing your house," I've implied that they're both difficult, _not_ that one of them isn't difficult at all.
Tim, I'm trying to figure out what point you're trying to make to Writerious up there. Writerious wrote that making decisions about one's own reproduction can sometimes be very difficult. You then asked why, if one believes fetuses aren't human, getting an abortion should be more difficult than getting a vasectomy. And now you're telling me that you agree that getting a vasectomy can be a difficult decision as well.
So what was the point of your question to Writerious? You seem to have been asking "Why should this one difficult choice be more difficult than this other difficult choice?", even though Writerious never implied any sort of heirarchy of difficulty among reproductive choices.
Mitch, apologies. I see what you are saying. Without wishing to argue, since I don't disagree with your point, I would say that logic/the intellect is only one of the tools of discernment that human beings utilize in making decisions. We also look to emotion, instinct, aesthetics, experience, the advice and influence of others, the moral sense which we call conscience, and probably other tools I can't at the moment call to mind. Pointing out the illogic of a decision may or may not be useful. In so difficult and painful a personal decision as whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, telling someone that their intellectual position is illogical is not likely to carry much weight.
Avram, you're right, I got tied up in your question and kind of lost sight of the original question.
My point was that if abortion doesn't involve killing anybody, then it's less drastic than a vasectomy, which doesn't kill anybody either but has permanent consequences. I concocted the "hierarchy" for comparison, because it seems to me that abortion is generally considered the more stressful decision. And I was wondering why that might be.
Mitch,
If you believe the fetus is a person, and abortion is murder, and you have sex without intending to procreate, you're gambling with another person's life.
No, if you believe the fetus is a person and abortion is murder, then every time you have sex it must be in the knowledge that you may create another human being. You're gambling with the commitment to carry the pregnancy to term and either give the baby up or raise it. In other words, you're gambling with your own (and, if you're in bed with someone that's worth sleeping with - IMHO - someone else's future).
It's only gambling with another person's life if you think it would be a person, but intend to abort it anyway.
Well, Tim, it probably varies. Keep in mind that there are more dimensions to the issue than just the irreversability of the operation.
For instance, while some religions might discourage their adherents from getting vasectomies, there's no large, political powerful movement pushing to outlaw the procedure. Men getting vasectomies don't have to run a gantlet of screaming protestors accusing them of murder, or hear their elected officials talking about getting their operation banned. If they did, that'd certainly up the stress factor.
Also, there's the fact that male sexuality and reproductive choices have historically been treated differently from female sexuality and reproductive choices, and still are today. That affects how people feel about their choices. So a man getting a vasectomy and a woman getting an abortion aren't fully comparable situations.
Also, vasectomies are not time-pressured, because they're preventative, not reactive.
Tim: Well no, the pro-life position is the (not grossly unreasonable) idea that abortion is the killing of a human being.
It is possible to argue that by strict logic this is the anti-choice position. However, if logic ruled, the self-styled pro-lifers would fully support all methods of contraception that do not involve expelling a fertilized egg. (For that matter, the opposition to morning-after pills is on weak ground; IIRC, the idea that a fertilized egg is a human being contradicts well-established arguments concerning how long it takes for the embryo/fetus to be ensouled.) This is in fact untrue; as you are a Catholic, you're presumably aware that current Catholic doctrine requires that (rough quote) "every act of sexual intercourse be open to the transmission of life" -- a position which IMO requires arguments as strained as anything purporting to prove that an invisible iota of tissue is a human being.
abi: excellent summary.
abi: excellent summary.
I know you meant that as a compliment, and as such I agree, but in fact it's almost a definition!
Hello, Chip! As Lizzy and I agreed above, there's no use advancing Catholic doctrines in a secular discussion. So we can safely disregard any theological arguments about embryos getting ensouled! Logic certainly ought to rule. And of course the logical problem is that, at some point on the line from conception to birth, a third person has entered the picture, and nobody knows when that point occurs, or even what it would consist of -- heartbeat? Brain waves? This or that degree of viability?
And practical application would be tricky -- "Okay, until the end of this week it's not a human. Say midnight on Saturday. That'd be California time, unless it was conceived on the east coast." For instance.
Avram, a well-reasoned answer, thanks!
Actually, Tim, the logical problem is that personhood is a human concept, not a measurable fact, and therefore has always been and will always be contingent upon human beliefs, opinions, and politics. There's no logical reason to prefer conception as a starting point over implantation, or gastrulation, or start of last period, or the point where the mother's belly has swollen so that she can no longer fit through the chief mother's ritual hoop, or birth, or a several-days-post-natal naming ceremony, or first birthday.
Or parents' marriage, for that matter. I can imagine a society where, when you get married, the priest tells you (based on some kind of oracular ritual, perhaps inspired by your wealth and how many kids he thinks you can support) how many new souls have been created by the gods to pass into the world through your union. If you don't meet that number, the unborn ones haunt you as ghosts (or so you believe); if you exceed that number, the excess are considered soulless abominations, and killed, or maybe enslaved. Imagine having some people from that society around for an abortion argument!
Avram: exactly. I think you and Tim and I probably agree, that when exactly a new person comes into the world is not a measureable, testable fact, and that reasonable people are going to differ about its truth. My own judgement says, Given that, and given also that we live in the US, which is not a theocratic state (yet), I must simultaneously support the right of women to make different choices, including choices of which I may personally disapprove, while at the same time protecting the new person to the best of my ability: which leads to a compromise or set of compromises, which is what we have now.
I should say, my own views have changed over time, though I have always been pro-choice. I suspect they will continue to change.
Tim Powers: And of course the logical problem is that, at some point on the line from conception to birth, a third person has entered the picture, and nobody knows when that point occurs, or even what it would consist of -- heartbeat? Brain waves? This or that degree of viability?
I've given some thought to this question - and muse that one answer might be "at some point after the embryo can no longer spontaneously twin."
Twins (triplets, etc.) raise interesting theological questions: if the "soul" is present from conception, then the "soul" of twins must therefore also somehow divide in half when the flesh does - and twins must therefore literally share the one "soul" present at conception. A more logical answer (for certain values of "logic") is that the soul can be present only at some point after an embryo has twinned. Which, if one believes in unique individual souls, at least seems more plausible than divisible soul-stuff.
So the existence of twins might imply that the soul is not present from conception. Some cultures have had a related view: and are convinced that one twin, logically, must be entirely without a human soul, and choose one to kill at birth.
Bob, I love the twins business! It is an interesting theological question! Maybe souls are some kind of infinity -- you take away half and you've still got a full dose of infinity. Though it's a neat idea that they might have half-a-soul each, whatever that might mean, or one has a soul and one doesn't.
Lizzy, I agree that "when exactly a new person comes into the world is not a measureable, testable fact, and that reasonable people are going to differ about its truth." I can't even imagine what you'd test for. But I'd say -- respectfully disagreeing with Avram -- that there _is_ a real, qualitative, objective difference between not-human and human, independent of whatever we might all agree on. It's like the distance of the sun -- various cultures came up with various estimates, using logical or preposterous criteria, but the sun really is out there at a particular distance.
But Avram, I like the idea of a couple having a precise number of predestined children, so that if they have fewer they'll be haunted by the unborn ghosts, and if they have more the excess children will be soulless abominations! Somebody should write these stories!
Tim, Avram, Lizzy: Let me add to the twins complication. In some African societies (notably the Yoruba) having twins counted as an abomination *because* only animals such as goats and pigs gave birth to multiple infants at the same time, humans were supposed to be born one at a time. This resulted, in the not too distant past, in the infanticide of twins.
Tim, thing about the distance of the sun is that it's really only useful to talk about at a certain scale. We can say the sun is one astronomical unit from the Earth (tautological, that one is), or about eight light-minutes, or somewhere between 91 million and 94.5 million miles. But if we had to give that distance down to the millimeter we'd be in trouble. Are we measuring from the surfaces or the centers of the two bodies? The centers make things easier, but then we have the problem of figuring out when to measure. Over the course of that eight minutes that it takes light to travel between the Earth and the sun, their distance will change by thousands of miles, and if we were to travel between them at the speed of light our ruler would shrink down to nothing.
The start of personhood is like that, as I see it. It's a concept invented by people who had no idea of what goes on inside a pregnant woman, and the concept breaks down under the level of scrutiny that modern science can bring to bear.
I also wonder who it was who decided that the fertilization of an egg was conception. Conception is a concept going back over a millennium -- Wikipedia tells me that the Conception of Mary was celebrated in 9th century England -- well before people had any idea of the biological details. Why should fertilization be called conception, why not implantation or gastrulation? (Both better candidates if you ask me.)
Tim Powers: Bob, I love the twins business! It is an interesting theological question! Maybe souls are some kind of infinity -- you take away half and you've still got a full dose of infinity....
Well, maybe. IANAEmbryologist, but I think twins can form successfully up to 12? days or so after fertilization. (I don't know the upper limit, but the later twiinning occurs, the higher the chances that they'll stay conjoined.)
I also am not a theologian, but I get the sense that Christianity tends to view immortal souls as pretty much assigned 1:1, soul:body. I don't think Christianity tends to view soul-stuff as fluid or divisible if it needs to be.
(Maybe we're inventing a brand new heresy here...)
Adding the two speculations together, I have trouble thinking how one single immortal soul is supposed to fission into two unique immortal souls if /when an embryo divides into twins.
It seems simpler to think that souls aren't 'incorporated' until there is an actual independent embryo present to receive it. Which to me would imply that souls aren't there until the local census is finalized: which would imply sometime after the ~two-week limit for when twinning can happen.
So, the existence of twins might suggest that souls are probably not incorporated before twins can form - and possibly much later.
Hi, Avram -- well the thing is, the sun really does exist, and we can say, for instance, "It's never closer to us than this or farther away than that" and be talking about something real. That is, our statement might be wrong because the sun really _is_ out there somewhere. (Of course you could say, "But what if there's disagreement about the definition of 'sun'?")
But I bet we do agree that you and I really are human beings! And even if everybody in the world should declare that you're not a human being -- laws passed, all religions concur, everybody gets their statements notarized -- you still would be.
Certainly it's true that ancient people couldn't have known what happens at conception. I imagine they just meant by it, "the point when there's a new person in the picture." And that works, whether that point is fertilization or implantation or what have you.
Fragano, that's pretty horrible, about twins in some African societies! And of course the reason I think it's horrible is because I think those societies were wrong -- that there's a true situation, independent of their concensus.
I apologize for deflecting this thread, by the way! Eventually we'll probably be debating traditional versus innovative martinis.
But I bet we do agree that you and I really are human beings!
(I feel tempted to insert the hoary New Yorker cartoon about how on the internet no one knows that you're a dog, but that would be way off the point. Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps, rather than being Tim Powers, noted SF author, you are "Tim Powers", first computer program to pass the Turing Test. Are you a person? Would wiping out all copies of your binaries and source code be tantamount to murder? Are you protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Can you be patented? I note that none of these are particularly original questions in SF.)
I think it's worth pointing out here that the reason why there is a healthy and active debate over abortion is because we as a society have yet to decide the edge cases of personhood conclusively. (e.g., fetuses, and those in a persistent vegetative state)
That people can come to a consensus on the cases solidly in the center of personhood is not a guarentee that people can come to a consensus on the edge cases. Avram has a terrific point by analogy when he talks about measuring the distance between the earth and the sun down to the accuracy of a millimeter. Given the amount of philosophical inquiry already spent on a specific definition of personhood, I don't hold much hope for one which resolves all the edge cases to everyone's satisfaction. The idea that we have consensus on the vast majority of cases and simply agree to disagree on those few cases where we do not reach consensus doesn't seem to have much traction.
(BTW, I should point out that problem that people can't come to consensus on edge cases even though most cases are fairly obvious is not an uncommon problem. On a much more mundane level, it's hard to come up with a distinction between musicals and operas that resolves all cases in the way that everything thinks they should resolve.)
As for martinis, I'm not a mixed drink person myself. However, I have friends who think vodka is an abomination and whose idea using vermouth is to present an image of the vermouth bottle to the glass. I'm not sure why they're not just drinking straight gin. But again, there are undoubtedly recipes which we dub martini recipes by consensus and recipes over which there will be passionate debate.
Tim: I agree it's horrible. Fortunately, it isn't an accepted practice any longer. I brought it up because it raises a quretion related to the issue you were debating. A pregnant Yoruba 100 years ago, given foreknowledge that she would bear twins (were that possible in those days) would have had no compunctions about seeking abortion; in fact she would have felt it a desirable act. OTOH, she would probably have objected very strongly to the idea that her husband might want to make himself permanently infertile.
Hello - I've been enjoying this blog for a long while, and I'm happy to have an excuse to post something. I'm not a geneticist, but I thought this snippet might be of interest to the discussion about twins.
There is such a thing as a human chimera: two separately fertilised non-fraternal twins which have fused at a very early stage to make one embryo. The resulting person will have different chromosomes in different parts of their body, but will be a completely normal individual in other respects. (Unless one twin was male and the other female, in which case the person may develop partly male and partly female sexual organs).
Although the condition is thought to be rare, there may be many people who have no idea that they are a chimera, since the only way it would show up is with DNA testing from different parts of the body. You or I could perfectly well be the outcome of fused twins and not know it.
There was a case recently of a woman in her 50s who was tissue typed to see if one of her three sons would be able to donate her a kidney. Two of the sons had DNA which appeared to show that she could not be their biological mother. It was eventually discovered that she was a chimera: her ovaries were producing eggs some of which carried the DNA from one original twin, some from the other.
I find it hard to believe that this woman had two separate souls, though.
See here for the case of the woman whose sons appeared to have different biological mothers.
Jenny: That's fascinating.
I think you meant to say either 'fraternal' or 'non-identical' twins, though (rather than 'non-fraternal').
--Mary Aileen
Tim, I agree that there is a real, qualitative, objective difference between human and not human. I just am not sure what it is, and I don't think -- here's where I, at least, may part company with some of the folks posting here -- that the difference will be discernable through scientific inquiry, because "personhood" is not fundamentally a scientific concept, but a spiritual one. Ooops, there's that pesky religious stuff again. I don't think we can get to the truth about what makes us human through science. Poetry, perhaps.
Now, having said that, I absolutely support those scientific inquiries. I think we should learn everything we can through the scientific process, and be afraid of nothing. I just don't equate scientific "fact" with the truth about this particular topic. It's like looking for God by sending up a rocket. Nuh-uh.
About souls: it's very interesting to find in this thread discussions of "souls" as if the soul (assuming for a moment that we all believe it exists, which I know is not the case) were an entity, a thing which somehow exists in the body, perhaps made of ectoplasm...? When I think of souls at all, which I mostly don't, I tend to think of the soul as an organizing or animating principle. (Yes, I am a Platonist. Why do you ask?) So the conversation about twins, DNA, chimeras, fused embryos, while fascinating in its own right, doesn't get me any closer to discerning what a person might be.
But as I said above, let free inquiry abound! Someone in this or another thread expressed the hope that human beings could acknowledge their own ignorance more frequently. I'll drink to that. I'm not a martini drinker, either. How about a Fat Tire ale, JC?
Ooops, there's that pesky religious stuff again.
I can't believe I'm the only person who sees the abortion debate as an issue of church-state separation. But I've waited in vain for anyone else to raise the point, so I guess it's down to me.
Xopher,
I know you meant that as a compliment, and as such I agree, but in fact it's almost a definition!
Could you unpack that? About the definition, I mean.
I'm not much of a martini type - I may have mentioned that single malt whisky is more my thing. But I did once see a Shirley Temple martini shaker I rather liked - you filled it with gin to the chin and vermouth to the tooth. (And yes, I know one such is mentioned in Demonby John Varley.)
cmk: we haven't discussed the separation issue directly because so far most folks posting here on the subject have explicitly or tacitly stated that they would not support the adoption of a specific religious viewpoint by the US government. (I myself would actively fight against it.) It hasn't seemed necessary to discuss the Constitutional issue. Was there something in a prior post which made you think we need to?
Was there something in a prior post which made you think we need to?
Well, yes and no; it's the background of the discussion more than most specific comments.
I just see banning abortion as inherently a religious position, so it's not possible to remove the theology from the debate.
Hi, cnk -- no, it only seems to be an issue of church/state separation because churches have expressed opinions on it. The issue is whether it involves killing human beings or not, and if so, at what point. That needn't involve churches at all.
Jenny, the chimera business is fascinating! That must have been quite a moment -- "You're not the mother of this guy" -- "Yes I am. I was there, trust me." I wonder if some people have several "genetic identies" in them! Add Multiple Personality Disorder and you've got the beginnings of a cool plot.
Fragano, good points. We can see lots of error there -- assuming we have the "teacher's edition" of the textbook!
JC, you're right, society has a hard time guessing at the precise boundaries of "human being"! The fringe areas, which would include a lot of very old people too (I expect to be a questionable example myself one day), just leave everybody with a helpless shrug. Didn't I read recently about some drug that's been waking up what had been thought to be "hopelessly comatose" people?
My point is that there _is_ a thing called "human being," and it exists independent of any society's concensus. Entities like "a person old enough to drink or vote" or "a citizen of this or that country" can be changed or eliminated by altering some laws ("Sorry, you're not that yet, or anymore"), but "human being" is a thing like pi -- societies can only recognize it or fail to recognize it. I agree with Lizzy that in fact it's impossible to precisely define it (like chasing all the decimal places of pi), but it's real anyway.
I mean, consider the alternative -- "A human being is whatever the church/government/concensus says it is, subject to changes in that estimation." It'd be as if we all decided that pi will be whatever we decide it is -- but circles and there circumferences would still be out there.
Tim --
You're almost certainly factually wrong about humanity having the same inherent status as a physical constant. Darned hard area to get research funding for, though.
It is well known that human is as the surrounding society does; if you raise a child outside human social contact, you don't get a human being. The 'build a person' brain development stuff doesn't happen.
The humanness is a product of interaction, not innate. It very likely took tens or hundreds of thousands of years to bootstrap itself.
It's quite possible to be non-human and potentially human at the same time -- any neonate, many people with some sorts of brain injury that may recover; also non-human and not potentially human -- other kinds of brain injury, that horrible condition where a baby develops without a brain and has a dished in head, etc.
So I'd argue that it's not the edge cases; those are pretty well understood, even when the understandings hinge on different axioms. It's the possibility of state change that's the contentious issue, especially which state changes are properly voluntary.
cmk said: I just see banning abortion as inherently a religious position, so it's not possible to remove the theology from the debate.
Tim Powers said: The issue is whether it involves killing human beings or not, and if so, at what point. That needn't involve churches at all.
Imagine a situation in which the churches, etc. had nothing to say about whether it is okay to kill a fetus in the womb, and all the talking about it was done by -- who? Politicians? Medical doctors? Pregnant 15 year olds? The 17 year old impregnators of the pregnant 15 year olds? Biologists? Astronomers? Freudians? Jungians? Who? Or does society as a whole simply keep silent on the issue and let each individual decide for herself, based on -- what? No, I'm not being sarcastic or dismissive. This is a political and social issue and a moral one; surely the input of precisely those institutions whose task within society traditionally is to examine moral issues should at least be heard. Take it as a given that I would actively resist an attempt to write the doctrines of my own church into American law.
Lizzy --
The basic Enlightenment combination of utilitarianism and fundamental rights seems entirely sufficient to solve that problem.
It's not at all obvious to me that any question of public policy should be regarded as a moral question; morals are fundamentally personal, and in a diverse society there will be many different notions of appropriate morality while there should be a single civil law which all acknowledged as supreme.
That civil law can't be arrived at by means of arguing for or against any particular personal morality, so that's pretty obviously -- I think -- not the way to go about it.
JC: The idea that we have consensus on the vast majority of cases and simply agree to disagree on those few cases where we do not reach consensus doesn't seem to have much traction.
Which is really not at all surprising, given the consequences of getting it wrong. Agreeing to disagree is fine in cases where the stakes are not literally life and death.
I agree with Tim that there is such a thing as a "human being" that more-or-less objectively exists, where "human being" = "living individual organism of the species Homo sapiens". While there are edge cases here as well (for instance, at exactly what point during the process of fertilization is there a new organism and not two nearly-fused gametes?), those aren't what people are generally arguing about in the abortion debate. They are generally arguing about "personhood", which is an entirely philosophical debate about which beings we accord what are known as human rights. Some argue for all human beings (see def. above) being persons, and others believe that one of many possible developmental milestones (implantation, brain wave activity, viability, birth, self-awareness) must be achieved for the organism to have personhood. Then there is also the question of whether there are/could be non-human persons.
None of this need be religious in nature or involve souls, although people do sometimes confuse matters (IMO) by bringing souls into it.
Re chimeras and other evidence that genetics is a LOT weirder than any of us learned in high school: I heartily recommend the book "Cats Are Not Peas: A Calico History of Genetics" by Laura L. Gould. Gould began exploring the subject when she became the owner of a MALE calico cat.
The book is out of print, but is available used & in libraries.
They are generally arguing about "personhood", which is an entirely philosophical debate about which beings we accord what are known as human rights.
In the interest of at arriving at a set of common terms so that we all understand each other, it seems to me that Tim et al. were using "human being" and "personhood" interchangeably whereas Jen clearly is not. (i.e., Jen raises the possibility that a human being may not have "personhood" as one of its properties.)
I agree that the discussion of personhood is a philosophical debate. However, my understanding of Tim's position was that it is not. That is, if I read Tim correctly, personhood is an intrinsic property of human beings (which he says is something that does not have a precise definition, but exists independently of any society's ability to recognize or define it).
So, Jen, you say that you agree with Tim, but I think you also agree with me at least in some ways. (I brought up potential, to use your term, non-human persons in my previous post.)
BTW,
Which is really not at all surprising, given the consequences of getting it wrong
My problem with this formulation of this view is that "getting it wrong" implies that we can know if we have, in fact, gotten it wrong. My position is that, as of right now, the vigorous discussion on these sorts of issues shows that we don't know in the edge cases. (I'm still thinking about Graydon's idea that the problem is not the edge cases, but the possibility of state change. It may be that what he's saying and what I'm trying to say are equivalent.)
Tim: Thanks for the compliment. Problem is, of course, that at any time we only have the student edition of the textbook.
What it means to be human is, in my not-particularly-humble opinion, socially, politically, and culturally defined. What we call 'human' is a product of our particular consensus (for a Western definition of 'our') as a result of our particular history and the circumstances of our time. We happen to believe that the current Western definition is the most inclusive, generous, and accurate. It happens, however, not to be the only one. That matters for defining whether abortion is murder, and whether vasectomy is either acceptable, unacceptable, or even worse.
Could you unpack that? About the definition, I mean.
I meant that you are past mistress of the excellent summary.
Or am I confused about someone's gender again? Argh.
The issue is whether it involves killing human beings or not, and if so, at what point. That needn't involve churches at all.
I disagreed with you because I had read what you wrote, not because I hadn't. I didn't comment up there in your first appearance because you were so clearly trying to be a nice guy about it.
JC, yes, I think you and I are understanding each other on the subject of terminology.
My problem with this formulation of this view is that "getting it wrong" implies that we can know if we have, in fact, gotten it wrong.
I do see your point. I think the best we can really do is to look at the cases in the past when people did, by our lights, get it wrong, and think about why we believe that they did. I have little doubt that, just as we believe the circle of personhood was too narrowly drawn in the past, future generations will believe that it is too narrowly drawn right now. Maybe they will be appalled that we exclude fetuses, or animals, or maybe they will just be aghast at the way that we treat many of those that we claim to consider persons. And maybe they won't have it right, either, but they'll probably be pretty sure that they have it more right then we do. Such is progress -- and I'm a starry-eyed optimist when I'm not too busy being cynical, and I do believe in progress.
Tim, you're wrong about pi. It is precisely defined, it's just difficult to write down in decimal notation.
As far as whether there is such a thing as a "human being" independent of society's consensus, well, that's a tricky question. Are we talking about a biological designation? Or something having to do with spiritual or intellectual qualities? If we're talking about biology, well, species designations really only work at the level of groups. They're not always reliable at the level of individuals.
Graydon, alas, though I have agreed with you in many circumstances, in this case I must confess I am pretty uncomfortable with utilitarianism, for a number of reasons. You are, I am sure, familiar with the LeGuin story; no need to recap it here. That story expresses one of my concerns; another being; How do we define the Good, and who gets to decide? Utilitarianism strikes me as kind of an American Idol version of ethics.
Some snark, sorry. It's been a long hard week.
Lizzy, did you notice that Graydon suggested a combination of utilitarianism and fundamental rights?
I did, Avram. I'm thinking about it...
Graydon's made my point for me, far better than I could have.
It's not at all obvious to me that any question of public policy should be regarded as a moral question; morals are fundamentally personal, and in a diverse society there will be many different notions of appropriate morality while there should be a single civil law which all acknowledged as supreme.
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