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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Go away. This is either another adequacy.org style troll, or a strawman.

And people, please stop responding seriously to it. The chance that he actually believes this is just about zero. The rhetoric is written to be maximally inflammatory, rather than to express a position. Anyone who actually thought evil needed to be destroyed wouldn't use negatively emotionally charged words like "genocide", "cancer", and destroying "heresy" to describe what he wants done.

It's like having someone argue in favor of abortion by saying "we should commence baby killing". Real abortion supporters wouldn't call it that.

It's like having someone argue in favor of abortion by saying "we should commence baby killing". Real abortion supporters wouldn't call it that.

Not precisely, Jiro. The scholarly and academic papers that I've looked up online (insofar as I can since you have to log in as part of an academic institution to get the full articles) refer to the "fetus" (American spelling) if they ever tip-toe up to mentioning "killing".

It's only a very few feminist theoreticians who will go Abortion involves killing - and that's okay! and even they won't out-and-out mention "babies":

I agree with Nelson. There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part. It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than (also) extinguishing a future child. In my view, recognizing that gestating manufactures a proto-person requires acknowledging that abortion kills a proto-person. A baby is completely dependent on human care in order to stay alive, but its needs could be filled by any person—whereas a fetus, a proto-person, is ineluctably dependent on specific person.

...This might seem counterintuitive in the context of an argument in favor of abortion-as-killing, but the distinction between making fetuses killable, and making it easy and stigma-free for people to take the decision to kill a fetus, is significant. The former refers to casting something (a lab rat, for example) out of the sphere the grievable, thanks to a tidy and final verdict on the permissibility of systematically sacrificing its life to a greater cause. The latter, while expanding access to the means of feticide, does not necessarily require any such sanitization of violence.

There seems to have been a fascinating case back in 1975 (the things you find when you go Googling!):

Roe and Doe also did not specifically define abortion, leaving another open question whose answer could affect Edelin's fate. If abortions presuppose the death of the fetus, as Edelin claimed, then his entire procedure was legal and immune from prosecution. But Flanagan's medical experts insisted that an abortion was nothing more than the termination of pregnancy, which could sometimes result in a live birth.

The definition of birth itself became pivotal as witnesses raised questions of fact about the procedure Edelin used and the exact moment the fetus died, Doctors testifying against him agreed that birth means the separation of the placenta from the wall of the womb, the moment at which the fetus "goes on its own systems" for nourishment and oxygen. Defense witnesses repeated the more commonly understood definition of the word as involving expulsion or removal from the mother's body. And Judge McGuire supported that understanding of the word in his charge to the jury.

The distinction was crucial, for Edelin was accused of killing the aborted fetus before removing it from inside its mother. Flanagan charged that he held it motionless inside the womb and watched a wall clock for three minutes as it struggled for air and died. Edelin, supported by testimony from two nurses and a medical student, denied the three-minute wait, and claimed that in fact there was no working wall clock for him to watch. But he did not deny that he had no intention of delivering a live baby: "It would have been contrary to the wishes of the mother."

You do get the canned responses to give to awkward questions worksheet that relies on parroting "there is no one-size-fits-all legislation". Also, seemingly, shoes are very important in making these decisions - you can't make the decision if you haven't walked in the shoes:

When people are making difficult, complicated, personal medical decisions, one-size-fits-all laws don’t work.

2. Why haven’t you taken a stand against infanticide or killing babies who survive an abortion?

What you should avoid

Don’t say "partial-birth," "late-term," or "born alive."

Murder of any person, including newborns, is already a crime, as it should be. This question is not rooted in medical care or science, but rather an intentional disinformation campaign.

Tragically, sometimes a woman gets a diagnosis of a serious health complication that threatens her life or health. Other times, a family learns later in pregnancy there is a very serious fetal diagnosis, or the baby is dying and can’t survive for long. When people are making difficult, complicated, personal medical decisions, one-size-fits-all laws don’t work. We cannot make a woman’s decisions because we haven’t walked in her shoes.

It's not believable enough to be inflammatory.

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