Claims of crisis belied by indifference (cont’d.)

 Answer the fucking question. Why do miscarriages not bother you. Unless you’re full of shit?

And until you do answer the question, that is all I will say to you, and I encourage others to do the same.

It’s Ash Wednesday, so I’m here to request a recipe for fish pie.

I believe that slavery is more evil than almost any other crime or sin.  Slavery is forcing someone else to do something to benefit you, not them.  Forcing a woman to carry a fetus for 9 months and then risk her life in childbirth to benefit your sense of morality is slavery.  I take it from your moniker “Frank” that you will never be in the position of being forced to do this yourself, so you are a slaver — which makes you complicit in an evil 600,000 people died to end in this country alone.  And as for your “convenience” purposes, I suggest you look at some of the reasons why real women have abortions — such as not wanting to die to suit the morality of panty-sniffing pecksniffs like you.  Ask Karen Santorum, in fact, about the medical procedure she had to end her life-threatening pregnancy — the one where her opposition to “abortion” made her child suffer for two hours before it died anyway.

The one I’ve always wondered about: If that zygote that just failed to implant in my uterus is a person, shouldn’t it be subject to laws regarding proper disposal of human remains? Aren’t the toilet and the landfill improper places to dispose of human remains? Doesn’t that mean someone will be tasked with checking my used sanitary products for that zygote so it can be given a decent burial or cremation, if it exists, instead of getting flushed or landfilled?

I’ve never really gotten an answer for that.

Mr. Frank, are you a member of Landover Baptist Church?

Love,
Danielle

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/ 

It does not occur to me that human beings can ever actually be convinced of anything, at least anything in terms of how they view the world or how they should behave on a moral level, by way of debate or argument.  I certainly never have, either as the advisor or the advisee; I doubt I ever will.

In the Joseph Needham biography ‘The Man who Loved China,’ it was quoted that the Arabs have a proverb to the effect of: The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.  If this is true, then I consider it one of the wisest things ever said.

This argument feels even more like a strawman than the last. Miscarriages are accidents of nature (or of God if you swing that way, but personally I feel like God would have better things to do), abortions are acts of mankind. We can improve the odds of, but never fully eliminate, the odds of an accident occurring which claims a life (or potential life, again, if you swing that way). Under no circumstances can you make having accidents illegal (unless you’re a Republican, in which case, you can try, and do have fun trying to enforce that law!), but you can make an act of mankind illegal. At best, this comparison is a call to prioritize, but an issue being a LESSER issue does not diminish the fact that it IS an issue (if you believe it’s an issue). Also, parenthical notation.

And judging by Frank’s posts, I don’t believe he could care less what logic you use to try to appeal to him. I, personally, haven’t had a tendency to read the comments on many of these threads (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, and today is one of the few days that I have, which is why I now know that I’m not the only Anonymous here — damn!), but Frank’s replies to these threads indicates not one smidgen of intent to debate these points on anything resembling a reasonable, constructive platform. “This is a circle jerk” is not a phrase which indicates that the following post(s) will be worth reading. Not having read the backlog, I can’t even be sure Frank IS Christian, or anything resembling it. Trolls come in all shapes and sizes, but they have plenty enough in common to be marginalized into their respective filthy corners of the Internet and summarily ignored.

(Frank, if you want to prove me wrong, do it with actions, not words. Your posts in the previous two threads have been nothing short of abysmal. I won’t even bother dignifying them with a direct reply if they continue in this fashion, and I’ll take a contemptuous reply to THIS as confirmation that I need not even give them the consideration of a good read first. I give everyone at least one chance, but I don’t feed trolls.)

In other words, Fred, every post you make along these lines does more to hurt your readers’ respect of you than Frank’s position. These are cheap arguments, bad logic, and apply just as broadly (and poorly) to everyone else reading this blog. If you want to deal with him, you’d be better off with a far different approach, be it a different tack of logic or a good old fashioned metaphorical boot to the head (nya nya).

It appears Frank was banned and all his posts deleted.  To show how obsessed with this board he was: Did anyone else notice the other thread went from seven pages of comments to five pages after he was deleted?  I find that very amusing.

Oh, and I loved Early Edition.

I didn’t see any of Frank’s posts, which sounds like I didn’t miss anything important. I’m all for eliminating trolls but I’m curious if Fred would have this same reaction for a Pro-Lifer sharing their belief on their own blog without actively doing anything about their cause. Isn’t that what slacktivism is all about?

I can’t even see Frank’s comments. Are they just being flagged into oblivion? 

Took me about a page and a half to figure out
why it was odd reading. I guess that’s what happens when you come in at the end of the day….

That’s not what Fred means by slacktivism.  He’s not using the Snopes definition of “someone who claims to care about an issue but never does anything substantive about it.”  He wrote a post once explaining his version (supposedly pre-dating the other definition) basically means being laid-back and friendly but still seriously striving to better the world.  I don’t remember the exact wording, but anyway, he doesn’t mean what you’re thinking.

Speaking as a geneticist, trying to stop the early miscarriages would be an exercise in futility with anything resembling our current level of technology.  When the miscarried embryos are examined, the majority have gross chromosomal abnormalities.  Quite a few are triploid (three sets of chromosomes rather than two).  Triploid babies are occasionally born alive but none have ever survived more than a few months, and they are grossly deformed–every aspect of development is severely screwed up.  Every cell in the body has the wrong chromosome complement, which interferes with regulation of just about every bodily function.  It’s totally unclear to me how you could even begin to fix this.

There are worse things, too:  if there are two sets of chromosomes but they both came from the same parent, there is never going to be anything remotely resembling a baby.  I will rue for the rest of my life having seen pictures of what happens instead.

I will tell the following story with the caveat that I am not nearly wise enough to understand what its point is:  it seems relevant, and I’ll leave it at that.  When my husband and I were looking to adopt, we noticed a baby on the state adoption site–this is very, very unusual, as babies are generally easy to place and do not end up on the state site.  This particular baby, however, had such severe defects that she was deemed unlikely to live for more than 6-8 months, and needed constant nursing care.

I could not then, and cannot now, imagine adopting this baby.  That’s maybe a God-like level of selfless love.  If I had given birth to her I suppose I’d doggedly try to take care of her till she died.  If I’d known in advance that I was going to give birth to her, would I have had an abortion?  I don’t know.  Probably.

I suspect she died in the state’s care.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to prevent miscarriages due to genetic defects.  I would, however, get wholeheartedly behind efforts to prevent miscarriages by improving maternal health.  I mean, that’s a win-win–good for mothers *and* good for babies.

 I think the reason why extreme anti-abortion believers don’t think miscarriage is a problem is the same reason why they (increasingly) have a problem with contraception and prenatal testing.  That is, if humans aren’t taking any responsibility or control, that means that everything happens because ‘It was God’s Plan’.  Miscarry a horribly deformed fetus?  God’s@twitter-15809927:disqus Will.  Watch a horribly deformed baby die in terrible pain?  God’s Will.  Why the ability of the human mind to do things like develop prenatal testing is not ‘God’s Will’ is something I’ve never been totally clear on.

Also, I realize now that calling Frank and Alan assholes, as cathartic as that might have been for me, did nothing to further the dialogue that makes this site a good thing.  So, rather than engage in profanity, and becoming a troll myself, I’ve decided to take a calmer tack.  From now on, when someone starts ranting about the evils of abortion, I’m going to, as calmly as I can, explain that their position was the direct cause of a great deal of pain and suffering, and ask for an apology.  I doubt this will be any more effective than calling them assholes, but it will make me feel better about myself.

Frank’s been banned!

I was wondering to whom Nathaniel was speaking. 

I did, however, get a snort out of:

Are you really indifferent to your penis and your wife’s womb being used as murder weapons?

Who dropped the banhammer on Frank — Fred or Patheos?  Moot point, perhaps.  If Frank was ignoring back-to-back posts directed to him specifically, he wasn’t here to talk.

If banned by Fred, I think that would make Frank (as far as I can recall) only the second person ever to be banned by Fred in Slacktivist history.  That’s kind of an achievement.

Still no recipes for fish pie, I see.  How about fish pie baked inside a cake?

Thank you for this comment.  Your conclusion is inarguable.  A friend of mine has been researching this topic and sending me her links, so it’s been on my mind recently.

Intuitively, it seems clear that Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome are on one side of a line and that trisomy-22 is on the other.  That leaves a very few genetic disorders that pose hard choices; primarily Down’s Syndrome.  And I could imagine two different societies.

One society asks, ”What would it cost to give all children born with Down’s syndrome financial support so that even poor parents feel that keeping them is an option, good homes even when their parents don’t feel they can make those sacrifices, the best educations possible, and jobs suitable for their abilities that will give them dignified lives?”  Then, it pays that cost, because it values those lives that much.  I think that wouldn’t be a society in which 90% of pregnant women who get a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome abort.

Another society asks, ”Are our hands clean of the predictable consequences of the choices we made?”  In this society, no feasible proposal to help people with Down’s syndrome, or their parents, is ever worth the taxes to pay for it.  Parents with money might be able to manage, but the safety net for those without would be hopelessly inadequate.  It puts as much social and legal pressure as it can on women to keep their babies.  It might oppose basic prenatal care because that would warn women that they were carrying a fetus with a birth defect, to ensure that, while no pregnant woman will be prepared to give birth to a baby with special needs, she also won’t have any real choice in the matter. It stigmatizes women who abort, but refuses to address her reasons for wanting to.  At every opportunity, this society expresses its disapproval of actions that violate religious taboo; the outcomes for people with Down’s Syndrome would not be such a concern.  Its priority, as determined from its decisions, is to make sure that as few as possible of the sacrifices of raising children with special needs fall on the wealthy, or on men.  In short, it would consider those children someone else’s responsibility, and when she couldn’t bear it on her own, instead of taking any of it off her shoulders, it would punish and condemn her.  Then it would congratulate itself on how moral it were.

The first society is one that I, as a progressive, would rather live in.  I also suspect that it’s one many people whose concern for fetuses with Down’s Syndrome is sincere would rather live in.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be where the battle lines in the culture war are currently drawn.

Wow. Take a break from the internet to read a new book (Howl’s Moving Castle, good book by the way) and come back to a wonderful surprise. Thank you Mr. Clark.

Playing devil’s advocate here, as my own position on abortion is similar to Tehanu’s above (i.e. those who would forcibly prevent a woman from exercising her right to control her own body are the moral equivalent of slavers and rapists): one could distinguish between abortion and miscarriage by taking the position that “it’s OK if you’re God.”  After all, many anti-choicers are also fundamentalists, meaning they literally believe that God committed and ordered all the mass-murders enumerated in the Old Testament, and also that God is not only good, but perfectly good.  Therefore, if God aborts 1.2 million+ “babies” each year, that’s a good thing, no matter how painful and upsetting it is to the women who lose pregnancies they *wanted* to carry to term; it’s only when women *choose* to terminate their pregnancies that it becomes murder.

   It stigmatizes women who abort, but refuses to address her reasons for wanting to.  At every opportunity, this society expresses its disapproval of actions that violate religious taboo; the outcomes for people with Down’s Syndrome would not be such a concern.  Its priority, as determined from its decisions, is to make sure that as few as possible of the sacrifices of raising children with special needs fall on the wealthy, or on men.  In short, it would consider those children someone else’s responsibility, and when she couldn’t bear it on her own, instead of taking any of it off her shoulders, it would punish and condemn her.  Then it would congratulate itself on how moral it were. 

After Rick Santorum’s (inaccurate) condemnation of prenatal testing, Slate reran an old piece that Tucker Carlson had written on the topic for the Weekly Standard back in the 90s. (They referred to this column as “classic”, which tells you how bad things are at Slate.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/02/rick_santorum_prenatal_testing_and_abortion_tucker_carlson_s_classic_essay_on_prenatal_testing_and_the_abortion_of_down_syndrome_babies_.single.html

I won’t bore people with a point-by-point discussion of all the many the problems with Carlson’s column, because its unnecessary and would take up too much space. I will say that of all the problems the one that makes me the most angry is the fact that it was written by Tucker Carlson and originally published by the Weekly Standard. 

The Right not only does nothing to help families raising children with Down’s and other special needs, they consistently push for policies that actually make their lives much, much harder. Because of that the entire article is just more anti-choice self-congratulation and judgement of people who aren’t them. There has to be some term equivalent to slut-shaming for people who do this to parents who decide that they’re not able to raise a handicapped child. 

Still no recipes for fish pie, I see

 I’ve got a pretty good one for shrimp pot pie.  I’ll post it when I get home and have access to my recipe book, if you’re still interested.

 I went with 80 posts based on the previous thread dropping from 7 pages to 5 once “Frank” was removed.

 
Still no recipes for fish pie, I see. 

I have no recipes for fish pie, but you might try posting the request in the other thread (How About I Be Me). That one has been mostly food discussion so more foodie folks may see it there. 

Yes it’s always easier to just ban the truth instead of facing it! 55 million unborn children killed since 1979 and 98% were killed because of convenience reasons.

But hey enjoy posting about nonsense.

So, I did a google search, and found 55 million killed by abortion worldwide in 2011, 55 million killed by abortion in the U.S. since 1952, 55 million killed worldwide due to climate change, and 55 million birds killed by cats in the UK last year.

55 million seems to be ‘the number’.  Much like 15 is the number when the U.S. Navy is talking about how many capital ships they need (Battleships in the 1920′s, Carriers in the 1970′s, Balistic Missile Submarines in the 1990′s.)

Fish Pie Recipe, as requested! (Warnings: I use butter and garlic like they’re food groups. This is neither gluten-free, low-calorie, non-dairy, nor suitable for penitence. It is, however, very tasty.)

- One 2-crust pie crust (I like the butter kind, personally)
- One large filet of some flaky mild fish, such as tilapia or cod, or halibut if you’re feeling pricey
-  frozen peas and pearl onions (or any other veggie of choice)
- butter and flour for creating roux
- fish broth and seasonings for creating gravy
- cream to taste

Chunk the fish small enough to be eaten easily in pie. Make a roux with the butter and flour, add the fish broth and stir briskly for gravy. This gravy should be thick – it’s what will hold your fish pie together. Finish the sauce with your seasonings (I like garlic, celery salt and tarragon) and a splash of the cream.

Put the fish chunks and gravy in the crust, seal and pierce, and bake at 350 for about an hour or until the crust is brown on top.

This always overcooks the fish, but I like it anyway. Eat hot or allow to cool – if the gravy is thick enough, you should be able to cut a slice and transport it without sloshing filling all over the place.