Interesting thread on abortion. Just a few at random.<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 In Mr. Hume’s post and the comments threads we’ve so far turned up Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin as having carried out legislative\u00a0actions suggesting that, at the least, they didn’t\/don’t mind abortion very much. I’d add Margaret Thatcher, who IMS voted in Parliament for\u00a0the 1967 bill<\/a> that liberalized British abortion law, and certainly who as Prime Minister\u00a0never made any move against the newly-liberalized abortion regime. So\u00a0\u2026 tell me again how [I can speak to the liberalization of the abortion laws in Britain in more detail, from observation and countless conversations in that\u00a0country through the pre-1967 controversy. The two driving forces were (a) class, and (b) our old pal disgust<\/em>. The class angle was the one\u00a0most often\u00a0heard in conversation. Under the old, quite strictly anti-abortion regime (still in force in Northern Ireland last time I looked), it was perfectly easy for well-off women\u00a0\u2014 not rich, just\u00a0upper-lower-middle-class and above\u00a0\u2014 to get a hygienic abortion in a decent clinic. Everybody knew this. Even the price was well-known:\u00a0it cost \u00a3200 in 1963-4 (about three months wages for a working-class man at the time). Working-class girls, however, had to resort to\u00a0“back-alley” abortions: older women of the same class wielding bicycle pumps and shirt hangers. (Frank Sinatra’s mum was in this line of\u00a0business, I believe, so things were probably much the same over here, at any rate in Hoboken.) This was regarded as grossly\u00a0unfair class-wise; and in post-WW2 Britain that was\u00a0sufficient to get a political movement airborne. The disgust was directed at the biddies with the bicycle pumps. If\u00a0people are intent on having abortions, as they obviously are, always and everywhere; and if, as is the case, it is rather easy for a doctor to write\u00a0up the procedure as something else, at least for early abortions (“dilatation and curettage” was the usual formula, making it sound like a\u00a0sort of gynecological house cleaning\u00a0\u2014 “\u2026 and to my great surprise, there was an embryo in there!”); then at least let’s make sure the thing\u00a0is done to some medical standards. Those were the talking points behind abortion law reform in Britain. British people don’t go in much for\u00a0metaphysics. At least they didn’t used to, when they were a sane nation.]<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0 Isn’t there any way to wean people off the silly, prissy, dishonest terminology of “pro-life” and “pro-choice”? \u00a0What’s wrong with “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion”? \u00a0That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Does anyone think the homicide\u00a0rate among “anti-life” abortion liberalizers is higher than it is among “pro-lifers” (My guess would be, it’s lower.) I\u00a0understand the marketing strategies here, but there is great clarification to be got from just using plain names for things.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0 The whole idea of ensoulment is a fascinating topic in cognitive psychology. Doug Hofstadter has witty things to say about it in his\u00a02007 book I Am a Strange Loop<\/em>. \u00a0The common human perception seems to be, though\u00a0\u2014\u00a0contra<\/em> one of the commentators\u00a0here\u00a0\u2014 that souls come in different sizes. Doug notes, for example, that the English word “magnanimity” and the Hindu\u00a0(Sanskrit?) title “Mahatma” both mean “great-souled.” He attempts a quantification of soul-size, based on a unit called the\u00a0huneker\u00a0\u2014 you have to read the book to get that reference. There is a two-page discussion about the size of a mosquito’s soul, coming up at\u00a0last with 10\u201310<\/sup> hunekers, the average human soul size being of course 100 hunekers. \u00a0Says Doug:<\/p>\n I have never been specific about the kinds of traits a high-huneker or low-huneker soul would tend to exhibit. Indeed, any hint at such\u00a0a distinction risks becoming inflammatory, because in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the\u00a0same amount.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You thus have one of those doublethink situations that cog-sci types get excited about: on the one hand, the intuition, universal and embodied in language, that\u00a0some souls are bigger than others, on the other hand, a cultural dogma that all human souls are equi-capacitous. Prof. Pinker, call your\u00a0office.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0 Still on the cog-sci beat, I think the other reader is right that we have, as part of our mental equipment, a module that, for any\u00a0other human being, computes a sort of “potential-for-accumulating-experience” quotient, and assigns the human being a value on that basis. This module likely only\u00a0kicks in when confronted with an observable human being, though. Probably our brains just didn’t evolve to have valuation modules for\u00a0embryos and fetuses, which we didn’t much encounter until recently. Following on from that<\/em>, I’d guess that much of the salience of the abortion issue in modern life\u00a0is driven by the good-quality medical imaging that’s become available in recent decades. I’d guess, in fact, that really<\/em> good quality\u00a0imaging of fetuses, if cheaply and widely available, would lead to public demands for earlier limits on legal abortion terms. The theocons can metaphysic all they want, but further policy\/legal changes in this zone will likely be driven by things we can see and hear, and by the effects\u00a0those things have on our emotions. \u00a0Metaphysics butters no parsnips.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0 I remember Nat Hentoff all right. He wrote the cover notes for the first British LP issue of\u00a0The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan<\/em><\/a>.” Sixties survivors don’t forget\u00a0stuff like that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interesting thread on abortion. Just a few at random. \u2022\u00a0 In Mr. Hume’s post and the comments threads we’ve so far turned up Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin as having carried out legislative\u00a0actions suggesting that, at the least, they didn’t\/don’t … Continue reading
\nyou can’t be a conservative if you’re not anti-abortion?<\/p>\n