The Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

An End to It

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Tue, 15 Mar 05 13:50:00 UT

I've finished my run at Journalscape -- and with blogging as a form -- with this experiment. I'll turn my writing now to other, productive ends. My best to those who were regular readers and wrote to say the conversation was of value. Signing off...

$upport Clarion East

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Sun, 6 Mar 05 23:06:00 UT

As many blog community members know, Clarion East, the esteemed speculative fiction workshop currently run out of MSU, has fallen on hard times, due to funding cutbacks by the university. Clarion East has been successful in recent fundraising efforts, but needs to continue to raise money to offer its summer seminar (at least, until it finds an alternative patron / site). The program needs $17,400 to hold its Summer 2005 session.

Donations may be made via paypal from a link at this page.

A Little Advice for the Far Left, Or Why to Check Yourself the Next Time You're Inclined to Call the US a Terrorist State

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Mon, 14 Feb 05 15:32:00 UT

Just this past Saturday, AlJazeera reported again what has now become a commonplace not only of the Arab Street, but of those dark and crooked passages on the World Beat where those who are not with us are against us: the US, in case you haven't heard it yet, is a terrorist state run by a Terrorist in Chief. This time, the charge comes from Venezualan President Chavez, who makes the charge in response to "Washington's criticism of Caracas for its arms purchase from Russia."

Such rhetoric isn't without its uses Stateside, either. Some Bush detractors move too readily from accusing the Bush Administration of contemplating a reinstatement of the draft to the erosion of any number of American freedoms, especially those touched upon by the Patriot Act. Of course, such pressures for accountability have value. All levels of US government and military must work to ensure that civil liberties of American Citizens are respected and the human rights of our detainees are maintained in these difficult times. Critics and watchdogs keep industries in check. However, when rhetoric such as the above is exaggerated or overused for political ends, it effectively cries wolf. And, when those who dish out such exaggerations come to believe it themselves, they lose all credibility with the Administration's rational critics. They take up with the lunatic fringe, and become the equivalent of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

The problem with left-wing conspiracy theories is that they aren't limited to characterizing the US as a Terrorist State. It's that they tend to be based on sloppy, morally indignant claims (that I get in my students' essays regularly), which is that the US has not and cannot redeem itself from its history of slavery, colonization, sexual discrimination, racism, and so on. Things today, the old saw goes, are as bad as they ever were. Things over here, some go on to add, are as bad as they are over there -- in Russia, for instance.

Well, no they're not.

I'm no apologist for US historical slavery, colonization, sexual discrimination, racism, corporate abuses, or bully policies elsewhere in the world or any of those practices still surviving. By all means, let's have social justice in our democracy, and let's ensure that others, who are less fortunate and able than ourselves, nationally speaking, have a crack at it, too. But let's not forget our advantages, either. Let's admit that most of us, even our low-wage earners, are incredibly lucky to have been born US citizens, with the advantages of our civil liberties, our economy, our federal benefits. Let's kiss the flag and touch this US soil with a little extra appreciation for how good we've got it compared to, well, just about everybody else.

Take this for an instance. We no doubt all recall the bogeyman of the renewed draft that was drawn out by the left before the American electorate. Bush will do it, they argued, whether he'll admit it before election or not. He has to, they added, He just can't fight a war on this many fronts without it. After all, at heart, he's a fascist. Fascist, communist -- no matter what direction a dictator comes from, they always meet in the totalitarian middle.

Which is just where Russia is now, at least on the question of the draft. In a little reported news item (source: Chronicle of Higher Education 2/11/05 by Bryon MacWilliams):

The Russian military raided college dormitories in the nation's capital last month, rousing many young men from their beds, in a surprise effort to find fresh conscripts following the cancellation of deferments from mandatory service.
Agents of the city's office of military registration and enlistment fanned out through dorms across Moscow the day after the conclusion of the New Year's and Old Christmas holiday period, during which the government announced that all draft deferrals would be canceled.
The raids were intended to catch students unawares. Recruitment officers, each accompanied by two police officers, sometimes dragged students from their beds, according to the newspaper Versiya.
Some students were taken directly to medical clinics to undergo physical examinations, reportedly in violation of a federal law that requires supporting documents from the place of study and allows young men up to three days to contest their conscription.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an assistant dean in the chemistry department at Moscow State University, said in an open letter that two students had been awakened at 7 a.m. and taken under guard for physicals even though they had been enrolled in the university's military courses -- a status that, by law, entitles them to deferments.
Full-time students had been excluded from the mandatory two-year stints since 1989. But the minister of defense, Sergei Ivanov, announced on December 30 that all draft deferrals would be abandoned, including those granted to college students.
Only 9.5 percent of the 176,000 men eligible for the draft last fall are serving in the military. In 1994 some 27 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 27 served, according to the general staff of the Russian armed forces. The military, comprising some 1.2 million troops, reportedly was short more than 31,000 recruits last fall.
Young men pursued higher education throughout the 1990s as a means to avoid serving in the demoralized and underfinanced military, where conscripts are routinely denied basic medical care and adequate food. Human-rights groups have reported that beatings and violence, often in hazing rituals, kill hundreds of conscripts annually.
Desertion and even suicide among the troops are endemic and well documented. But parents fear most that their sons will be sent to fight in the war-torn Republic of Chechnya.
Alternative forms of service are poorly developed and are opposed by the armed forces. The Kremlin plans to reduce the mandatory term of service to one year in 2008, but only if "everyone" serves, according to Mr. Ivanov.
President Vladimir Putin hinted that the abolition of deferments was not final at a meeting with college students in Moscow late last month.
The minister of education and science, Andrei Fursenko, said he opposed the lifting of deferments because the draft was not subject to checks and balances. The Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees of Russia, a human-rights group and political party, has called for a nationwide referendum to determine who is entitled to deferrals.

I would find it difficult to believe that any reasonable person, after reading such an account, could still assert Bush likely to take a page out of Moscow's playbook.

On the other hand, Bush has been described in near fascist terms, to the contrary, for promoting what he refers to as a "culture of life." Are enforced abortions any more to feminists liking? I'll grant that I'm opposed to broadly legalized abortion, but I do think that somehow the State's imposing sterilization or abortion on women either unwilling or pressured into consent due to social circumstances is even more problematic.

Perhaps, then, if Bush plans to soften his image, he can look to China's humanitarian example. For China, in another recently underreported story from the same page, holds out hope to totalitarian states everywhere (reported by Paul Mooney):

China's Ministry of Education has announced that it will lift a 25-year-old regulation that barred college students from marrying and from bearing children.
Fan Yi, an official in the ministry's student-affairs department, was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying that the policy would no longer prohibit undergraduate and graduate students from getting married and having children while they are enrolled.
Mr. Fan made the announcement last month at a forum organized by Peking University's Center for Women's Law and Legal Services. He did not say when the new policy, which has been under consideration since 1996, would take effect.
The ban has forced students considering marriage, or those who have gotten pregnant, to make difficult decisions -- abandon plans to marry, have an abortion, or end their studies.
Some students said it was unlikely that the move would lead to a surge in campus marriages.
"This will make no difference at all," said Rick Yu, a student at Tsinghua University who said he did not even know there was a ban. "It's stupid to think about getting married when you're still at school."
Cheng Jing, a student at Peking University, praised the policy shift, saying it would be "a step forward in upholding students' human rights."
Shandong University lifted the ban in March 2004, when it issued a provisional regulation permitting students to marry and have children as long as they followed local laws on marriage and family planning. Under Chinese law, men must be at least 22 and women at least 20 to get married, and 23 and 25, respectively, to have children. However, Shandong requires pregnant students to leave the university for one year to take care of their babies and to recuperate.
Chinese colleges were basically shut down for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. When they began to reopen, in 1977, many students were in their late 20s and 30s, and with families. As younger students entered the system in the following years, the ministry issued a regulation in 1980 outlawing marriage and childbirth among students. Some colleges even prohibited dating among students.

And yet, the US--with all its capitalist vices and imperialist tendencies and sense of super-empowered cultural smugness--is the freest nation in the world and her people mean to do the most good, however imperfectly her government may sometimes enact her ideals in practice. No, America is not utopia -- but that is too often what we find ourselves compared against. We measure ourselves against such a high standard in the first place because we were founded on rationalist, Enlightenment ideology that, as we have come to reinterpret it to modern means, is precious to nearly every one of us.

But then, this rhetoric of extreme leftist idealistic disgust and despair is nothing new. Few of us now probably know Allen Ginsberg's protest poem "America" -- that held the Russians and the Chinese, and the Red Movement in general, blameless innocents victimized by our nationalist paranoia. In Ginsberg's imagination then, too, America held the power to end war -- not imperialists abroad, or those who would abuse their populations. No, those who reacted against American ideals -- they were the real idealists, those to whom we should look to for our ideals.

You see then, left-leaning readers, your gurus have misled you before, such as Ginsberg was in 1956. No, I didn't say all wrong -- square culture, white culture, the Eisenhower Whitehouse, well -- mistakes were made. But, wrongheaded about how we measured up and to whom, yes, there --

America
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time
Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad.
She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Real Life Frankenstein Redux: On Cloning

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Thu, 10 Feb 05 07:54:00 UT

When I teach Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as I have every term in recent memory, my students often wax poetic on the relevance of the novel as a warning of the advances of biotechnologies with too little consideration of the moral obligations the potential outcomes such experiments into the nature of nature necessarily entail. They rarely (by which I mean never) go into detail beyond broadly gesturing at cloning as a hot zone, rife with ethical dangers. But, what exactly is the problem with cloning?

Personally, I don't find reproductive cloning as a concept, not even human cloning, terribly ethically problematic. I don't believe, for example, that the clone will be "born without a soul." I don't share that limited conception of individual personality and even spiritual potentiality. I am so far from this thinking that I hesitate to counter that objection with the usual, "Do you think identical twins share one soul?" It plays into magical thinking.

I do have some limits I'd like to see imposed on reproductive cloning practices. There are ethical pitfalls.

For example, I have concerns about whether clones will be as sound in initial and successive cycles as the original. According to Wolfgang Lillge (see citation below):

Cloned animals like Dolly give the outward appearance of full health, but the probability of their having numerous genetic defects is very high. Moreover, the entire cloning procedure is extremely ineffective. Most cloned animals die before birth, and of those born alive, not even half survive for three weeks. In the best case, there is a success rate of 3 to 4 percent.

Could we, in our ignorance, be damaging the genetic copies so that later clones do not live as long or have some malfunction introduced into their organic systems? Again, according to Lillge:

So far there has been no solution to the problem of developing in the laboratory an unmistakable identifier for stem cells that can distinguish them unequivocally from cancer cells. For this reason, it is also not possible to produce sufficiently pure cell cultures from stem cells. So far, with embryonic mouse stem cells, a purity of only 80 percent has been achieved. That is in no way sufficient for cell transplantation as a human therapy. In a cell culture for therapeutic purposes, there must not be a single undifferentiated cell, since it can lead to unregulated growth, in this case to the formation of teratomas, a cancerous tumor derived from the germ layers. This problem would not be expected with adult stem cells, because of their greater differentiation.

Until we are certain that this is not the case, we need to avoid cloning higher organisms. Where we draw the line is an open question, depending on one's stand on animal experimentation. Certainly, at the threshhold of humanity, we need to consider this one bar to further progress until it is resolved.

Also, I am concerned that the cloning of higher organisms might lead to a resurrgence of genetic elitism or genetic policing. Some grant to select for desired genetic traits may be innocent and desirable, as well as some grant to deselect genetic materials that triggers or determines pathology. Again, the question becomes where we draw the line. Similarly, cloning has the potential to reduce at least physical and perhaps also other characteristic forms of individuation. The dystopic fantasies of rampant conformism that smack of Aryan design are extravagantly exaggerated from our present view, and yet deserve a watchful eye as the applications of these technologies progress.

Finally, I, like most other people who value life, cannot approve of therapeutic cloning that creates higher order beings (again, open to a sliding scale depending on one's valuation of other animal life) for the sole purpose of harvesting their physical material to sustain the life of another, not even a human other. The reduction of any potentially living, thinking, feeling entity to mere biomatter, its devaluation as an independent organism relative to another, signifies, to me, the worst form of depraved indifference.

Which brings me to the August 11th 2004 and February 8 2005 decisions by Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to grant its first and second human cloning licenses. Specifically, these licenses allow researchers at Newcastle Human Embryonic Stem Cell Group to create human embryonic stem cells using the technique of cell nuclear replacement. Their purpose is to compare the stem cells that carry pathogenic genetic material with healthy and diseased cells extracted from patients. The first license was a study of diabetes and degenerative diseases such as Altzheimer's. The second is for a study of MND, a paralytic nervous system disorder.

Although I am opposed to broadly legalized abortion (see my other posts on this subject), I am not opposed in concept to stem-cell research. My ethical concern is for the source of the stem cells. Because I oppose selective abortion under almost all circumstances, I find the harvesting of stem cells from potentially viable embryos to be a gruesome example of benefiting from the deaths of developing children. Stem cells harvested from miscarried or stillborn children (if that were possible) or living volunteer donors (which is becoming increasingly likely, given new Dutch research) would be welcome research components.

This qualification returns us to the Newcastle Group (also responsible for Dolly the sheep). Their method entails removing genetic material from the blood or skin cells of a consenting donor who suffers from an inherited illness and implanting it in an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The eggs are then fertilized and allowed to develop for approximately six days (British law allows for up to fourteen days [AP 8/11/04]), when stem cells will be extracted from them, during which process the embryos are destroyed (Reuters 2/8/05).

The most important ethical question, given the nature of this process, is whether that embryo constitutes a developing human life (to which the answer is, yes, of course) and whether a developing life (although not yet capable of independent existence) ought to be accorded some rights, at least those that ensure its treatment as a forming human being and not mere biomatter.

In the case of abortion, pro-choice lobbyists have argued that the welfare of the mother -- emotional, financial, social -- outweighs any right of her developing child in the earliest stages of its existence (some go later), especially since we must be concerned with the right of women to determine their own bodies. An embryo in this view is seen as either an undifferentiated element of the woman's body that she may electively have removed surgically or as a parasite that may be extracted from its unwilling host. In the case of therapeutic cloning, we might reasonably find a woman's donation of her unfertilized egg or blood / skin cell as the voluntary assignation of a part of her body -- no more important that a piece of hair with the root attached. There is no separate or symbiotic developing life in these tissues.

The ethical problem enters in when researchers stimulate the egg to develop and begin the formative process of an individual life. That is an entity that could have a very real, projected future as a human being. It is the forming essence of a son or daughter, one with potential intelligences, feelings, abilities, experiences. Does it matter to the ontological and so political / ethical status of the embryo that it has never seen the inside of a uterus?

Should we congratulate ourselves that we have had the restraint to stop with harvesting from developing humans so early that their destruction is of small moment to any involved, including the genetic and egg donors who understood their these forming lives were derived from their own? If some impossibly hypothetical plague were to sweep across the planet killing millions, and the only possibility of developing a cure were to remove the frontal lobes of living donors -- and the best donors for the research were teenagers -- would we congratulate ourselves on only extracting brain tissue in incremental amounts or from that population? Once we are on the slipper slope of harvesting tissue from the living for research purposes, I don't believe we can congratulate ourselves on ethical restraint at all. We have crossed a line that should have been maintained.

On this question of whether the embryo is a developing human life and whether it thus merits our consideration as such, I turn to Lillge on the science:

Normally it goes unmentioned, that it is only a small step from this so-called "therapeutic cloning" (because, it is claimed, in this way a therapy for diseases can be developed) to what is called "reproductive cloning." The only difference is that the development of the embryo is not interrupted in the early blastocyst stage; instead the embryo is implanted in a uterus and a complete organism developsâan exact genetic copy of the donor.

Those in favor of continued testing of animals for important medical research have argued that the sacrifice of these lower life forms is necessarily for the enhanced survival of we higher order ones. I don't see why those in favor of therapeutic cloning don't acknowledge the life-in-development status of human embryos and make the same case. If anyone has, I have not heard it.

I would like to suggest that the reason they don't is because the argument smacks of the most heinous form of thinking about human life we can imagine. It is the stuff of Mengele-inspired nightmares. In order to believe that what they are doing does no harm, the Newcastle researchers and their supporters must have no doubt that they are not destroying life but working toward enhancing and extending lives. That, to me, seems delusional thinking -- one that requires an irrational assertion against a basic fact.

Further, such research is conducted not because stem cells cannot be found in adults, but because "scientists believe they may not be as versatile as those found in embryos" (AP 8/11). May not be. As our understanding of stem cells and extraction methods from adult hosts improves, will we continue to find embryonic stem cells preferable? It's an open question. Even for those who are ambivalent about such methods as embryonic stem cell harvesting might allow that we should explore the possibility before taking the course we find now being established in the UK.

Consider some of the more promising developments in our understanding of stem cells and their potential for later harvest, this reported by Wolfgang Lillge, M.D. in 21st Century Science and Technology Magazine:

It is appropriate here to sketch the characteristics of stem cells, and the overthrow of some dogmas of developmental biology. Broadly speaking, a stem cell is one thatâin the course of cell division and increase in the numbers of cellsâis able to reproduce itself and also mature into various specialized types of cells. The stem cell with the greatest potential (totipotential) is the fertilized egg cell, which is capable of developing into a complete organism.
According to the usualâbut actually very doubtfulâexplanation, the fertilized egg cell has totipotential up to the stage of division into eight cells, and in later stages the cells retain only "pluripotential." That is, they can form many different types of tissues, but not the complete organism. Embryonic stem cellsâthat is, those 50 cells within a blastocyst, which then continue to develop into the embryo properâhave this pluripotential. In the course of further specialization, stem cells of individual tissues are formed, such as that of the bone marrow, from which all the other kinds of blood cells develop.
Behind this description lies the conception that a linear process of differentiation is played out, in the development of the individual, toward increasingly "mature," specialized cells in the individual tissues, from totipotentiality to tissue specificity. This process is supposed to run only forward, but never backward. That is, as soon as a cell has reached a certain degree of "maturity," the way back to earlier stages of development is closed off. So it is evident that a stem cellâs capacity to perform is increasingly limited to specific functions, and it loses, correspondingly, the manifold capabilities still present in earlier developmental stages.
According to latest reports, however, this dogma of developmental biology does not hold. Evidently, tissue-specific stem cells have the abilityâas has been impressively demonstrated in experiments with animalsâto "transdifferentiate" themselves when in a different environmentâthat is, to take on the cell functions of the new tissue. Thus, neuronal stem cells of mice have transformed themselves into blood stem cells and produced blood cells. Indeed, there are indications of another capability of adult stem cells: Apparently they have the potential to be "reprogrammed." Not only can they adjust to the specific conditions of a new tissue environment, but they can even assume more generalized, earlier levels of development, so that it even appears possible that they become totipotent again.

See the rest of Lillge's article for details about advances in adult stem cell research, and its demonstrated productivity (to date) over embryonic stem-cell research.

For an issues briefing on the ethics of stem cell research prepared for the Australian Parliament in 2002, see here.

A Case Against Broadly Legalized Abortion: The Follow-Up Discussion (compliments of Kat's journal)

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Wed, 9 Feb 05 06:33:00 UT

Just in case anyone missed the extended discussion that Kat, Larry Turner, and I carried on in Kat's journal, I give you the rest here in its entirety:

Kat kicked us off with this reply to my original argument:

2005-02-07 11:17 AM
Fetal Viability

I often read The Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart's journal and since he (I think?) doesn't have comments on his journal I wanted to mull over his most recent entry here. Abortion is a topic which is very important to me. I really think this a topic men cannot understand because pregnancy is something they can never experience. Someone forcing you to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term isn't a treat to them. Abortion is such a complex topic because pregnancy and childbirth are also complex.

Childbirth is brutal. The only way to get through it emotionally and physically intact is to see it as a right of passage. Whatever the method, the baby isn't coming out without a great deal of pain, and that pain doesn't end with the birth. To a woman who wants to be a mother and wants the baby inside her, it's worth it. It's something she has to go through to get what she wants. To a woman who doesn't want that child, forcing her to go through it is tantamout to torture.

This is why there is such a difference in the status of an embryo based on whether or not the mother wants it. Yes, a miscarriage at even 4 weeks is mourned. But I believe that even a woman who has had multiple miscarriages would agree that losing an early pregnancy is not the same a losing a living child.

Even though I don't believe that this early it is a life, as a mother I know that what it is is potential for a life. You know that, unless something goes wrong, you will be holding a beautiful baby in 9 months. You plan for it, and think of names, imagine what the terrible two's will be like and wonder what that child will be whey they grow up. But you still know it's not that baby yet.

I don't think abortion is a good option. It would be far better to prevent the pregnancy than to end it once it's begun. In the journal I mentioned, he discusses where viability actually lies. He discusses whether we should determine viability based on lung development or brain activity. To me, it's simple. If taking the fetus from the mother's body would produce a living person that has to be killed, that's murder. If the fetus could not survive outside the mother's body, it's not yet an individual. I honestly don't know at how many weeks this change occurs, but that's my definition of viability.

_____________

15 Comments:

1 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:44 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST

Glad to see you posting on this, Kat.

First, I'm a woman. And, I'm a woman who has endured what was labeled by my perinatologist as an "extreme, high-risk" pregnancy. Both I and my child almost died at various points. The pregnancy, moreover, was unplanned. And, my husband lost his job during the pregnancy, and my insurance went haywire, was revoked, then reinstated. His former employer even stole our Cobra check. My coworkers had to throw us a baby shower because we couldn't afford to set up a nursery. I cried because we didn't have the money to make it pretty or even to put it in a separate room in the dinky, nasty, rented house. Oh, and my parents disowned me after the baby was born becuase I wouldn't let them unload their emotional baggage on him. So, I did it all without family support -- even after an emergency c-section that went into a post-operative infection and has left me with permanent damage to my left leg. So, I do understand what you are talking about when you speak of the demands of pregnancy.

Even if I had known I was in for that kind of life-threatening, depression-instilling ride (I had to be treated for major depressive disorder after -- nearly hospitalized for it), I would still say that the life of my child, potential child though he was, was worth my sacrifice. That, even if I had not known how incredible he would turn out (I risked my life to save his before we'd "met"); fortunately, I've had the luxury and luck to know him.

Second, however, I don't think we can decide about abortion on an emotional basis like this. We must decide based on ethical principles that we use to make decisions for the social good.

You've said that you agree, effectively, with viability at 23 weeks if machine support doesn't muddy your definition of the child's ability to live independently and 28 weeks if it does (that's the earliest we can hope for that level of lung development). Now that's a rational standard we can discuss.

You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born.

Again, if it were a matter of the mother's right to LIFE against the potential life, then the mother's (which is already assured) might take precedence. However, in most cases, we are talking instead about her emotional and physical sacrifice. If the woman were to become a suicide risk if required to carry to term, that would be a matter for individual exception, based on expert assessment.

But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?

2 Kat (mail) (web)
2:17 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST

On your first point, I agree. Anything I would have had to go through or sacrifice to have my son here and more was worth it, and I knew that throughout my pregnancy. Even though yours was an unplanned pregnancy, do don't say whether it was unwanted.

"You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born."

I guess this is where we just disagree. This is something that there is no science behind, it's simply a moral issue. I believe it's not yet alive, though I agree it's on it's way to living. Since it's not yet alive, to me it has no right to life. It is essentially a parasite. Of course, emotionally, I didn't feel that way about my son when he was at that fetus, but that is how I see it objectively.

"But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?"

On this I too agree, at least to some extent. I think it's terrible that some women use abortion as birth control. The only way I could even see myself considering abortion would be if prenatal tests showed significant birth defects, and even then I don't think I'd do it.

However, while I don't agree with their decision and even think they're wrong, I don't think I have the right to force them to carry the pregnancy to term just because they've made bad choices. I also have to stop and think - do we really want someone who is selfish enough to want an abortion just to save them the burden to be a parent?

3 Larry Turner (mail)
3:12 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST

thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart & kat:

It's clear that the issue of abortion is the most highly charged polical/ethical/social/religious issue anyone could currently discuss.

While I agree men cannot fully grasp the dimensions of motherhood, I think it would be unrealistic and unproductive to seek to exclude them from the debate on those kinds of grounds.

As to the question of fetal viability, I would suggest reading the bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University. Singer points out that viability is an extremely indeterminate state - that modern medicine has been "pushing back" on the point of viabilty for over half a century. As a consequence, we could argue about THAT issue alone and never be able to make conclusive determinations that could not be immediately overturned by the next medical advance.

So the maturity of lung tissue or brain function seems to me to be beside the point.

As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?

As a practical issue, will making abortion illegal change very much except making it harder and more dangerous for women to obtain?

The issue becomes even more complex if we consider that an effective hormonal MALE contraceptive could, in the not too distant future, further disentangle human sexual behavior from procreation.

And here is where I think we get to the heart of the matter - that any form of effective "contra - ception" (literally "against conception") changes the dynamics of procreation, human sexual and gender roles, and a vast array of religious, cultural and traditional beleifs about male/female relationships, human sexuality and procreation.

Clinical abortion is but one method human beings can, have and will use to limit thier population. As modern science gives us more different ways to plan parenthood - perhaps the debate will center more on how best to make parenthood a desired outcome for men and women - (and ultimately their children too) - and how to make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."

4 Kat (mail) (web)
3:26 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST

Larry:
I don't think that men should be excluded from debate about the subject at all. It just seems to me that most of the legistlation on the subject comes from men and that shouldn't be.

"As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?"

Parenthood should not be legally forced on anyone. Some will always argue that making abortion illegal wouldn't do that because adoption is available, but that doesn't hold water for me. In a perfect world though, sexually active human beings would be responsible for their actions and prevent unwanted conception.

...make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."

We can always hope, can't we. :)

5 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
2:21 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

Both of you, Larry and Kat, are approaching this matter with sense and reason, qualities often in short supply in discussions of this highly charged issue.

Like Larry, I also believe that men have an equal right to participate in this social debate and the policies that follow from it, since, although they don't carry children to term, are ours and our baby's fathers, uncles, brothers etc. as well as fellow citizens. Majority opinion must in this, as in other matters, determine the legislative course.

I point out my own gender and experience late in this conversation to show that I do understand the demands placed on women in pregnancy, especially tough pregnancies due to emotional, physical, and circumstantial pressures. Too often the charge is made that those who are against broadly legalized abortion don't understand the suffering pregnant women undergo, or women with unplanned pregnancies, or women who are pregnant when poorly circumstanced. This is not a matter of a lack of sympathy for those women. I have been friends with two women (that I know of) who have had abortions. It is a matter of public policy -- and the thinking that I believe should inform it.

Was my child wanted? Yes, as a human being. In that particular moment in my life? I wouldn't be entirely honest if I said yes. I was having significant marital problems. I was mentally exhausted and physically unwell. But, what mattered was that I was pregnant. I didn't choose the moment especially (I was using two forms of birthcontrol which I'd used effectively for years), but I did have sex. So -- I accept the consequences. Ultimately, my life's better for it.

As for viability, Larry is right that the timetable was pushed back for a number of years due to advances in medical science. 23 weeks has been a hard number for some time (this, btw, from Planned Parenthood). Debates concerning viability are beside the point only in the sense that that number isn't likely to change again for some time (this is, again, mainly due to breathing difficulties). My suggestion about considering brain development instead doesn't speak to viability but how we define what seems legitimately "human" to us.

When Kat writes that a living child is of more value than a forming one, I grow concerned at what I perceive as a delusive split between the two. My living, independent son is the same entity that I carried in me for 37 weeks. They are one continuous organism. If he had died at 10 weeks, my son, the one I now treasure, would not have existed. His loss then would have been easier to bear (I acknowlege Kat's emotional realism there), because I could have only imagined who he would become and how attached to him I would grow. However, to deny that he was as deserving of my sympathy and care at ten weeks as he is now is disturbing -- and I think casuistry.

Should we only accord humanity, and therefore human rights, to those we know? What about those human beings on the other side of the world, dying innocents in Iraq or victims of warlords in Sierra Leone? Should I care about them less because I have never met them? To me, they are nearly as conceptual as an unborn child, their photographs and video impressions as devoid of explanation or inner life as the sonogram images of the baby I saw through my pregnancy.

I want to add that we are not talking, when we talk about rendering most abortion illegal, about unwanted _parenting_. Those women who carry unwanted children to term are not also forced to keep them. We're talking about women carrying unwanted children to term so that those children may have the opportunity to live. If women's thinking about the nature of abortion and their responsibility to their unborn children changed, so too might their emotional responses to carrying unwanted children to term and giving them up for adoption. It might be possible now for women who do so to be perceived as heros rather than as whores (which was unfortunately, historically, too often the case).

I don't pretend that adoption is any magical solution. It carries a significant social burden and very muddy, often unsatisfactory outcomes for the children involved. However, I ask again, is that better than death? Yes.

I have heard women with an unwanted pregnancy say, in life and in television interviews, that they would rather have an abortion than know that their child is out there being raised by strangers. It may be a natural emotional response, but is it a legtimate ground for ending a life in development? Is it the sort of parental thinking -- the unconditional love and concern for the child -- that motivates such a response -- or is it the mother wanting to remove this burden, so that she can get on with her life with no loose ends? By this, I do not mean to suggest that the decision to abort is an easy one for the women who make it. But, I have talked with women who have had abortions, and many of these otherwise good-hearted, feeling women have learned to live with their decision not only through telling themselves they removed tissue rather than a forming child but also through the feeling that they could not have had the life they desired in any other way.

Kat has said that a developing child, embryo or fetus, is a "parasite." That is an all too common and disturbing modern figuration. A parasite simply feeds off its host. It is an invading foreign body. A developing child is conjoined with its mother; it develops from and as a part of her body -- as well as, increasingly, from those introduced elements combined with hers (i.e., father's genetic material), to establish a body of its own. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with its mother. The forming child's presence triggers hormonal changes in the mother, some of which give her lifelong health benefits. It is a healthy, natural process (barring illness or accident), one that women's bodies are designed to do. It is not a disease.

The parasitic analogy brings to mind the epistemological view modern women have been taught about their own social identity and its ontological determination of their bodies. If they inhabit an asexual, equally competitive vehicle for social and career advancement, then any physical force that invades that body must be a parasite. They presume, at some level of the political unconscious, a genderless physical self. This is, I argue, a culturally-induced dysmorphia.

I am not arguing, btw, that women are born reproduction machines in the sense that they must or should produce. Not at all. I am claiming, however, that reproduction is a natural and healthy part of women's physical natures. To represent it as a pathology is distortion, a way of legitimating abortion through semantic manipulation when the fact is that it is a mother chosing to end the life of her developing child (in most cases for emotional rasons) rather than killing an invading foreign body (for plainly reasons of health).

6 Larry Turner (mail)
6:37 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted.

What courses should be open to women who have become pregnant - and for whatever reasons of their own - would rather not become a parent?

With an added twist of complexity, the same argument could be made for a male in this situation.

I have shared thoughts with thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart before on sex differences. I cringe at the notion that philosophy could become so twisted in this post-modern world that we could be discussing 1) whether or not women might naturally, probably biologically, long for children and feel fulfilled in the role of a mother; and 2) that abortion is the removal of a "foreign body" from a mothers womb.

I don't want to appear to be like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss and say we live in the best of all possible worlds. What I do want to emphasize is that women will get abortions in great numbers worldwide whether it is readily available and legal or very difficult to obtain and illegal.

I think the humane course is not to try to decide for women in this predicament a priori with intrusive laws and strictures that try to decide what the "ethical" choice for them should be.

Legal, illegal, readily available or scarce, women will decide to abort fetuses worldwide and in great number - especially where other forms of deprevation are rampant for the prospective mothers.

It is only in the last century or so that foodstuffs have become so readily available in the industrialized world that we can suffer from an epidemic of obesity.

Ultimately, the question of how best to limit abortion becomes one of asking if, at some point, human civilization will provide minimum humane economic conditions for the vast majority of human beings? - and perhaps we might then enjoy "an epidemic" of more ethical behavior.

7 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:00 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

Larry,

I agree with you that we need to pursue the most humane course. An important factor you raise here is what will happen if women are denied the ability to receive safe abortions, those undeniably enabled by legalized abortion. The answer is that women will continue to seek abortions -- in fewer numbers perhaps, but those who do will expose themselves to potential maiming, suffering, and death.

Given improvements in birth control, we might hope that these numbers would be down somewhat from historical highs. Yet, we cannot ignore that this would be a consequence of eliminating the broad legalization of abortion.

Nor can we ignore the fact that already much of the world's population is poorly cared for in terms of basic needs, education, medicine, and so forth. You suggest we ought to focus our attentions there -- before concerning ourselves with adding to the numbers of the underserved is the implication.

I'll address these two last points separately.

As for women suffering from illegal abortions -- it's abominable. The history of it sickens me, to think women suffered in the US and still do suffer in much of the rest of the world (barring the current and former Communist block) those ways. Yes, there will always be otherwise healthy women driven to do something desperate, rather than carry a child to term and face the social consequences. And, there will always be underground activists and profiteers who will provide an equally desperate "solution." So, we come to a difficult dilemma. The potential physical welfare of an already formed life hangs in the balance with the certain death of a forming life. Is it clear who is the most vulnerable member of this equation, the one that a civilized society has the greatest obligation to protect? Only if we deny the potential humanity of the forming life does this become a simple moral equation, with a ready answer. Believe me, I don't want to see women harmed through illegal abortions -- and I know some will be. However, I also don't want to see forming lives ended -- and I'm certain that more of them will die than women will be harmed by illegal abortions.

Now, as for putting our focus on the world populations current needs, you are, of course, correct that our emphasis ought to be there. But how far are you willing to carry this argument?

I have already addressed elsewhere the sinister character of a related argument, one that suggests we ought not add to the already strained public burden by allowing unwanted children to live. Currently, the World Health Organization estimates that 26% of all pregnancies over the world end in abortion, whether legal or illegal. Do we really want our global population to increase by an additional 26% each year -- at what is an estimated 46 million? That is, if all of those pregnancies were viable, brought to term, and the infants survived into later childhood (such figures are likely to significantly erode in developing nations). Now, this sort of reasoning, as I've said before, strikes me as an argument akin to euthanasia or selective breeding. It is a colder calculation than those done by the insurance industry in figuring mortality tables against profit margins.

Of course, your sense of urgency for the living is much kindlier meant. You don't argue against increasing the social burden. You argue for where our energy ought better to be spent. But, if you consider that the "convinced" -- as I am -- believe that a terrible mistake is being made, that millions of forming human beings are being killed with ethical justifications that cannot bear the weight of what is being carried out in their name -- you understand why I do not grant that ground. This is a matter of life and death. It is not simply a question of shifting our emphasis from funding schools over welfare benefits or choosing between endorsing public education or school vouchers. It is not a quiet public policy question. It is as palpable as genocide, even if its target's lack of specific racial, religious, ethnic, or other collective identity renders the use of that term inexact.

Yes, the world had more pressing matters, more concerns for the local and the living and the profitable causes, when Rwanda went down, and Sierra Leone, and Bosnia, and the Sudan, and etc. Believe me, you don't need to advocate for a renewed focus of invested self-interest; we're already inclined toward it.

And, if we are to turn from international to domestic focus, which I believe is more in line with your feeling, then what? We ought to give our resources, our advocacy, our care to the welfare of the children already born who, granted, need so much more than we are already offering. Because -- we have only so much compassion in us? Given a limited amount of public attention and concern, we ought to point it where it can do the most important good? Such an argument has been made about the division of media resources to equally good causes: breast cancer competing with heart disease competing with Tsunami victims, etc. Yet, people who feel the importance of those causes continue to scrabble to be heard, to be answered, by members of the public who are concerned for the local, national, world, human, and animal communities. We don't argue that the breast cancer people should stop whining about women dying in the US because so many millions are dying of AIDS in Africa. Yet, here you are suggesting that we shift our attention from the planned death of children in development, approximately a million or so in the US each year. No, we ought to save our concern for the living children alone. Because we treasure children. After they are out of the uterus, beyond 23 weeks or 28 or whatever your line for viability is. Before that, they are something altogether different -- empty potential, unwanted tissue, inedible meat, perhaps with some added research value.

If we want to get to such a basic level of support for abortion rights, we might as well resort to arguments of nature: studies of rats or mice or wolves that destroy their own young when resources are scarce and territory is contested (whether the mother devours the newborns or an invasive male slays them and / or consumes their remains). Perhaps such an argument could convince those who argue in abortion's favor for the third world (and that makes the human rights advocate in me sick -- I say offer it in the Swiftian sense), but what about in the first world, where the competition for resources is rarely about literal survival?

8 Larry Turner (mail)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart

We might have to agree to disagree on this one.

Although I must say it is a pleasure to be able to correspond directly - having enjoyed your postings very much on other sites.

You raise the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?

9 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

Just as an aside -- Larry wrote, "I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted."

Yes, of course. The question is why so many women have adopted this particular way of representing the unwanted child growing inside them. I have suggested it has to do with a particular contemporary understanding women have -- cum second wave feminism -- of the nature of their bodies as an androgynous or perhaps even masculine-identified cypher that is invaded by an outside organism when an unwanted pregnancy occurs. They don't conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies.

Men have a different set of figurations for the experience of unwanted biological fatherhood.

The techniques I'm using here are standard Cultural Studies practice -- humanities stuff.

10 Kat (mail) (web)
11:56 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST

The reason I used the term parasite is because by definition, that's basically what a fetus is.

From wikipedia: A parasite is an organism that lives in or on the living tissue of a host organism at the expense of it.

Of course I didn't emotionally feel that my son was a parasite as a fetus! But the fetus develops at the expense of the mother. I'm pretty sure that it isn't until the birth and breastfeeding that the mother reaps benefits (i.e. reduced chance of getting breast cancer).

I do "conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies". This is why I also chose natural childbirth - pregnancy and labor are things that our bodies are made to do.

When it comes down to it, what I'm really trying to say is that in giving rights to a fetus that is not yet a living person, you are taking away the basic rights of the woman. The place that I personally draw the line is when removing the fetus isn't enough to end the pregnancy. When removing the fetus produces a baby that moves on its own, breathes (or tries to) on its own, etc and that baby has to be injured separate from the removal, that's too far.

I am not saying that a fetus before this point is nothing more than a bit of meat - I am simply saying that because it isn't alive yet it shouldn't be given rights that trump the living mother's.

11 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:23 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST

Yes, we'll all three have to leave the discussion continuing to disagree. But, it's been enjoyable and enlightening.

I do see Kat's literal point about the fetus being conceived of as a parasite. However, the term is often also defined with the qualifying phrase "to the detriment," "to the disadvantage," or "causing it [the host] harm." The parasite is also universally conceived of -- in technical circles -- as an organism foreign to the host, not one derived from part of its tissue. An embryo or fetus is, quite literally, comprised in part of maternal tissue. (I've also suggested fetal development gives women some continuing health benefits, to shore up my sense that there is conjoined or symbiotic relationship between the two and that the relationship is healthy and not pathological, as parasitism always is.)

And, when you say, Kat, that the forming child's rights don't weigh as heavily in the balance as the already born and independent mothers, then I say that you need to assign different weights to different kinds of rights. The right to privacy and property cannot supercede the right to life. Unless you suppose that by life, we mean some special status of life -- life with a certain degree of quality or independence -- and therefore assume such a status of life cannot be granted to something that is quite literally living even if we will not call it human yet. And then I wonder how far we can apply that to the disabled who cannot care for themselves or live on their own without mechanical assistance.

The rub for you is a feminist one, as it is for many women. We don't want anyone telling us what to do with our bodies. That happened for too long historically -- and we don't want to give any ground, especially over our physical self-determination.

We are so concerned with our rights as fully formed adults that we are willing to sacrifice those of others who have not yet had the chance to gain that status. And about half of them would have been women, too. In some parts of the world (India, for example, and China), even more than half of abortions are female (gender settles in around 12 weeks, btw) -- because, you know, daughters are just not as desirable as sons. Shame those aborted girls won't get to practice these hard-won rights we have.

And as to Larry's point that I've raised "the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?" -- I say, certainly. I consider women seeking illegal abortions to have been driven to an extreme, drastic measure. And there's no question that women historically went to such lengths to rid themselves of unwanted children. Medical science has enabled women to shift what used to be post-birth exposure, infanticide, abandonment, and so on (when primitive herbal and mechanical practices failed) to a quiet death pre-birth. Yet, I don't deny that there's an emotional cost to participating in that quiet moment when, as Hemingway described it in "Hills Like White Elephants," the doctor lets "the air in."

Just one qualification to the correspondence between modern abortion and previous eliminations of unwanted children Larry draws: In my experience as a textual historian, I've found such practices were largely regarded, in Europe at least -- which is my domain of expertise (esp. the UK), with horror and by the nineteenth century seemed the very stuff of nightmares. You know, historically, people loved their children just as we do -- even given hard times and different understandings of children, childhood, and parenting practices. Thomas Hardy (in _Jude the Obsure_) has the little boy Father Time kill his tiny siblings to show how crazed he's become by his exposure to the cruel, hard world that doesn't seem to want them anyway. Perhaps the willful murder of infants then was more of a surprise, granted how many died anyway from accident and disease, medical science being what it was. Poverty was so grinding and conditions so awful that it took care of children well enough on its own, without human assistance.

But, back to this issue of women's suffering in their effort to control fertility Larry raises. Granted that effective birth control exists to prevent most unwanted pregnancies (not all to be sure, my own experience as case in point), we don't want to grant that abortion is actually a regular technology for women to control their fertility, do we? That's awfully close to the slurring rhetoric (which I don't condone) that women use abortion as a method of birth control. Because abortion, as many pro-choice advocates will say, is meant as an unfortunate last resort. The control of fertility may now largely be a matter of prevention rather than "cure," especially when that cure means the ending of a life already under construction.

12 Larry Turner (mail)
12:33 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST

My fellow bloggers:

In Kat's defense - I don't think she meant parasite in a strict, biologically defined way - but as an extended circumstance of the definition of a fetus - which she cites.

In a very real sense, the rights of people who are "already here" will always trump the rights of "people" who aren't - we can debate the ethics and pass as many laws as we want.

13 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:47 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST

I agree, Larry. When I take apart Kat's definition of a parasite, it doesn't hold up. She means it, I think, more as a way of saying the developing organism is living off the woman and so should be hers to dispose of as she will. It isn't an entity in its own right, one that merits the protection of our society. (One problem with this, as I've said earlier, is that it's dangerously close to Social Darwinist thinking, in which the definition of parasite may be applied to the social, as well as the maternal, body.)

As I've argued earlier, I find the argument that those who are here trump those who aren't questionable.

If by those "who aren't here" we meant -- as in more conventional conversation -- our not-yet-conceived future generations, well, even then I think we've got an obligation to give them an eco-system that's inhabitable and a world politic that isn't crazy mad impoverished and at war and a homeland whatever it is that's not sunk into a depression and affords no kind of living or any civil liberties or human rights. Well, you get the drift. We've a responsibility to future generations -- even though they aren't here, yet. Only in a time of genuine crisis do I believe we can legitimately push that charge aside to do what's best for us, the presently living, alone.

In this case, I do believe these developing humans are more here than in the sense either Larry or Kat will accept. And even though they are also not quite here, they are our most immediate future generation. When they inherit the earth, they are inheriting it much too literally for my conscience to accept.

14 Larry Turner (mail)
4:21 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST

Well - I commend my fellow bloggers -

On the most heated of topics we could have chosen - much more light than heat.

15 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
4:24 am, Feb 9, 2005 PST (edit) (delete)

I second that (e)motion, Larry :).

Why I Don't Do Comments

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Mon, 7 Feb 05 13:12:00 UT

A reader sent an email asking why I haven't enabled the comments function to this blog. I am, of course, writing on often controversial matters of culture and public policy, and so should offer others the ability to respond.

My explanation's this: I had enabled comments when I first began this journal and for some time after. However, in December, a second incident with an insistent, argumentative commenter took the pleasure out of responding to comments.

Given the demands on my time and energy (teaching four college courses, wrapping up a fifth, participating in an active job search, volunteering as a community leader, raising a small child, serving as a journal editor, etc.), I decided I didn't want to continue to put time and energy into that dimension of the journal -- at least not right now.

However, I'll be glad to take emails, especially from those fellow journalers who have addressed my posts in their own blogs. I'm as interested in points of disagreement as I am agreement. I just won't promise to reply :).

Professor ...

A Case Against Broadly Legalized Abortion

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Mon, 7 Feb 05 09:27:00 UT

If we accept that a human life has value, and, when innocent of heinous capital crimes, cannot with moral authority be ended unless in cases of self-defense or, for those who embrace euthanasia, lack of viability cum a certain expressed quality, then whether life begins at the moment of conception, or implantation, or viability outside the uterus is the first important question to address in developing one's own stance on abortion.

How ought we to define life? One persuasive argument is that we ought to define a human life as beginning when the fetus has the potential to live outside the womb on its own. That is, at the earliest according to current science, at 23 weeks of development (near the end of the second trimester). The reasoning is that at this stage, the fetus is a separate person from the mother, rather than a part of her body.

Although I do not believe it is reasonable to portray an embryo or earlier staged fetus as a life entirely separate from its mother's, neither do I believe it makes sense to assume it is nothing more than undifferentiated maternal tissue.

It seems odd that -- legally -- we conceive of a forming child within a woman as nothing more than generative cells, enabled by a male's fertilizing agent. We admit no sense of the embryo as a symbiotic entity, with its own lifeforce and potential. To remove it, under the law, is no more troubling than scraping away undesirable tissue, no different than ridding a woman's body of an ovarian cyst or endomitrial excess.

That is, unless the embryo is desired. Then, even at the earliest stages of detection, we watch over that physical matter as if it mattered, as if it has a separate nature and constitutes an individual life or soon will, granted sound medical progress and lack of accident. The loss of a forming child at 8, 10, or 12 weeks is still felt as profound. The child is buried. The family grieves. And this for a child who may not well have been viable. Many miscarriages are the result of an embryo that is improperly formed and could not have continued to later pregnancy.

That we popularly find it acceptable to change our conception of the forming child based on whether it is desired or not by the mother seems problematic to me. Either that entity is undifferentiated tissue, or it is an individual life, or -- as in my view -- it is until viability something in between, in which case the forming life still deserves the valuing of its life, although placed, I argue, in balance with the right to life of the mother (not her right to privacy or property). From the moment when development toward the end goal of individuated life is enabled, we ought to have some fixed, definite sense of what it is and what it means to us. Moral definitions cannot be rendered along the lines of personal convenience.

The case has been persuasively made that such definitions, of when life begins and what life means, ought to be left up to the mother to decide, based on her own system of values. Yet, we share as a society carefully detailed definitions of murder, even to different types based on their motivations and circumstances. If we acknowledge that the ending of an embryo's or fetus' development is the ending of a life, then we must accept that it is murder. And, murder, our society has heretofore assumed, must be governed by a uniform code, not individual ethics.

So, the question of whether and when life begins, comes back to us again as the crucial deciding point. Recognizing this, some have argued, again persuasively, that we ought to consider life as developing gradually, and so assign greater rights to the forming child as it becomes more and more human. They accord the most rights, those of personhood, to the child when it is may life outside the womb.

One problem with this argument is that it tends to mark viability at the end of the second trimester, which is up to five weeks after current science marks viability (at the start of 23 weeks; the second trimester ends with the completion of Week 27).

Another problem is that the placement of viability late in pregnancy tends to be based on lung, rather than brain, development. Determining when brain development reaches a "human" level is tricky. At 6 weeks of development, embryos register electrical activity in their forming brains and nervous systems at 6 weeks of development. Within the first trimester, they also respond to pain stimuli. By 20 weeks, fetuses register a suckle response when their lips are brushed. By 23 weeks, when fetuses first become only marginally viable outside the womb, they are able to think and dream. One week later, they respond to sound.

Still yet another problem, and this is most concerning to me, is that we are weighing a life in development's very existence against -- in most cases -- not the life of the mother, but against the sacrifices she would make in order to carry a child to term. I don't undersell those sacrifices by calling them mere inconvenience. Carrying a wanted child to term means medical, emotional, familial, and financial burdens. Carrying an unwanted child to term, and in less than ideal circumstances for the mother, means additional costs to her and those around her. And yet, what is a human life worth, granted of course that we acknowledge a forming child may be considered alive, at least in a partial, conjoined sense?

The most sinister argument, however, is the one we so often hear, that forcing women to give birth to unwanted children means a strain on our social welfare systems and enforced lives of suffering for the children themselves.

Let me first consider the case for abortion as a means of reducing strain on our social welfare system (which sometimes takes the form of: who will provide for these children -- the pro-life lobbyists? the government?).

Granted that most abortions in the U.S. are still optioned by poor or low-income women, and granted that minority women are between two and three times more likely than white women to seek abortions, what indeed are we supporting with such an argument?

Are we making a case for the euthanization of poor people, of people of color? If the State were to demand such a practice, then, yes, we would be. Since economics and social politics have led abortion to seem like best-case solution to a worst-case scenario, we have managed, as a society, to convince women in these communities to carry out family planning for a rich society that will now have to bear this additional burden.

Whether we admit it or not, by endorsing this kind of argument, we have, in cold terms, established that the lives of their children may be sacrificed in order to grant a better living for the rest of us. What were they going to amount to anyway? Better that they should die than become a burden to the rest of us. Where do such arguments end? Will we next begin making such cases of the elderly? Of the disabled?

Now, let me take on the second argument: the enforced suffering of unwanted children. Are they indeed better off dead than in foster care, or orphanages, or in adopted families? I don't believe so. The vast majority of those born impoverished, materially, emotionally, socially, choose life. Many of them strive to better themselves, to heal themselves, to contribute to society. Those who fail to do so -- are their lives worthless, to themselves and those who love them? Are we so certain that they will only lead miserable existences, ones at greater risk for crime and poverty, that we are willing to say their lives would have had no value and so may end them without a spasm of conscience? Those who make such arguments haven't, it seems to me, thought through what they are really arguing. Does one have to come from an emotionally and materially privileged position to think this is a just view? I suspect so.

The fact is, that in the U.S., approximately 40 million forming children have been legally aborted since 1973. The majority of their developments were ended because they meant an unwanted pregnancy to women in their 20s, most of whom were poor, unmarried, and had previously had children or at least one prior abortion. Nearly all of these forming children were aborted during the first trimester. Were they potential human beings or waste tissue? Was the sacrifice their mothers would have had to make to bring them to term worth the social cost of their births and the possible value of their lives?

These, too, are questions that need more careful, honest answers.

______________

See my earlier post on Basic Abortion Facts for support of the demographic claims I've made in this post. Embryonic and fetal development facts have been drawn from standard medical sites.

This Memo Just in From the Nonlethal War Tactics Dept.

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Fri, 4 Feb 05 01:00:00 UT

This per Chuck Shephard's most recent News of the Weird; originally sourced from New Scientist:

"Nonlethal war tactics suggested by an Air Force research team in the 1990s were made public in December by the military watchdog organization Sunshine Project and included a recommendation to expose enemy troops to powerful aphrodisiacs in order to distract them into lustful hookups with each other (irrespective of gender). (The Pentagon said the idea was dropped almost immediately, but the Sunshine Project said it was discussed as recently as 2001.) Other ideas: giving the enemy severe halitosis (so they could be detected within a civilian population), overrunning enemy positions with rats or wasps, and creating waves of fecal gas. [New Scientist, 1-14-05]"

Folks, to this, I've just...no comment.

Abortion Statistics: Basic Data

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Thu, 27 Jan 05 16:26:00 UT

In this entry, I begin with world abortion statistics but then go on to mainly present US abortion statistics from the two most reliable sources, the AGI and the CDC. At the end of the post, I give the AGI's statement of how the Institute's methods of information collection differ for the CDC's (the AGI leans toward pro-choice, while the CDC purports to be neutral).

The statistics given here are some of the more recent on public record, although they are now 3-5 years out of date. I will present a position analysis in a later entry. For now, as best we can surmise, the facts:

sources are quoted directly, unless marked with bracket exclusions; any emphases are mine

_____________

source: "The Incidence of Abortion Worldwide: Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 25, Supplement, Jan. 1999. By Stanley K. Henshaw, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas

http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/25s3099.html

Worldwide, about one-fourth of the approximately 180 million pregnancies known to occur each year are resolved by abortion. Abortions numbered an estimated 46 million in 1995, but given the uncertainty of the data, that number could be as low as 42 million or as high as 50 million. About 35 in every 1,000 women aged 15â44 have an abortion each year.

[Of the approximately 46 million annual worldwide abortions,] about 26 million were legal and 20 million illegal. The abortion rate worldwide was about 35 per 1,000 women aged 15â44. Of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages and stillbirths), 26% were terminated by abortion.

The developing areas of the world, where 79% of the world's people live, account for 64% of legal and 95% of illegal abortions. When both legal and illegal abortions are considered, the abortion rate is 39 per 1,000 women aged 15â44 in developed countries and 34 per 1,000 in developing countries, a difference that is nonsignificant when the degree of error in the estimates is considered. The abortion ratio (abortions per 100 pregnancies ending in birth or abortion) is higher in the developed regions than in the developing regions (42% vs. 23%) because the developed areas have low birthrates.

The number and rate of abortions in developed regions are strongly influenced by the number and rate in Central and Eastern Europe, where abortion is a common method of limiting and spacing births. When Eastern Europe is excluded, the number of abortions in the developed areas drops by more than half, and the rate falls from 39 to 20 abortions per 1,000 women. Similarly, China accounts for a large part of the developing world's population; excluding China, however, has little impact on the abortion rate. [Among developing nations, Vietnam and Cuba have the highest abortion rates.]

_____________

About.com's Women's Issues site gives (without source) the typical number of abortions (usually cited as calculated from CDC annual figures) of abortions performed in the US (an estimate, of course) since Roe v. Wade's passage in 1973: 40 million.

_____________

source: Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health and The Alan Guttmacher Institute (favorable to a pro-choice position)

http://www.agi-usa.org/presentations/ab_slides.html

unless otherwise marked, statistics were reported in January 2003, and are therefore assumed to represent 2002 information; in this section I paraphrase, rather than directly quote, research results (the numbers have not been altered, nor the categories of reporting, except that I have chosen to phrase how many unintended pregnancies resulted in abortion in the positive

total number of abortions: 1.3 million, 90% in the first trimester

48% of pregnancies were unintended; 47% of unintended pregnancies resulted in abortion

of women who aborted, 56% were in their 20s; 67.3% were never married

in 2000, 57% of women who aborted were (together with their household) below the poverty line or low income

low-income women were less likely to abort unintended pregnancies than higher income women, but had more unintended pregnancies, which result statistically in a greater number of abortions, proportionally

non-Hispanic whites account for 41% of abortions (the largest racial group represented)

together, however, black and hispanic women make up 51.8% of women having abortions [e.g., black women have 3 times as many abortions as non-hispanic caucasians; hispanics combined with other race groups but excluding blacks account for 2.3 times more abortions than non-Hispanic white women per the CDC in 2001]

61% of women who aborted had previously given birth; 48% had previously had at least one abortion

reasons for abortion (1987 study used by both pro-choice and pro-life, Torres and Forrest, 1988; women gave 3.7 reasons on average):

"Inadequate finances 21%
Not ready for responsibility 21%
Womanâs life would be changed too much 16%
Problems with relationship; unmarried 12%
Too young; not mature enough 11%
Children are grown; woman has all she wants 8%
Other 4%"

"Fetus has possible health problem 3%
Woman has health problem 3%
Pregnancy caused by rape, incest 1%"

_____________

source: CDC Abortion Surveillance and Research, 2001 (table and figure links removed):

http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/surv_abort.htm

Overall, the annual number of legal induced abortions in the United States increased gradually from 1973 until it peaked in 1990, and it generally declined thereafter. In 2001, a total of 853,485 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC by 49 reporting areas. This represents a 0.5% decrease from 2000, for which the same 49 areas reported 857,475 legal induced abortions.

The national legal induced abortion ratio increased from 196 per 1,000 live births in 1973 (the first year that 52 areas reported) to 358 per 1,000 in 1979 and remained nearly stable through 1981. The ratio peaked at 364 per 1,000 in 1984 and since then has demonstrated a generally steady decline. In 2001, the abortion ratio was 246 per 1,000 in 49 reporting areas and 247 for the same 48 reporting areas for which data were available since 1998. This represents a 0.4% increase from 2000 (246 per 1,000).

The national legal induced abortion rate increased from 14 per 1,000 women aged 15--44 years in 1973 to 25 per 1,000 in 1980. The rate remained stable, at 23--24 per 1,000 during the 1980s and early 1990s and at 20--21 per 1,000 during 1994-- 1997. The abortion rate remained unchanged at 17 per 1,000 during 1997--1999 in the same 48 reporting areas. In 2001, the abortion rate remained unchanged from 2000 at 16 per 1,000, both overall and in the same 48 reporting areas as 1999.

Abortion trends by age indicate that since 1973, abortion ratios have been higher for adolescents aged <15 years than for any other age group. For females aged <19 years and those aged >40 years, the abortion ratio generally increased from 1974 through the early 1980s and declined thereafter. The abortion ratio for women aged 20--34 years (those with the highest fertility rates) (7) has declined slightly since the mid-1980s. The abortion ratio for women aged 35--39 years has declined gradually over time.

The numbers, ratios, and rates of reported legal induced abortions are presented by area of residence as well as by area of occurrence. In 2001, the highest number of reported legal induced abortions occurred in NYC (91,792), Florida (85,589), and Texas (77,409); the fewest occurred in Idaho (738), South Dakota (895), and North Dakota (1,216).

Note: The two primary sources of US Abortion Statistics are the CDC and AGI. Per the AGI, their methods of information collection are the chief difference (the numbers themselves tend to be complementary, although not exact in their correspondence):

The methods of data collection differ as well. The CDC collects most of its information indirectly, mainly through reports from state health departments. Reports for the 45 states that collect information on abortion and the District of Columbia vary in completeness, with some lacking information on as many as 40-50% of the abortions that occur in the state.
The CDC also conducts limited surveys of abortion providers or makes estimates for the states that do not collect abortion information (Alaska, California, Iowa, New Hampshire and Oklahoma). For information on the type of abortion procedure used and the characteristics of women having abortions, the CDC relies on the reports of the approximately 40 states that collect these data.
AGI, on the other hand, directly surveys all known providers of abortion services, which numbered 2,380 nationwide at last count. As a result, the number of abortions reported by AGI is accepted as the more accurate and is somewhat higher than that report ed by the CDCâby 15%, on average (although the difference has narrowed somewhat in recent years). Most likely, some abortions also go unreported to AGIâprimarily office procedures performed by physicians for their own patientsâbut this number is believed to be very small. Underreporting may become more prevalent if methods of nonsurgical abortion become widely available in private physicians' offices."

Biological Differences Between the Sexes: Recent Research

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Thu, 20 Jan 05 12:02:00 UT

A recent ABC article, prompted by Harvard's President Summer's controversial remarks, overviews research that establishes biologically-based differences between the sexes. Such differences may not be deterministic in terms of human character, intelligence, or other potentials, but they are suggestive and merit further investigation.

For example, when it comes to disease:

"Depression, for example, appears to be twice as common in women as in men while women with schizophrenia seem to suffer less cognitive difficulties than men with the condition.

Nearly all neurodevelopmental diseases are either more common in one gender or more severe among one gender, says Nancy Forger of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Other conditions, including arthritis, heart disease, even lung cancer also seem to be influenced by a person's gender."

Also, when it comes to brain damage and memory encoding / structural functionality:

"Studies in people with damage to the left sides of their brains, for example, show that men with damage are less likely to be able to recover their ability to talk. The work, from researchers in Bonn, Germany, suggested that men's verbal abilities may stem mostly from the left side of the brain. Meanwhile, women with left brain damage usually retained some language skills.

This difference might partly explain why studies have shown that infant girls speak sooner and use more words than infant boys.

Other work has tapped functional MRIs â scanning devices that measure blood flow and activity in the brains of conscious subjects. Drs. Ruben and Raquel Gur at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that women's brains light up in more areas than men's brains when given verbal and spatial tasks. This feature, they argue, may enhance women's ability to focus on many tasks at once. Women may even use different pathways than men when thinking and encoding memories.

Turhan Canli, a Stanford psychologist, recently tested 12 men and 12 women in functional MRIs and showed that women encode memories using different pathways than what men use when recording memories. The women were later able to recall emotions of a memory more accurately than men, which could possibly stem from how their memories were encoded in the first place.

Other differences keep emerging, including variability in size of the different brain regions, including the hippocampus, the amygdala and certain brain cell clusters." Researcher Nancy Forger of UM-Amherst reports over 100 differences between male and female brains have been discovered so far. For instance:

"Forger's work in mice has shown that as mammals develop in the womb, testosterone and related hormones trigger cell death in some regions of the male brain and foster cell development in other regions. In this way, the hormone sculpts the male brain and how it will differ from the female version.

Remove or add testosterone to mice shortly after birth, and their brains develop according to the presence of the hormone, regardless of their sex."

The article's last point, about the impact of sex-associated hormones on brain development and activity seems to be, from my other reading on the subject, the hottest area of current research. An article at Scientific American takes this research and applies it to activity performance differences by men and women.

The performance differences, again, are more suggestive than conclusive when it comes to educational or career preditors. Research shows that men "tend to perform better than women on certain spatial tasks," especially three-dimensional ones. Women, however, perform better on tasks that involve perceptual speed, such as when matching items (objects with two-dimensional shapes). Women also tend to demonstrate better ability at textual recall, manual dexterity, and mathematical calculations. Men, however, show greater ability at mathematical reasoning, target-directed motor skills, and matching lines with identical slopes.

One interesting claim in this article is that sex-differences in these areas of ability are now found to appear before puberty, not at or after puberty as was often previously claimed.

The main controversy on which the article touches is the question of whether women's tendency to perform less ably in mathematical competition is the result of biology or socialization:

"...Such findings are relevant to the suggestion by Camilla P. Benbow, now at Vanderbilt University, that high mathematical ability has a significant biological determinant. Benbow and her colleagues have reported consistent sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability that favor males. In mathematically talented youth, the differences were especially sharp at the upper end of the distribution, where males vastly outnumbered females. The same has been found for the Putnam competition, a very demanding mathematics examination. Benbow argues that these differences are not readily explained by socialization."

However, the writer cautions, "It is important to keep in mind that the relation between natural hormone levels and problem solving is based on correlational data. Although some form of connection between the two measures exists, we do not necessarily know how the association is determined, nor do we know what its causal basis is. We also know little at present about the relation between adult levels of hormones and those in early life, when abilities appear to become organized in the nervous system."

Another interesting finding the article notes is that both men and women may be affected by fluctuating / cycling hormonal levels:

"One of the most intriguing findings in adults is that cognitive patterns may remain sensitive to hormonal fluctuations throughout life. Elizabeth Hampson of the University of Western Ontario showed that women's performances at certain tasks changed throughout the menstrual cycle as levels of estrogen varied. High levels of the hormone were associated not only with relatively depressed spatial ability but also with enhanced speech and manual skill tasks. In addition, I have observed seasonal fluctuations in spatial ability in men: their performance is better in the spring, when testosterone levels are lower. Whether these hormonally linked fluctuations in intellectual ability represent useful evolutionary adaptations or merely the highs and lows of an average test level remains to be seen through further research."

PMS, indeed :).

Chicken Fight: Animal Cruelty in the Media

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Fri, 14 Jan 05 13:17:00 UT

Newsflash: "A man who sold pit bull fight videos to investigators is the first person to be tried under a 1999 federal animal cruelty statute." -- Pittsburgh (AP), Jan. 12, 2005

________________________________

As a whole, American society takes a mixed view toward animal cruelty. We generally don't like to see it, not for entertainment's sake or even for the preservation of landscape or agriculture, unless we're involved in those businesses (and then, it's not for the sake of pleasure, unless shooting or trapping to kill is -- and for some, let's admit, it is).

But, by and large, we either reluctantly or blithely accept it in at least three contexts: 1) Getting a good steak or drumstick on the plate. I don't hold myself above this hypocrisy: I'm an enthusiastic carnivore. While I wish my meat came my way with less cruelty in the process, I am not ignorant enough to believe I've done much if anything to ensure it. 2) The performance of medical research on our human behalf, given a qualified attempt to reduce suffering (or what we would hope or assume is such an attempt). 3) We are less informed about its use in consumer products testing, although for the more gently inclined, it too has become an issue, usually on the level of buying the lipstick marked "not tested on animals" over the one that isn't. I once wrote a letter to my Senator asking him to look into banning Detroit auto manufacturers from crash testing cars with live, unanesthetized pigs inside rather than sensor-rigged dummies. It was, at the time, a common practice.

Thus, I would not say that Americans condone animal cruelty, as some PETA activists and other extremists are likely to argue. It's become fashionable to reject the wearing of fur, or too much fur. It's de rigeur to claim vegetarianism on more than health grounds. It's easy to raise an outcry over the thinning of crows in New York State, or wherever, or the movement of a hawk's nest in the City, and so on. We have tender, bleeding hearts for the fishy, feathered, furry set, Americans. But, in certain contexts, we tolerate their abuse -- as long as we don't have to see it or think about it too much.

And yet, until 1999, representations of animal cruelty were legal (at the Federal level) when snuff films remained underground and subject to prosecution. I'm no fan of Clinton, but until he signed the bill into law, the paradox existed of animal cruelty's illegality in act but legality of display in fact. Now, such materials are outlawed unless they can be proven to have "no serious educational, historical or scientific value."

Although under the "new" federal law representations of actual animal cruelty must be legally coded as educational / historical / scientific" for distribution, we still get broadcasts of animal cruelty for pleasure. I was myself surprised to see the Chicken Fight Burger King campaign, which began in roughly October 2004. Although the company described the chickens as "wrestlers," viewers cannot help but see the poulescent combat as an updated, comedic form of cock fighting. The music and other stylistic features of the campaign further introduced elements of Latin culture, suggesting the appeal to a hip young audience of Latinos and other American demographics who find that culture the cutting edge of cool -- a recent trend in popular media, as the children's show Mucha Lucha illustrates.

Most Americans would likely find references to dog fighting unacceptable. It's banned in all 50 states. Bear baiting, and other acts of overt animal cruelty for entertainment are likewise widely considered publicly distasteful. Why did Burger King endorse, and their advertising company design, a campaign that was a throwback to a cultural practice that is both abhorrent to many present-day American and associated with a certain lower-order of Latin culture with which many Latino Americans would be loathe to identify?

The almighty dollar is, of course, the answer. Burger King has introduced a celebrity voting campaign concurrently, hoping to increase the interest of a young demographic to their chain (with the likes of such stars as P. Diddy and Snoop Dog as pitchpersons; see BK CMO's statement here). The Chicken Fight ads, we might argue, appealed not only to a young demographic, but also to a specifically male youth target. It seems that we will use anything to sell to our youth these days -- regardless of what it may be communicating about our basic care for the welfare of those who cannot defend themselves and otherwise have no voice.

True, humans wrestle, and box, and ultimate fight for sport: the physical testing of themselves, and entertaiment and material enrichment of others. But, they've chosen to do it. They live through it. They're repaired well and adequately compensated -- by their own estimation at least. Or, they've accepted the risks as reasonable. In the case of dog or cock or bull fighting, human beings are exploiting a natural territorial or mating aggression of an animal whose aggression has been encouraged, and sometimes enhanced (as with steel rooster spurs). It's the equivalent, sans the humanity, of slave masters setting slaves to fight for their amusement. The only concern for the slaves' welfare being, historically, their continued preservation as good fighting property and breeding stock. Not to mention that taking pleasure in a spectacle of real, damaging violence -- not the pretend or holds barred stuff we often consume in lieu -- reduces us. It renders us ugly and primitive, or, perhaps more accurately, it appeals to those dimensions of us that already are. For shame, then, that we have not earned a higher degree of civilization when we impose such terms on "lower" animals, even if we have -- I hope we have -- learned not to do this to men.

Of course, we tolerate fictional representations of animal cruelty all the time. So to get up in arms about this one might seem to overstate the case. But, it is one thing to show a man in a movie defending himself from a grizzly bear attack and another to take pleasure in the idea of animals ripping one another up for sport. Let's just say it doesn't give me a taste for chicken -- in fact, it takes away my appetite.

Talking in Bed

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Sat, 8 Jan 05 02:51:00 UT

There's a lot of bad love poetry out there -- superficial, sentimental, vapid, vain. I used to have a website where I put up some romantic poetry that gets it right. Really, it was in a desire to inform tastes, because when amateur poetry goes bad, it's never worse than when it touches on the heartstrings. So, once again in that spirit, I offer up a poem by Philip Larkin.

I've been thinking about the following poem lately, since a couple of students have written on it. It's the final stanza that packs the punch, especially the last line. But, even more subtly, it's the existential broadening of the second and third stanzas that make the difference.

Landscape description in poetry can seem a mere generic convention, but here, Larkin uses it to set a mood and then express a philosophical connection between the personal and the profound. Gone is the pure passion and the Holy Grail of storybook romance, which only lasts so long as fantasy is sustained.

Present instead is a growing sense of distance between a more realistically drawn, committed couple. Their physical closeness, when contrasted with the isolation without, should increase their intimacy. The landscape's lack of care / responsivenss ought to give them a deepened sense of that for one another. But, it doesn't.

The need is present, but the ability to connect, honestly, tenderly, readily, isn't -- they are too vulnerable, know one another too well, for that.

Talking in Bed
Philip Larkin (c/p 1960)

Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.

The Academic Left

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Thu, 30 Dec 04 13:30:00 UT

I had a debate with a colleague on an online scholarly list some time back. I suggested that promoting his own political agenda through off-topic posts, which were entirely irrelevant to the subject of the list, was inappropriate since it assumed (or at least the way he was doing it assumed) that list members were in agreement with his views, meaning left-leaning. He argued that he, as a liberal, was in the political minority not only in the U.S. in general but in Academia. Since he was as an openly gay man and a queer theorist, I could give him the benefit of the doubt on those grounds for America in general. But, as a gay academic? Or, as a liberal academic?

Now there, I drew the line. I told him that was utterly ridiculous. As a sometimes left and sometimes right leaning independent academic (depending on the issue), I could make a good case for the exclusion of the right as well as the assumptions of the left holding sway. In fact, it's the last that bothers me most.

I expect thinkers to interrogate their value assumptions, especially trained doctors of philosophy. That's not too much to ask of the profession -- or so I would have thought.

I don't say that all academics are failing or fallen in this regard. The better scholars are flexible and discerning. But, there are plenty who disappoint, and not a few of them are the star players in the Humanities.

To this end, I reproduce portions of George Will's recent column in the Washington Post on the left in higher education, which is, of course, a significant influence on college students as well as US intellectual production:

Academia, Stuck To the Left
[...]
One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.
Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.
But we essentially knew this even before the American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:
Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.
Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.
Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.
UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2004, of the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush.
But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice." That clears that up.
A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls academia's "sheltered habitat." In a dazzling essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, notes that the "first protocol" of academic society is the "common assumption" -- that, at professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.
It is a reasonable assumption, given that in order to enter the profession, your work must be deemed, by the criteria of the prevailing culture, "relevant." Bauerlein says that various academic fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship:
"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."
This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.
[...]
Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.
They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Amen, Brother George. Ain't it the truth.

Quantum Darwinism

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Tue, 28 Dec 04 05:13:00 UT

Reported in Nature by Philip Ball 12/23/04:

If observing the world tends to change it, how come we all see the same butterfly?

[...]

A team of US physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world.

If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find?

Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states.

If it wasn't for quantum darwinism, the researchers suggest in Physical Review Letters1, the world would be very unpredictable: different people might see very different versions of it. Life itself would then be hard to conduct, because we would not be able to obtain reliable information about our surroundings... it would typically conflict with what others were experiencing.

[...]

Because, as Zurek says, "the Universe is quantum to the core," this property seems to undermine the notion of an objective reality. In this type of situation, every tourist who gazed at Buckingham Palace would change the arrangement of the building's windows, say, merely by the act of looking, so that subsequent tourists would see something slightly different.

Yet that clearly isn't what happens. This sensitivity to observation at the quantum level (which Albert Einstein famously compared to God constructing the quantum world by throwing dice to decide its state) seems to go away at the everyday, macroscopic level. "God plays dice on a quantum level quite willingly," says Zurek, "but, somehow, when the bets become macroscopic he is more reluctant to gamble." How does that happen?

[...]

Physicists agree that the macroscopic or classical world (which seems to have a single, 'objective' state) emerges from the quantum world of many possible states through a phenomenon called decoherence, according to which interactions between the quantum states of the system of interest and its environment serve to 'collapse' those states into a single outcome. But this process of decoherence still isn't fully understood.

"Decoherence selects out of the quantum 'mush' states that are stable, that can withstand the scrutiny of the environment without getting perturbed," says Zurek. These special states are called 'pointer states', and although they are still quantum states, they turn out to look like classical ones. For example, objects in pointer states seem to occupy a well-defined position, rather than being smeared out in space.

The traditional approach to decoherence, says Zurek, was based on the idea that the perturbation of a quantum system by the environment eliminates all but the stable pointer states, which an observer can then probe directly. But he and his colleagues point out that we typically find out about a system indirectly, that is, we look at the system's effect on some small part of its environment. For example, when we look at a tree, in effect we measure the effect of the leaves and branches on the visible sunlight that is bouncing off them.

But it was not obvious that this kind of indirect measurement would reveal the robust, decoherence-resistant pointer states. If it does not, the robustness of these states won't help you to construct an objective reality.

Now, Zurek and colleagues have proved a mathematical theorem that shows the pointer states do actually coincide with the states probed by indirect measurements of a system's environment. "The environment is modified so that it contains an imprint of the pointer state," he says.

[...]

Yet this process alone, which the researchers call 'environment-induced superselection' or einselection2, isn't enough to guarantee an objective reality. It is not sufficient for a pointer state merely to make its imprint on the environment: there must be many such imprints, so that many different observers can see the same thing.

Happily, this tends to happen automatically, because each individual's observation is based on only a tiny part of the environmental imprint. For example, we're never in danger of 'using up' all the photons bouncing off a tree, no matter how many people we assemble to look at it.

This multiplicity of imprints of the pointer states happens precisely because those states are robust: making one imprint does not preclude making another. This is a Darwin-like selection process. "One might say that pointer states are most 'fit'," says Zurek. "They survive monitoring by the environment to leave 'descendants' that inherit their properties."

"Our work shows that the environment is not just finding out the state of the system and keeping it to itself", he adds. "Rather, it is advertising it throughout the environment, so that many observers can find it out simultaneously and independently."

[emphasis mine]

Latest NBC/WSJ Poll Defines Democratic & Republican Values

dgnfly@hotmail.com — Thu, 16 Dec 04 04:16:00 UT

Per MSNBC Online:

"When asked on which one or two of specific values they thought the Democratic Party is the strongest, 37 percent cited ensuring equal opportunity, 27 percent said tolerance, 19 percent said individuality, 14 percent said compassion, and just 5 percent said strong faith. For the Republican Party, on the other hand, 31 percent cited strengthening families, 25 percent said strong faith, 21 percent said personal responsibility and just 6 percent cited compassion and tolerance."

Here, faith emphasis becomes a clear factor in Americans definition of Democratic and Republican parties. But, so too does the apparent ideological split between "ensuring equal opportunity" and the emphasis on "personal responsibility" and "tolerance" and "strengthening families." Although these values don't seem on the surface to stand in necessary opposition, they are, when put into practice, set into tension with one another.

The former pairing of 'equal opportunity' and 'personal responsibility' serves as code for positions on such debates as Affirmative Action, No Child Left Behind, and Welfare Reform. The latter pairing of 'tolerance' and 'strengthening families' serves as code for positions on such debates as Gay Marriage and Gay Adoption as well as Abortion Rights.

The Democratic pronounced valuing of 'individuality' makes sense as a complement to 'tolerance'; together these suggest a higher potential for Democrats to embrace nonconformity. However, in practice, the nonconformities so embraced follow a proscribed set (religious extremists, rural militia, etc. need not apply). Of course, the Republican value of "strengthening familiies" likewise suggests an embedded limit; the families supported tend to be traditional or to have originated as traditional.

An interesting feature of the poll -- and this may be determined by the polling questions themselves, which are not reported -- may be the lack of more externalized values (those extra-domestic in orientation) finding expression here. The questions of capitalist economics, world policing, human rights, and humanitarian aid don't seem as readily suggested by the values on which the poll touches.