Alas, A Blog has posted a handy table showing how pro-life positions tend to correspond a different motivation than what they claim — that these positions aren’t consistent with a belief that abortion is murder, but are consistent with a belief that women should be punished for having sex. It’s quite compelling to see the argument laid out in this format.

Ampersand claims that he’s been reluctant to use the “pro-life movement is really anti-sex” argument in the past because he views it as an ad hominem attack. But, he says,

although I’ve met some rank-and-file “pro-lifers” whose policy preferences were consistent with a belief that a fetus is morally indistinguishable from a child, those folks usually have policy preferences which are totally out of step with the abortion criminalization movement as a whole.

In contrast, the leaders of the abortion criminalization movement have consistently put their political weight behind policies which make little or no sense if they genuinely think that abortion is identical to child murder. And they’ve done so with the apparent backing and blessing of the vast majority of the rank and file.

This is pretty much consistent with what I’ve seen in the comment wars here on Word Munger. I’ve had a commenter who defended the pro-life movement, but then said she’d be okay with abortions up to the fourth week of pregnancy. I’ve had a commenter who said it was ridiculous to say the pro-life movement was anti-sex, but when asked, pretty much matched up in attitudes to what is summarized in Ampersand’s chart, and I’ve seen no evidence that the pro-life leadership’s attitude is anything but anti-sex.

First, I just wanted to let readers know that the comments threads are still quite active in two of my posts on the pro-life movement (here and here — I really need to get a “recent comments” plugin set up on this site).

But I wanted to bring yet another of Deep Thought’s comments to the forefront, and since he doesn’t seem to mind the attention, I’ll address it right here. He says:

That is, in the end, the debate. The right of a woman to have an uninterrupted career, or to not be hassled while completing a graduate degree, or to not gain too much weight, or escape the economic burden of her own actions.

Women are selfish, he argues, for wanting these rights, and for sacrificing the life of another in order to get them. That’s the heart of his argument right there: that the rights of the embryo or fetus to live trump the right of its mother to have the life she wants. I don’t think he’d disagree with that.

But let’s be clear about some things: for Deep Thought, “her own actions” include using birth control which fails. I wouldn’t be surprised if Deep Thought included her being raped in “her own actions.” This is what Deep Thought is talking about. If you are raped, you must not only suffer that inhumanity, but if the rape happens to result in a fertilized egg, then part of your rape will continue for another nine months, because you will not only be forced to have intercourse, you’ll also be forced to bear and give birth to the child that results. Otherwise, you’re just being selfish.

For Deep Thought, emergency contraceptives for rape victims would be an unacceptable compromise, because Deep Thought believes, against all scientific evidence, that emergency contraceptives may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.

Deep Thought claims that I haven’t talked to enough pro-lifers to really understand what they believe. Deep Thought believes that both abortion and contraception are wrong, but, he claims, for different reasons. It would be theoretically possible for someone to be pro-contraception, but also believe that life begins the instant the sperm reaches the egg, and so any device that prevents implantation or causes an abortion should be banned. I haven’t met anyone like that. I’d be interested to know if any group actually supports that agenda, because again, I haven’t seen one. Christina Page claims in How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America that no such group exists. Deep Thought, do you know of any?

Update: I’ve now added a recent comments list. I think it looks lousy, but it’s functional. Maybe one of these afternoons when I’ve got some time, I’ll spruce it up a bit.

I’ve found myself writing more and more about the issues of contraception and abortion, so I figured I may as well start a new category. I’ve even gone back and relabeled my old posts on the topic, so if you want a history of my thinking on the subject, you can click on the category above or in the sidebar. Yummy. You won’t be able to comment on the old posts, though, so if you want to make a comment on one of them, feel free to use this thread for that purpose.

Be forewarned: In the past when I’ve started a new category it’s tended to result in my either abandoning the topic or starting a new blog devoted entirely to it.

So Mollie Ziegler of the New York Sun has reviewed How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, which I also reviewed last week. Let’s take it paragraph by paragraph:

NARAL Pro-Choice New York’s Cristina Page writes a book that fails to even attempt to live up to its title: “How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America” (Basic Books, 256 pages, $24). Instead, its bizarre thesis is that pro-life groups do not attempt to prevent abortion. Rather, “they are against sex, and the sex lives the vast majority of Americans enjoy.”

I’d agree that the book fails to live up to its title: I’d say it’s saved America up to now, but the future is in serious doubt. Now Ziegler claims Page has an alternate thesis, that pro-life groups are against sex. Let’s see if Ziegler shows Page doesn’t prove this thesis.

Her odd claim that pro-lifers oppose sex for pleasure would be laughable were it not espoused with vehemence. A book that critically responds to the political work of either side of the abortion debate would be welcome. Instead, she puts the worst possible construction on a few select positions, notably a view among some pro-life advocates that contraception is to be eschewed. She also conflates pro-life opposition to abortifacients with opposition to all contraception.

Note that Ziegler offers no response to Page’s claim that no pro-life organization supports contraception. If even one group did support contraception, this claim would be easy to disprove. Yet there is no response, only mockery at the very idea of the claim. Then there’s this nonsense about conflating abortifacients with “all contraception.” Page is very clear in the book about the difference between abortifacients and contraception. She points to the overwhelming scientific evidence that neither the birth control pill, nor the “day after pill” is an abortifacient, that they act by preventing ovulation and fertilization, not implantation. She makes a very clear distinction between these contraceptives and true abortifacients, such as the “abortion pill,” RU-486, already banned in the U.S. Note again that Ziegler makes no responses to Page’s argument, just misrepresents and dismisses it.

Physicians who refuse to prescribe morning-after pills are “kooky” and “outrageous.” Their “dubious religious notions” cause them to engage in “vigilante acts of obstruction-by-pharmacist.” Apparently she believes women should not be forced to have children they accidentally conceived, but pharmacists should be forced to act against their conscience.

Wait, I’m confused — is it the physicians, or the pharmacists who are obstructing here? How can physicians engage in “vigilante acts of obstruction-by-pharmacist”? Surely that’s a quote out of context if I’ve ever seen one. The next sentence rises to even higher levels negligence: Ziegler claims Page believes that women should not be “forced to have children.” Okay, so far, so good — I think — I hope that even Ziegler agrees with this part of the sentence. The next part is a huge problem: “they accidentally conceived.” Umm, no. Remember, the “day after pill” doesn’t have any effect on fertilized eggs: the way it works is to prevent ovulation, and possibly to prevent fertilization. The final part is the final straw, suggesting Page believes that “pharmacists should be forced to act against their conscience.” Page said no such thing. She said that patients should be able to go into pharmacies and get the drugs their doctors prescribed. Pharmacies should be obligated to provide staff that can fill the prescriptions prescribed by doctors. Now, if you’re thinking of getting into a career in pharmacy, your employer has every right to make sure you can do your job. But no one’s “forcing” you to work against your conscience. You can always find another job, just like someone uncomfortable with pornography probably shouldn’t be working for the cable company. No one’s forcing anyone to do anything. Except in South Dakota, where they’re forcing rape victims to carry their assailant’s progeny to full term.

Ms. Page is the Ann Coulter of the pro-choice movement. Not only are reports that abortion causes lingering psychological damage false, but girls who have abortions actually function better. Besides, everyone knows that postpartum depression is a more legitimate concern for women.

Uh-oh. I’m confused again. Is the Coulter thing supposed to be a compliment or a slam? Because coming from Ziegler, I’m really not sure. Next Ziegler restates Page’s argument, only sarcastic-like, because sarcasm is always an effective rebuttal for science.

After calling President Reagan a “fundamentalist” and making an obligatory comparison of pro-lifers and Iranian mullahs, Ms. Page writes that the pro-choice movement “has been the realistic movement. And if, as a result, it has given up the high ground of deeply felt, religious intoned ‘values,’ it has gained something else. It has science.”

Okay, let’s just say this quote is taken a wee bit out of context. The “values” Page is speaking about here are the pro-life movement’s repugnant work to dismantle UN efforts to help China end its oppressive “one child” program. I’d take “science” over those “values” any day.

Apart from Ms. Page’s mocking of religious views and contention that science is on her side, It seems that the pro-choice movement is the one in thrall to ideology. The pro-life movement’s tactics of fighting for incremental political gains in state legislatures and court appointments is much more pragmatic than the pro-choice movement’s rigid refusal to concede any ground against abortion on demand.

Let’s remember, Ziegler has done nothing to disabuse us of the notion that science is on Page’s side. I’ll concede Ziegler’s last point: lately the pro-life movement has been much more effective than the pro-choice movement in bringing its agenda forward. But whether Page’s book helps the pro-choice movement or not remains to be seen.

Oh, and one last thing. Did Ziegler ever show us that the pro-life movement isn’t against contraception, or that they’re in the least bit comfortable with recreational, non-procreative sex among even married couples? I’ve quoted her entire review, so I guess not. What she’s done instead is prove Page’s point, that the pro-life movement uses misleading innuendo and pseudoscience in the name of the “belief” that abortion is wrong. Ziegler doesn’t discuss contraception at all in the article (except to wrongly imply that emergency contraception is an abortifacient), when Page’s entire book is about the pro-life movement’s opposition to contraception.

And the pro-life movement laps this shit up. Just take a look at Dave Andrusko’s response to the review on the National Right to Life web site: it’s all about “ripping babies’ heads off” — when this is a book about contraception, not abortion. I guess it’s all right to lie and deceive, as long as you’ve got God on your side.

I’m having quite a debate with “Deep Thought” in the comments about some of the finer points of abortion. I don’t want to pick on Deep Thought in particular, but I have noticed a few things. Pro-lifers like to think in analogies: Abortion is like pushing someone off a roof when they’re hanging on with one hand. Just letting them fall may be negligent, but it’s not like abortion.

Frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out what either of these analogies has to do with abortion. The only way it works for me is if you start with the idea that abortion is murder. Then, yes, a different type of murder is also like abortion. But if you actually consider what an abortion is, then the analogy falls completely apart. Is the woman the roof? Or is she the one hanging from the cliff? Or is she the pusher? Maybe the father is the roof. I guess the fetus must be the guy hanging from the roof, since it’s the thing that “dies.” But what if you don’t believe the fetus is alive? The analogy is of no use in determining whether abortion is actually murder.

Second, pro-lifers don’t like statistics. You can tell them that there’s a one in a million chance that someone on the Pill will somehow produce an egg that gets fertilized but doesn’t implant (actually the chance is probably lower — there’s no evidence the Pill, even the “day after pill,” prevents implantation), and they’ll go on a crusade from here to Kathmandu to protect that one “potential life,” no matter how many other lives they ruin in the process. That one in a million fertilized egg is worth more to them than the millions of women who die in childbirth around the world.

Third, they will deny until hell freezes over that their opposition to sex education has anything to do with their opposition to abortion. They’re two completely separate issues that almost all pro-lifers happen to be in agreement on. It’s just a complete coincidence that people who don’t like abortion also don’t like sex. Education. I mean it’s a coincidence they don’t like sex education.

Fourth, it’s all a slippery slope to them. Except when it’s not. For example, if you’re willing to abort a four-week fetus, you might be willing to murder a toddler with autism. Yessir, a slippery slope. But it’s invalid to suggest that since many pro-lifers and all pro-life organizations are either opposed to contraception or unwilling to support contraception, that the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to ban not only abortion, but also contraception. Nosirree, no slippery slope there.

I’ve just been reading through the comments on this post. Clearly there are lots of people who believe abortion is murder. How can it not be, one commenter asks, if you’re destroying a person with brainwaves and a beating heart?

Well, what if you’re not?

According to Medline Plus, the heart doesn’t start beating until week 4 of gestation. So if a beating heart is the criterion, then some abortions, using this logic, are okay. But since no pro-life group supports contraception, on the off chance that a fertilized egg might be prevented from implanting, clearly they think life begins a little earlier than week 4.

So what’s with the beating heart and brainwaves argument? Is there really some subset of pro-lifers that would be okay with abortions up to week 4 of pregnancy? If not, why use that argument? Why not have a massive educational campaign for early detection of pregnancy so we can abort fetuses before they’re alive? We could prevent millions of murders that way!

The reason, of course, can be found in Justin’s comment: his disgust at middle-schooler’s suggestive dancing is what spurred him to become a pro-lifer. You see, he implies, the only reason for the lascivious behavior of these kids is the knowledge that if a girl gets knocked up, she can easily abort the baby. If only abortion were illegal, our urban youth would be models of decorum, just like they were in the good old days.

But if what we really want to prevent is the lascivious behavior, why not outlaw that directly? Don’t all the pro-lifers argue that we have no right to privacy anyway? We could just implant surveillance devices in every child, and if the central monitoring computer detected them getting too close together, it could administer a painful electric shock. After all, many sexual activities, such as oral or anal sex (not to mention homosexuality), offer no chance of conception. Vast quantities of sexual behavior are going unpunished! Isn’t this the real tragedy?

I’ve argued for a long time on Word Munger that the “pro-life” movement is really an anti-sex movement. I think most Americans realize that the anti-abortion aspect of the “pro-life” campaign isn’t so much about preserving life as it is an attempt to legislate sexual morality. What they don’t realize is how uniformly the leaders of the “pro-life” movement are also anti-contraception. It’s easy to be moved by the idea of the sanctity of life, that a fetus is really a little person who has “rights” the same way all living human beings have rights. It doesn’t seem like so much of a leap of faith to suggest that a fertilized egg, possessing the same DNA as a fetus, is the logical beginning point of life. Even I can appreciate the simplicity of the logic there, so it’s not surprising that “pro-lifers” use this logic to present the outward face of their movement.

After reading the book How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, by Christina Page, I’ve come to an epiphany. The “pro-life” movement isn’t just anti-sex; its motivation runs deeper than that. What “pro-life” is really about is preserving “traditional” families, with the man in charge, and the woman at home taking care of babies. It’s not anti-sex; to the contrary, the “pro-lifers” believe men should be able to tell their wives to give them sex whenever they want it.

Calling it the “anti-sex” movement gave me a false sense of power; it made me think that if Americans could only see the hidden goal, to deprive us all of recreational sex, then they would see that the movement was silly, and start to ignore it.

But now I see that this movement isn’t just silly; it’s dead serious. Its goal isn’t just banning abortion, or extramarital sex. Its goal is the complete submission of women to male authority, the stripping of all human rights from women. I don’t think it can succeed. But on the other hand, Hitler got pretty far before the rest of the world figured out what he was up to. Who, ultimately, is going to stand up to this movement? Will we have to see the equivalent of an Auschwitz or a Treblinka before we come to our senses? And no, I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

The problem is, we all get a little squeamish when we start to talk about sex. It’s private, unmentionable. Even the justification of Roe v. Wade comes down to “privacy.” But think about it: if “conception” is the moment a life begins, then when we start talking about abortion rights or contraception rights, we have to move into a discussion of the most private, intimate parts of a woman’s body. We have to start talking about what happens in the few hours before, during, and after the moment of sexual intercourse. For most of us, that’s uncomfortable. The “pro-lifers” have used the squeamishness and embarrassment that many people have talking about sex to nourish the notion that sex is “wrong.” Rather than get into details, they can use buzz-words: “death doctors,” “condom-pushers.” The pro-choice movement can only retaliate with the kind of frank sexual discussion that makes many people queasy. This, coupled with the ignorance of most Americans about the basic facts of contraception, makes it easy to deceive.

I’ve fallen for it myself. I wrote an extended defense of the “day-after pill” where I, like Jane Brody, another supporter of emergency contraception, granted the notion that the pill prevents implantation. What is the basis of that assertion? According to Page, it’s a misreading of a 2004 meta-analysis of all the research on the drug showed that 82 percent of the time, it stops fertilization, and that there is no evidence that it prevents implantation of already-fertilized eggs. Since the drug is about 85 percent effective, it’s pretty clear that all it’s doing is preventing fertilization (the three percent gap may be explained by some cases where ovulation is prevented). But the pro-life community took that “no evidence” statement and ran with it, suggesting that if there’s “no evidence” the drug prevents implantation, then there’s “no evidence” it doesn’t. On the off chance the science might be wrong, the pro-lifers argued, we should ban one of the safest methods of contraception available. Unless you believe life begins before conception, we’re not talking about “baby killing” by anyone’s definition here, we’re talking about forcing women, including rape and incest victims, to have babies.

These are people that want to ban sex education, to fool people into accepting a third-grade notion of conception. They want to claim that the sex act itself is equivalent to conception, and they therefore will not stop until every sex act is punished with a child. These are people that want to ban condoms, for heaven’s sake. They have argued that condoms don’t prevent AIDS, that they don’t prevent HPV, a common sexually transmitted virus that can lead to ovarian cancer. In fact, they’ve opposed research on an HPV vaccine because, God forbid, if women didn’t get ovarian cancer, they might have more sex. As Page puts it,

However mired in medicine or science or safety a debate becomes, it’s important to remember that the real interest is elsewhere. The pseudoscientific debate about HPV is, for them, a debate about how they think we should all live. And no matter where the science leads, the pro-life side has an indestructible set of convictions in this regard. Indeed, this is what is so frustrating about entering an “open-minded debate” on safety or health concerns. Doctors and researchers can agree to go where the evidence leads. But pro-lifers don’t sign on to these terms, even if they sometimes act as if they do. So meeting imagined safety concerns with a mountain of data is a thankless endeavor. When predetermined passions rule, medicine is powerless.

How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America isn’t so much about its titular claim, but rather, how the pro-life movement is planning to destroy America, to return it to some imaginary time they believe existed but never really did. Perhaps the most frightening examples of the influence of this movement is what it’s doing overseas, preventing U.S. funding from reaching U.N. agencies that not only help with family planning in the third world, but also help in preventing infant mortality and women from dying in childbirth. This is the real face of the pro-life movement: a new mother dying from fistula in Botswana, a baby dying of AIDS in Kenya because her sick mother didn’t have access to birth control. This is the movement that convinced George W. Bush to deny U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, a group that was, and still is, making significant progress helping China phase out its oppressive one-child program. You know, the one where they force women to have abortions, where families pay off doctors to kill female babies. Apparently encouraging voluntary use of birth control isn’t pro-life enough, so we’ll just continue with government-dictated infanticide.

So if you thought I was going a bit over the top when I compared the pro-life movement to the Holocaust, think again. The pro-life movement is advocating a return to the medical technology and gender equality of the bronze age, when women are stoned to death for ingesting some poison herb to try to terminate a life-ending pregnancy.

When the women of the earth are brutalized into subservience and slave-labor motherhood, that’s when the pro-life movement will have reached its goal. That’s when we’ll wonder why we never saw it coming.

Jane Galt’s at it again: Back in the good old days, she argues, women got abortions so their lives wouldn’t be destroyed from the shame of being unwed mothers. By contrast,

we are now having abortions so that we can have a really great career, instead of a mediocre one; so that we will not get stretch marks, hemorrhoids and that baby pooch; so that we can afford to have the really nice house, car, and stereo that we’ve always pictured ourselves with; so that we can find a great guy to marry; so that we can have a youthful, carefree college experience instead of a harried, burdened one. We are having abortions, instead of giving up our babies for adoption, so that we will not face the inevitable stigma from our bosses, our friends, and our families, who will wonder what kind of a heartless woman gives up the baby she bore rather than raising it.

Galt says she’s opposed to banning abortion, but here is one reason she claims makes the pro-life anti-sex argument more tenable: abortion is used as a convenience. Hey, if the only impact of banning abortions was to give the self-obsessed rich bitches of the world a piece of humble pie, I’d be all for it.

But think about it: if these money- and status-grubbers had their babies, they’d still be just as obnoxious — it’s just that now they’d have kids, too. They’d be the ones screaming at the McDonald’s clerk for not removing the pickles from their daughter’s cheesburger. They’d be the ones ruining the school play with their camcorder on a tripod in the front row. They’d be the ones demanding that their next door neighbor babysit their kids on a snow day because “she’s home anyway.”

The idea that pregnancy and child-rearing are an appropriate “punishment” for irresponsible sex is simply ridiculous. Why should we legislate that the most irresponsible among us are required to bear and rear children? What good does that do for the children? For the rest of us who must live with those children — and their parents?

Galt claims that abortion is justified the same way that war is justified: just as it’s sometimes legitimate to kill people in a war, sometimes it’s legitimate to terminate a pregnancy. I disagree. I think it’s always sad when a real human dies; I just can’t work up any emotion at all about the plight of a blastocyst — or a fetus, for that matter. Something that has less consciousness than the chicken I had for dinner the other night is not worthy of my sorrow.

Galt claims that the key difference between abortion and birth control is that a child is “inevitable” once the pregnancy begins. Since abortion destroys this future child, it’s a graver sin than preventing the pregnancy in the first place. I don’t buy this line of reasoning either. The reason murder is wrong is that it ends the life of a conscious being and destroys the human bonds that have been created over a lifetime. An unwanted fetus is neither conscious nor loved.

Some people might claim that they love a fetus, but what they really love is the idea of the child that the fetus could become. I had similar feelings about my kids before they were even conceived. If Greta and I had decided not to make love that night 15 years ago, no human bond would have been destroyed, even though we loved the idea of having a child. If Greta had miscarried, she and I would have been devastated, but only because we had spent so much time imagining the life we would be building together, not because a real person died. When someone chooses to have an abortion, they might be upset about it because they can imagine having a child, but it is nothing like killing a real human being.

Galt likes to use graphic descriptions of the abortion process in order to bring her point home — it’s the “gross-out” argument. Abortion is “icky,” therefore it’s wrong. But any medical procedure can be described in equally graphic terms. Is hemmorhoid surgery “wrong”? And speaking of ickiness, I wonder if Galt has changed any diapers recently. Perhaps babies are “wrong,” given all the puke, shit and other effluents they so prolifically spew into the world.

It can be funny to imagine some former beauty queen now burdened with stretch marks, desperately cleaning her unwanted baby’s spit-up off her Gucci purse. It’s not as funny to think of a 14-year-old girl dropping out of school to raise a welfare baby. It’s not as funny to realize that the prudes that don’t want to teach teenagers about responsible sex apparently want these same teenagers to raise the next generation. It’s uncomfortable to talk to your kids about sex; it’s easier to scare them with the prospect of an unwanted child. It’s easy to talk platitudes about adoption. It’s much harder to find someone to raise the child of a crack addict.

One thing is certain: if Jane Galt’s logic on abortion wins out, we’re going to need a lot more day care centers in our high schools.

As if I haven’t ranted enough about the abortion debate (which I prefer to refer to as the pro/anti sex debate), I want to rant a little more.

Now Jane Galt’s got a long piece about why sex education isn’t going to solve the “abortion problem.” Her big piece of evidence is a 1995 study that shows that after participating in a sex education course and getting free access to birth control, contraceptive use increases only 22 percent. Yikes! That means that if the rate of contraceptive use was, say, 50 percent before, then even after a sex-ed course, perhaps 39 percent still don’t use contraceptives!

This is the problem with using the “war on abortion” defense. Even if we could show that sex education and easier access to birth control would reduce abortions by 90 percent, the anti-sex crowd will argue that one “baby” “dying” is enough to justify a whole host of restrictions on women’s rights.

I think a much more effective route is to point out that the real agenda of the so-called “pro-life” movement is to restrict your activities in the bedroom. Their real goal is not to restrict abortion, but to restrict sex, and to do it, they want to ban not only abortion but also birth control. Don’t believe me? Look at the vehemence with which the “pro-life” movement argues against the “day after pill,” as they like to call it. This drug is nothing more than a large dose of standard birth control pills, and it functions in exactly the same way. Consider how these same groups rail against non-procreative sex — against homosexuality, against oral sex, against masturbation. If the real goal is “saving babies’ lives,” why are they so interested in restricting activities that have nothing to do with getting pregnant?

Most sadly of all, the means by which the anti-sexers choose to restrict is to turn the child into a form of punishment for having sex. Instead of seeing a child as something that people should cherish, as something to nurture, the anti-sex movement sees the possibility of pregnancy as the ultimate trump card. Don’t have sex, they suggest, unless you are willing to devote half your life to raising rugrats. Not only is this approach demeaning to children, it’s also a rather crude method of enforcing morality. If the anti-sexers aren’t impressed by social measures that “only” reduce abortions by 20 percent, I suspect they’d be similarly disappointed in the impact of criminalizing abortion. Outlawing abortion isn’t going to stop sex any more than high insurance rates have hindered the sale of sports cars.

None of this is to say that I’m in favor of some kind of free-for-all orgy. I have a 14-year-old son who’s six feet tall. I’m absolutely petrified of him becoming sexually active, and I’m prepared to use any scare tactic in my arsenal to persuade him to postpone sexual activity. I’ve even pointed out to him that, here in North Carolina, it’s entirely likely that a girl he gets pregnant will choose not to get an abortion, and so he’d be changing diapers after school. Whether he’ll choose to remember that when the moment of passion arises is a less certain bet — it’d be better if I knew the girl was getting a similar education. But that’s something that can only be achieved with better sex education for everyone.

William Saletan wants pro-choicers to declare war on abortion.

William Saletan is wrong. First off, where do we get off declaring war on a concept? You declare war on a country, not a concept (and no one even bothers with that sort of war anymore either — the U.S. hasn’t actually declared a real war since World War II).

Second, Saletan is ceding the moral high ground to the anti-sexers. As I’ve argued time and time again, the battle over abortion is really a battle about sex. “Pro-lifers” don’t just want to ban abortion, they want to ban sex. By playing along with their battle plan to do away with abortion, Saletan is taking a dangerous step towards their ultimate goal of banning sex.

Saletan justifies his “war” by claiming that abortion is not good — that no woman prefers an abortion to avoiding pregnancy in the first place. By this logic, we should declare war on all medical procedures. After all, everyone would prefer to avoid appendicitis rather than submit to an appendectomy, right? Let’s declare war on appendectomies!

Now, obviously it would be preferable if more women could avoid unwanted pregnancies. But really, aren’t unwanted pregnancies just one possible outcome of unhealthy sex?

What we really should be fighting for is more healthy sex. Just a couple of ideas to toss out here:

• Healthy sex is fun and natural
• Healthy sex is between consenting adults
• Healthy sex uses medically proven contraception
• Healthy sex relies on several methods to prevent pregnancy (where desired) and disease, including prophylaxis, abstinence, and communication between partners
• Masturbation is healthy sex
• Prostitution should be highly regulated or strictly forbidden
• Effective contraceptives and prophylactics should be freely available to all
• Enforcement of rape laws and education about rape should be dramatically increased
• Abortion should be freely available to all women
• Proven sex education should be a part of all school curricula, nationwide

Got any other ideas?

After I heard news of the outrage over Planned Parenthood’s appeal for donations to restore its hurricane-ravaged facilities and help women in need in the wasteland created by Katrina, I’ve come to a simple conclusion:

We need to reframe the debate on abortion. Because the debate is not about abortion, it’s about sex. Instead of describing the sides as Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, we should be describing them as Anti-Sex and Pro-Sex. Here’s what the Anti-Sex people really want: they don’t want you to have sex. Ever. They think sex is dirty, rotten, and immoral. Now, they may argue that sex can be appropriate when accompanied by marriage, as long as proper prayer and penance are made, but I would argue that anything preceded by that much prayer and penance can’t properly be called sex. That’s “conjugal relations,” simply a form of insemination, and nothing more.

For the Anti-Sexers, a child is not a child, it’s a Punishment. That’s right: children are God’s way of punishing you for having sex. If you have sex, you must have a child. Boys who have sex must work for 18 years to pay for the child’s upbringing, and girls who have sex must suffer the incredible annoyance of pregnancy, the pains of labor, and finally, the bothersome toil of raising the child to adulthood.

(One thing I’ve always wondered, by the way, if children are merely God’s punishment for sex, is why the punishment is so unequally administered. Why don’t we get pregnant every single time we have sex? After all, as the Intelligent Designer, God certainly has that power. Now I do understand that Evil People have discovered ways to keep babies from coming even in those, say, ten percent or so of all sex acts that would otherwise lead to pregnancy. Clearly these people need to be punished. But what about all the people who have sex over and over again, and still don’t have babies? Why doesn’t God punish them, too? In fact, it seems God only punishes people who aren’t evil enough to prevent the punishment.)

Clearly I’m falling on the Pro-Sex side of this debate — but that doesn’t mean people should go around willy-nilly having sex all the time. After all, we need to take some time out for watching TV, playing video games, and gambling. Plus medical treatment all those sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, and occasional live childbirths can get expensive — and then who can afford beer and drugs? As with other things, good Pro-Sexers support sex in moderation, if only for these practical reasons.

My very immodest proposal to reframe the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate would only be hollow words if I didn’t back it up with hard currency. And so, now, I am doing just that. I’m pledging all Cognitive Daily advertising proceeds for the past 5 months to Planned Parenthood. I hold in my hands as I type (well, actually, just before I typed) a check from Google, Inc. for $118.64, which I humbly promise (whenever I get around to it) to deposit in my bank account and transfer to Planned Parenthood. I further pledge to never refer to this debate as anything other than a Pro-Sex/Anti-Sex debate.

So help me Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Over on Cognitive Daily, we’re hosting Tangled Bank, a collection of blog posts about science.

However, we were uncomfortable posting some of the submissions on what’s supposed to be an objective site, so rather arbitrarily, we decided to move those more overtly political submissions over here, where I have no such qualms. Some of them are quite good. I hope you enjoy them!

Eva Young has two posts about the ID/Darwinism debate. In the first one, she takes on some of the standard arguments against evolution. In the second, she talks about how gay blogs are addressing the issue

Grrlscientist has written a thought-provoking essay on the role of science blogs in public life. She argues that more than just outlets for disseminating scientific information, they should actively argue against political- and faith-based movements such as creationism and ID.

Mike Dunford has written a detailed explanation of a problem that’s been plaguing Hawaii recently: the invasive gall wasp that destroys the culturally significant wiliwili tree, citing it as an example of the power of using evolution to solve real-world problems.

Orac Knows offers a critique of politicians who try to claim science education should be “balanced” with “faith-based” perspectives.

The Bad Astronomer has written an extended response to Bush and Frist’s suggestion that Intelligent Design be taught in schools.

Stephen Frug has crafted an interesting argument against teaching ID in schools: that, like many new developments in science that aren’t currently being taught, it’s not established enough to warrant inclusion.

From the Rachel highlights an episode in Darwin’s life (with some quotes from Janet Browne’s biography) in order to make the point that there exists a kind of authority for scientific judgement, analogous to the diagnostic authority that doctors have. Pseudoscience is so prevalent these days because a large portion of the public fails to acknowledge the authority of scientists.

An extract from an 1850 speech on quackery by Joseph Henry. Pay particular attention to the links, added by contemporary annotator Doran.

Daryl Cobranchi describes his submission thus: “It’s short but that’s about all I can stomach of ID.”

Finally, on a related but separate subject, P.Z. Myers explains how the process of becoming human is much more complex than simply fertilizing an egg.

I’d like to make a bit of an editorial comment of my own about all this. I think one of the biggest problems the scientific community faces regarding the ID/abortion debates is simply this: most people don’t like science. I think one of the reasons the average Joe is so difficult to convince on these issues is because Joe’s eyes glaze over at the mere mention of science. In order to explain to Joe why his cockamamie ideas are all wrong, we first have to convince Joe that science doesn’t have to be boring. A tall order, I know, but perhaps some of the folks I’m citing here are headed in the right direction.

Benjamin Wittes argues in this month’s Atlantic (sorry, subscription only, but worth the price) that it’s time to give up on the Roe v. Wade decision. Since Wittes is a pro-lifer, this might come as a bit of a shock. Wittes argues that having judicially mandated abortion rights only fans the flames of the most ardent anti-abortion activists. Wouldn’t it be better to let the political process decide?

Let’s see … what would a post-Roe abortion landscape look like? If states could decide on their own whether or not to allow abortions, what would we have? To visualize it, I’ve repurposed the World 66 mapping tool:

(World66.com)

I took the states that leaned heavily in favor of Bush in 2004 and colored them red, as “lost cause” states, where abortion will most certainly be illegal. It looks like a woman in central Montana would have the farthest to travel to get an abortion. Otherwise, access to an abortion would be less than a state away for most women. I suspect some of the “border” states such as Texas and my own North Carolina will enact restrictions such as parental notification or father’s permission, but probably won’t ban all abortions.

What’s interesting about this map is that these are states where it’s already difficult to get an abortion due to intimidation by pro-life activists. A woman in central Montana already has to travel hundreds of miles to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion. These are also America’s least densely populated states, with perhaps 40 percent of the land area of the lower 48, but only 7.8 percent of the nation’s abortions, so the scale of the problem would be limited.

Just One Minute has criticized Hillary Clinton for participating in a “scramble back to the center” on abortion. This trepidation of a moderate Democratic response to the fanatical furor over abortion from the religious right is another indication that giving up some ground in the abortion battle might be an important step in preserving abortion rights. Here’s how Wittes sees a post-Roe world shaping up:

In the short term some states might pass highly restrictive abortion laws, or even outright bans — but the backlash could be devastating for conservatism. Liberals should be salivating at their electoral prospects in a post-Roe world. The simple fact is that a majority of Americans want abortion legal at least some of the time, and the majority in a democracy tends to get what it wants on issues about which it cares strongly. In the absence of Roe abortion rights would probably be protected by the laws of most states relatively quickly.

Interesting article in Bitch Magazine about the “I had an abortion” T-shirt. Apparently the idea of the shirt is to show people (pro-lifers? fence-sitters?) how many different types of women have had abortions.

The article points out that the shirt has attracted dramatic responses, and not just from pro-lifers. Pro-choice women aren’t so sure it’s a good idea to advertise the fact they’ve had an abortion. Aside from the personal safety issues (which would be significant where I come from), there are personal privacy issues, and the question of whether it would have any impact.

Suppose the 40 million or so women who’ve had abortions all decided to wear the shirt. Would pro-lifers, seeing they live among millions of murderers, finally decide murder is okay? Or would they realize it was time to step up their anti-abortion efforts?

The shirt strikes me as a fairly dumb idea. I’m not sure “laying low” is the best way to keep abortion safe and legal, but this strikes me as rather a slap in the face of anti-abortion advocates. As I’ve said many times, I don’t think it would be a good idea for the pro-choice crowd to hire me as an advocate, but at least I recognize that my rhetoric probably isn’t doing any good. If the shirt begins to be more widely worn, I’ll be fascinated to see what its effect is.

I finally had a chance to read this article, the one I quoted and linked to last Thursday. This is a good example of why we should all read the entire article we quote, not just the brief snippet we read on someone else’s blog. We might start by noting the site where the original article was published.

When I taught college writing, I was astounded at the number of times my students quoted articles that in fact came to the opposite conclusion the students claimed they did. The students would then go on and on about why Ed Koch was right to oppose capital punishment, or why Gloria Steinem was wrong to oppose women’s rights. How could they do this? Were they really that stupid? Of course they weren’t. They were just in a hurry, and they weren’t being careful. They saw a long, sprawling article and couldn’t be bothered to read the whole thing, so they selected the choicest snippets and just went with them. (This phenomenon, incidentally, is one of the things I worried about in my long, rambling post yesterday.)

Now I’ve caught myself doing exactly the same thing: I had read the post on Alas, A Blog, followed the link to the article, and saw screen after screen of somber grey text. I don’t need to read all this, I thought, I already know what I’m going to say about it. I proceeded to blurt out three extensive posts, all building on the same initial riff inspired by the blatantly anti-abortion article I hadn’t even read. Turns out, the author was not anti-abortion at all. My first clue should have been that the article was published on a site called “catholicsforchoice.org,” but I hadn’t even noticed that. Yesterday, I read the entire article. I should say, I skimmed the article, because it is a hard slog to get through the whole thing. Ugh!

I wouldn’t say the article shreds my argument to pieces, but it definitely places it in a new light. The author, Frances Kissling, is complaining about how steadfastly pro-choicers refuse to acknowledge the value of “fetal life.” In short, she’s complaining about people like me, and my response was to give her back more of the same.

I’ve always been open about the fact that my position on abortion probably won’t change anyone’s mind. I wouldn’t recommend any pro-choicers go out on the streets and spread the Word Munger gospel to all the unannointed pro-lifers out there, because they probably wouldn’t listen to a scrap of it. However, I’m not sure Kissling’s approach is going to be effective either: if it’s too much cold rationality for me, it’s probably too much for just about anyone.

One of the many reasons I would make a terrible politician is that I’d have a hard time making a position statement I didn’t believe in. When John Kerry says he thinks abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” it sends a chill up my spine. About the only thing I can agree with in that statement is that it’s better than the alternative. I think many sorts of abortion should be safe, legal, and as common as necessary to get the job done. Saying the day after pill should be “safe, legal, and rare” is like saying cough medicine should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Yes, I’d prefer the common cold be rare, but I don’t honestly believe it will happen over, say, the next two presidential terms.

There are some compromise positions on abortion I’d be willing to accept, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to argue for the whole nine yards. I’m not so naive to think that my way of thinking will convince anyone, but if I had to argue for a compromise, I wouldn’t claim that the compromise position was what I believed all along. I might say it was a reasonable compromise, but I didn’t completely agree with it. This would make me more consistent, but it wouldn’t make me a good politician.

I’m much more concerned about being a good writer — and that starts with being a good reader. I’ll try to be a better one from here on out.

On Thursday, I speculated about what would happen if we knew for certain that abortions were not immoral acts. Turns out, it would be pretty difficult to argue against abortion in that case, as long as it’s what the prospective parents want.

I suspect, however, that a lot of pro-lifers would still have difficulty accepting abortions. Why? Because they believe that sex is for procreation, and so people who engage in sex for reasons other than procreation should be punished. Or better yet, people would be deterred from recreational sex because of the potential for punishment.

So, according to this perspective, it’s “right” to doom millions of children to lives of poverty and abuse in order to possibly prevent some adults from having sex. It’s actually very similar to the argument that has been put forth (and usually retracted) by members of the religious right regarding sexually transmitted disease. The argument goes like this: “These people are wrong for having promiscuous sex, and therefore we shouldn’t try to help them when they get sick, because this is God’s way of punishing them.”

The problem with this point of view, as many have pointed out, is that very often the wrong people get “punished”: victims of rape, for example, or the wives of philanderers. In the case of pregnancy, the “punishment” is even more irrational: typically the man is not punished at all, and the woman (who may or may not have been complicit in the undesirable sex act) bears not only the burden of pregnancy, but also of childrearing. The resultant child, who had nothing at all to do with the illicit sex, suffers most of all.

But this discussion brings up another question: if the goal is to decrease the incidence of non-procreative sex, then is banning abortion the most effective way to do so? Why not punish offenders more directly? We could simply fine people whenever they were caught having sex out of wedlock. We could ban condoms. We could withold medical treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These punishments could be applied more fairly, to all involved parties, not just the one with the ability to get pregnant.

Perhaps these moral extremists favor such measures, but realize they would be unpopular, and so instead aim for the lower-hanging fruit of banning abortion. After all, it’s easier to play the emotional, “unborn child” card than to suggest we just ignore people who are dying of AIDS. But I’d like to offer a challenge to those in favor of banning the “day after” pill: do you really believe you’re “saving” a child, or is your real goal to punish people with loose morals? If punishment is your goal, then perhaps you can think of a more effective penalty than giving these moral deviants a child to raise.

Yesterday I wrote about the hypothetical moral question of what my position on abortion would be if a pregnancy could be terminated without harming the mother.

Today I’d like to pose a hypothetical question of my own: What if God descended from heaven and told us all that abortions in the first trimester weren’t “killing”; that the soul didn’t enter the fetus until sometime during the sixth month of pregnancy. Would it be justified to require that all pregnant women receiving public assistance, and all pregnant drug addicts, undergo the abortion procedure?

After all, an abortion, especially in the first trimester, is certainly less invasive than going through with the entire pregnancy, and we could avoid a whole array of social ills that would otherwise result. Or would someone who previously was “pro-life” now realize that the woman’s health was also part of the equation? After all, we can’t legislate what a woman does with her own body, regardless of the implications for the greater society.

And what about the moral perspective? Would former “pro-lifers” now decide that it’s morally preferable to terminate pregnancies conceived in sin? Or would they actually prefer that the product of illicit affairs be allowed to mature into impoverished children, most likely to be raised by their immoral parents, or in broken homes, even though there was no longer any moral baggage associated with the prospect of abortion?

What of hard-working families with high-school-age children? What if such a family’s middle-aged mother faced an “accident” pregnancy? Would it be morally preferable to spend the hard-won college savings for the teens on a new, unplanned infant child, or to end the pregnancy that no one planned or wished for? Would it be right to expect the family’s father to work hard into his retirement years, all for the sake of a fetus that God has already told us wasn’t a living thing?

Of course, many people can’t assign a zero moral value to terminating a fetus. So now reconsider those questions if the moral value of “killing” a fetus was equivalent to killing an ant. What about a butterfly? A rat? A turtle? A cow? A dog? Where would we draw the line? Some people might object to killing a butterfly. But how many would not kill a butterfly in order to send their kids to college? I suspect most people would have no problem escalating all the way up to a dog, especially if someone else did the dirty work for them. What would God say about that?

… to be continued.

Alas, A Blog cites an article that suggests that pro-choicers are neglecting the value of the fetus in their discussions of abortion rights. From the article:

Imagine a world in which it was possible to remove fetuses prior to viability from women’s bodies and allow them to develop in a nonuterine environment. Perhaps they could be implanted in men or other women who want them; perhaps they could develop in a specially equipped nursery? In this world, medicine is so far advanced that this could be accomplished painlessly and without risking the health of either the woman or the fetus. Of course, this is at present largely a fantasy and by that time we would have found the ideal, risk-free, failure-free contraceptive; but let’s pretend.

What are the first five concerns and reactions that come to your mind? Is one of them the fact that this would mean fetuses need not die? My own experience in presenting this option to both advocates and opponents of abortion is that the fetus’s life is rarely a consideration. Among the most interesting reactions of those who are prochoice is a concern that some women might find the continued existence of the fetus painful for them or that women have a right to ensure that their genetic material does not enter the world. Abortion in this sense becomes the guarantee of a dead fetus, if desired, rather than the removal of the fetus from an unwilling host, the woman.

So women are supposed to imagine that the fetus could be removed from the body and then raised in another context. Would they be in support of abortion then: when the only difference between abortion and these other options is “killing” the fetus? Continuing my tradition of appalling metaphors for discussing abortion, let’s consider another one: suppose your house is infested with rats. Would you prefer to have the rats killed or simply removed to another location, if you could be assured that the de-ratification would be just as effective in either case? What about a bunny rabbit infestation? Who in their right mind would slaughter bunnies when bunny removal could be accomplished without any senseless killings?

The point is, when the discussion is reduced to those terms, to “killing” or “not killing,” the reader is presented with a logical trap. Someone’s going to have to deal with those rats (or bunnies). If the mother doesn’t raise the child, someone will have to do it. Do we really want to enlist the kindhearted souls of the world to take in every rat that someone else wanted cleanly removed from her life?

Some may consider it appalling that I compare fetuses to rats, but there are certainly points in a fetus’s development when it is less “conscious,” less “alive” than a rat. Heck, a newborn human baby is less trainable, and certainly less physically adept than an adult rat. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to babies, but not to fetuses that can’t even survive outside the womb except in a fantasy world. A rat’s life is much more significant than a fetus’s “life,” but no one gives a second thought to killing rats.

But ah, the fetus has potential to be so much more! It could be a scientist, or an architect, or a world ping-pong champion! No rat has ever been taught to play ping-pong! Surely the fetus is worth saving!

Since we’re already engaged in a ridiculous metaphor, allow me to extend it. What if rats could be taught to play ping pong? Would we spare the rats infesting our houses then? Of course not, because if we transferred them to another home, the new host would not, in any likelihood, train them. The rats would be doomed to a life of dull drudgery in dark passages and cold attics. One might believe they would be better off dead.

But what if there was a ready supply of faithful trainers, ready to take in any and all rats and prepare them for ping-pong greatness? My response would be the same: it’s just a rat. If you want one so badly, they’re easily breedable, or you could go to Africa or some other place with a significant rat problem and find all that you need. Why do you want my rat? If it’s remotely cheaper and more convenient for me to just kill it, that’s what I’m going to do. Some people might decide they’d rather “save” the rats in their homes, but you couldn’t convince me that a law banning the killing of rats was justified, even if rat-transfer and training was just as effective. The only way I’d even consider the transfer and training option would be if it was less expensive — a notion so ridiculous, whether we’re talking about rats or fetuses, that even I am not willing to take this metaphor that far.

That’s the problem with metaphors. They don’t represent the real world. In the real world, we don’t have rat trainers, and we don’t have people to take in even the deserving and needy real children, let alone fetuses. When every AIDS orphan in Africa has a real future, then talk to me about the future of a blastocyst.

Last Friday at the entrance to the mall, there were two sets of protesters. This was on the street, mind you, where traffic was just turning in to the immense parking lot. On the first corner were the animal rights activists, with one guy dressed in a bunny suit and others holding real live bunnies. On the next corner was the abortion guy, who had clearly spent a lot of money at Kinko’s getting a disgusting picture, allegedly of an aborted fetus, blown up to 4 by 6 feet. The picture was gross, and I wasn’t pleased that my kids had to look at it, but hey — it’s freedom of speech, so what are you going to do?

It wasn’t quite as bad as the porno woman, back in New York, who used to display photos of S&M porn on Fifth Avenue and then yelled at the men not to look. In some senses, she might have had the best point of all. After all, if you don’t know what’s being depicted in the worst smut, how are you to know what she’s asking you to ban?

But we all know what a bunny looks like, and having seen a newborn baby (not a pretty site, I can assure those of you who haven’t had the pleasure), I can imagine what an aborted fetus would look like. So the question is, how is this visual rhetoric going to further the dialogue in the abortion rights/animal rights debate? I suspect the point, mainly, was to get people’s attention. Instead of seeing some wacko with a megaphone, we see some wacko with repugnant photos and a megaphone. Maybe we’ll slow down as we turn into the mall and think about what he’s shouting at us. Maybe, as we try to distract our children from the photos, our consciences will get the better of us. Not likely, but it could happen.

My daughter, age 11, did notice the photos, and asked about them later as we were eating lunch at Panera. I told her I thought it was a cheap way to get publicity and lower the intellectual framework of the argument. I was about to say the protester should have shown pictures of a dead woman and her dead fetus after they weren’t allowed a partial-birth abortion because of people who were swayed by wackos with pictures of bloody fetuses, but my wife hushed me before I had a chance. We were eating, and there were others who might hear me. Now I knew this guy had failed. If his point was to get people talking, he had completely missed out on his objective. We were all too embarrassed or grossed out to say anything about it, whether nodding in agreement or shaking our heads in frustration.

Aborted fetuses are not pleasant to look at. Neither is the intestinal appendix. Should we ban appendectomies? Bunnies are cute. Should we find an uglier animal to use for scientific experiments? Maybe we could use vultures, or crows — everyone hates them. Aborted fetuses are ugly …

… hmmmmm …

… maybe that’s why the animal rights people were on a different corner.

I took an automated “poll” yesterday, in which the computer asked me several questions on the hot political issues of the day. I suspect the computer had a conservative bias, because the questions were more than a little misleading: “Do you believe that the government should not pass laws restricting our constitutional right to bear arms?”; “Do you favor keeping your federal taxes the same, or, if possible, decreasing them?”; and, of course the big one: “Do you believe life begins at conception?”

No, no, and no. I guess the RNC can cancel that planned sales call.

But a recent Jane Brody column in the New York Times got me to thinking. The article was supposed to convince readers that the “morning after pill” should be available over the counter. Of course, it will do nothing of the kind. Pro-lifers will say “life begins at conception. End of debate.” Brody’s response is that

Some opponents of emergency contraception confuse it with abortion. But an abortion can occur only after a pregnancy has been established. The National Institutes of Health and the obstetricians group define pregnancy as beginning with the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus.

Jane, you’ve already lost them. So what if a bunch of quacks say “pregnancy” hasn’t begun, they’ll say. “Life” has begun, and that’s what matters to them.

I have a different way of thinking about all this. First of all, whether it’s “life” or not doesn’t really matter. After all, humans don’t value a generalized “life” above everything else. We routinely slaughter animals, plants, bacteria, and even humans if we feel the need. What we’re really talking about is “innocent human life.” Even that is not something everyone feels compelled to protect. Think of the “collateral damage” in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we really valued “innocent human life” above all else, would we even allow SUVs on the road? According to today’s New York Times, SUV passengers are 11 percent more likely to die in accidents than passengers of other vehicles. If we don’t bother putting a stop to that, why are we so particularly concerned about potential loss of “innocent human life” inside a woman’s body? What about “innocent human life” lost in a famine? If a country is overpopulated due to lack of access to birth control and/or abortion, don’t the lives lost there matter too? Why aren’t we rushing to do something about the millions of children who die every year due to lack of food and/or proper health care? We’re not because we don’t see these people, we don’t live with these people, we don’t care about these people. So really we’re not concerned about loss of “innocent human life,” we’re concerned about loss of “innocent human life that matters.”

In this context, is a fertilized egg “innocent human life that matters”? To my mind, a fertilized egg doesn’t even live up to the biological definition of “life,” let alone “innocent human life.” Incapable of maintaining homeostasis without the protective environment of the host ovary, it’s not a living thing. At this point, a better definition is “human bodily function that matters.” How it matters depends on the woman hosting it. It could matter the way it matters to someone who is coming down with a cold, or it could matter the way a child matters to its parents. Does it “matter” to anyone else? Would anyone else mourn or cheer if they learned that the fertilized egg inside of Woman X failed to implant? Perhaps the potential father or grandparents might, but beyond that it simply wouldn’t. So why should we make laws regarding something that doesn’t matter to us? We shouldn’t. End of debate.

Unfortunately, only in my mind.

The fallout from last weekend’s March for Women’s Lives has hit Charlotte hot and heavy. First there were the letters to the editor, asking why the Charlotte Observer didn’t print pictures of aborted fetuses instead of covering the march on Washington, the same way they printed pictures of the bodies of private security contractors in Iraq.

Whenever I see this kind of argument, I just begin to lose it. Maybe it’s because abortions aren’t news, I say to myself: they happen every day. There are lots of things that happen every day that aren’t easy to look at — such as live births — yet we don’t see pictures of bloody afterbirth in the Observer. Just because a fetus isn’t pretty doesn’t make it news. See what a soulless jerk I am — clearly I have no compassion for these lost “souls.”

Then you have columnists like Kathleen Parker, who thinks abortion should be outlawed because fetuses look just like little people.

It is natural to want to avert one’s eyes from the sight of a pair of tiny human feet held between an adult thumb and index finger, an image taken from a first trimester abortion…. But by whatever term we comfort ourselves, pictures don’t lie.

So… as long as we have pictures to support our argument, we needn’t be bothered by such trivial things as, oh, say, logic? If pictures don’t lie, and I see a picture of a Barbie Doll, then what does that mean? That Barbies should enjoy the same legal rights as adults? After all, the Barbie looks almost human. It would be wrong to hurt Barbie!

Pro-choice advocates aren’t stupid enough to respond the way I do, because they understand that logic simply doesn’t stir most people, who are moved by such things as “cute” pictures of fetuses “sucking” their thumbs. Here’s how I’d respond to the thumb-sucking “argument”: so if you saw a cockroach licking its “thumb” as it munched on your baby’s oatmeal, you wouldn’t kill it? Again, more proof that I’m heartless, and shouldn’t be allowed within 200 yards of a Planned Parenthood press conference.

Humans are moved by the “logic” of fetus photos not because they are human, but because they are animals. They are born with an instinct to protect anything that looks like a baby, whether it’s “human” or not — the same way a robin will protect anything that hatches in its nest, even if it turns out to be a cuckoo. When activists show pictures of aborted fetuses to demonstrate how “inhuman” abortion is, they are not appealing to our human side, but to our animal side. What makes us human is the logical part of our minds that can imagine the damaging impact of a crack baby’s birth, despite our animal instinct to believe that a “picture doesn’t lie.” What makes us human is our ability to reason that a woman should have control over her own body, shouldn’t be made a criminal if she chooses not to go through not only the wrenching nine months of pregnancy, but the taxing eighteen-plus years of parenthood, all because a lifeless blob that “looks human” has been mistakenly conceived inside her (and don’t even get me started on the adoption thing — what, we’re supposed to fund a massive increase in the adoption industry to protect these lifeless blobs?). What makes us human is the knowledge that even full-term babies are born incompletely developed, with a fraction of the abilities that, say, a cow is born with.

We are human because we know that a picture doesn’t tell the whole story, and that while the picture itself may not “lie,” (since, after all, it’s not a sentient entity), the person presenting the picture can use it to create a fiction.

Unfortunately, the debate on abortion will never take place on such “human” terms, because too many people are not ruled by human logic, but instead rely on animal instinct.