I believe actual abortion survivors (and extremely premature babies in general) may live but often have life long problems of varying severity. Not that I have any statistics or anything.
What are the ethics if a person is making a movie like this, and changes their mind and halts production, before the point of commercial viability?
... and abortion after 20 weeks generally happen because something is threatening the health of the mother or fetus. ...
Speaking of lack of statistics I would like to see some references for this claim. It is my understanding that in practice many late term abortions occur because the mother either always wanted an abortion but was unable to get one earlier (for reasons like lack of money) or was ambivalent and decided late. This seems to have been the case for the Philadelphia abortion clinic where babies born alive were allegedly being killed (which I have referenced before).
(which I have referenced before)
Boy have you ever!
I'm kind of curious how the adoption angle plays out but not enough to actually watch the movie. (Like, what are the mechanics by which she finds her birth/firstmother? Did she go into foster care after being accidentally born or did her mother just immediately sign papers terminating her own rights? Does anyone notice that there are never dads in these kinds of stories? etc., etc., etc.)
Rob, can your students actually answer questions this complicated in any meaningful way? I'm not sure what percentage of Lee's would, but it's small.
6.1: Oh gawd! I went on wikipedia and learned that her parents didn't even tell her she was adopted and so the whole adopted-and-failed-abortion thing gets blurted out at once. I wonder what the priest has to say about forgiving her adoptive parents for their lies and if that parallels the birthmother story or whether they get to be unequivocally good guys who just had her best interests at heart. I know where I'd place my money on that.
I am strongly in favor of contraception to prevent unwanted movies from ever being made in the first place. I knew it existed, but thought to spare anyone else that knowledge, like the whole world.
I can't believe such obscenity has been forced upon children in an educational environment.
Something I'd like to ask students under these circumstances would be to list as many bases as they can think of for having moral qualms about an abortion under these circumstances. Then to think about whether those bases apply to an earlier abortion, and then to using birth control. Then see if they can make their moral intuition about the three cases, late abortion, early abortion, and birth control, consistent for those reasons that apply equally to all three situations.
What question should I have asked my students about this movie?
Is art made purely to drive home an ideology ever any good? Why or why not?
Alternatively, In what ways does the discussion of extremely unlikely situations affect our understanding of more common situations? Discuss the ways that limit situations provide productive or unproductive lines of argument.
because the mother either always wanted an abortion but was unable to get one earlier (for reasons like lack of money)
I don't have stats on this either, but my sense is that it's implausible at least for very late term abortion: that once you're getting close to or into the third trimester, you're talking about something that costs thousands rather than hundreds of dollars. Someone who can't scrape together a couple of hundred dollars for a first-term abortion, but can come up with thousands only a few months later, isn't impossible, but it's not going to be a common situation. (I think that sort of thing does operate to push people from the first into the second trimester, so later abortions. But very late abortions are, as far as I know, seriously expensive.)
Rob, can your students actually answer questions this complicated in any meaningful way?
Everything I do is set up to give them the ability to talk meaningfully at this level of sophistication. If I'm not pushing them there, I just get endless repetitions of statements heard in the media, and wishy washy statements people learn to make to avoid fights on complicated issues.
10: Alternatively, In what ways does the discussion of extremely unlikely situations affect our understanding of more common situations?
This. Then you can bring in "ticking bomb" for good measure.
because the mother either always wanted an abortion but was unable to get one earlier (for reasons like lack of money)
The best statistics on any issue related to abortion come from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and they say that a full percentage breakdown of the reasons people seek late term abortions is not feasible for them.
They do however list common situations that drive people to late mid and term abortion. Aside from health concerns, there are people who are unable to realize they are pregnant or unwilling to admit that they are pregnant, including drug users, homeless people, and teenagers. I image in that sometimes you hit a trifecta with that one, and have a homeless teenage drug user seeking a late term abortion.
The questions in 10 are very good.
12: I'm really glad to hear that. I'm hoping that after the semester conversion, Lee will be able to do more of that kind of work that has some sort of payoff. I've worked with her on that sort of thing in the past, but they have short terms and it's hard to make much progress.
The questions in 10 are very good.
Someone should have given me a faculty job!
Someone who can't scrape together a couple of hundred dollars for a first-term abortion, but can come up with thousands only a few months later, isn't impossible, but it's not going to be a common situation.
Add in also the much greater likelihood of having to travel to have the procedure done.
Yeah, I like Blume's questions. And then "is it ethical to sneak a dollar box of Junior Mints from a deli into the abortion movie so I don't have to pay $3.50 on top of the thirteen fucking dollars movies costs these days anyway?"
19: That belongs in the Harvard Business Debt thread, plus surely Junior Mints cost more than that in NYC concession stands, since I think they do even here. (Seriously, I'm sure we went over this last time, but I keep finding myself being very judgmental about the whole flask thing. I mean, there's a time and a place, but taking one to a bar just seems wrong.)
Yeah, me too. Honestly, I think I'm being more judgmental about it as tacky than as dishonest, but it's dishonest as well.
Junior Mints are abortifacients, Smearcase.
In what ways does the discussion of extremely unlikely situations affect our understanding of more common situations? Discuss the ways that limit situations provide productive or unproductive lines of argument.
This is what I was trying to get at with "Does it matter that most abortions take place in circumstances that are radically different than these?" but I like your wording better. I'm going to update my prompt. (The online class I'm teaching is quiet because there are no big deadlines coming up.)
re: 17
This is sort of vaguely my academic field [except more just the bio- without the -ethics], but I've got nothing!
Ooh, I got a reply from a student! I'm starting a line of argument like like LB's 9 with her. We'll see how it goes.
10 In what ways does the discussion of extremely unlikely situations affect our understanding of more common situations?
Yeah, this is a great question with broad applicability. Especially given how intrinsically bad people are at judging how common low-likelihood situations are.
I hereby join the resounding chorus in praise of Blume's questions.
Aside from health concerns, there are people who are unable to realize they are pregnant or unwilling to admit that they are pregnant, including drug users, homeless people, and teenagers. I image in that sometimes you hit a trifecta with that one, and have a homeless teenage drug user seeking a late term abortion.
And that is exactly the sort of person we most want to be having babies!
If you could start with an issue that they all encounter in daily life, and ask how unusual possibilities bear on the ethics of that, that would probably be good too.
If you do post this, there's one more question I'd like to put before the unfoggetariat: What question should I have asked my students about this movie?
I don't know that it's a question for your students, but the first thing that I thought of when I read the post was the various posts on Crooked Timber about trolly problems (and how whimsical they are). So my question would be, "if you're elaborating an extremely unlikely scenario for the purpose of illustrating a philosophical point, what distinguishes between a useful thought experiment and propaganda?"
Is art made purely to drive home an ideology ever any good? Why or why not?
I would quibble with the word, "purely" in that sentence, but I'll certainly defend the idea that there is good art which is primarily ideological (didn't Stanley have a post in which he put up a video of the Woody Guthrie song "Deportees"?)
good art which is primarily ideological
What about devotional/religious art, too? That's all in service of an ideology, but lots of it is generally recognized as good (to understate the situation).
It seems that natural conception and parental intention always figure prominently in thought experiments designed to identify the boundary of independent human life. This way abortion seems like an extreme case of bad parenting, and draws on everyday background knowledge.
The two other framings that I think are also relevant are as a medical technology and as resource allocation.
Conception hasn't yet become separated from sex, but it's on the way, with cost being the biggest limiting factor as far as I can see in the US. IVF is 1% of births in the US, no idea about the rates of surrogacy or artificial insemination. The odds of a viable pre-term birth are also a function of technology. Abortion as a consequence of detecting serious genetic defects is IMO the corner case here.
For resource allocation, China's one-child policy, the use of abortion rather than contraception in the ex-USSR, and (illegal) selective abortion after sex determination are the corner cases. Probably all of these are too foreign for useful discussion. But the preference for focusing discussion on a small fraction of US abortions rather than demographically significant rates of abortion indicates to me an interest in parents rather than zygotes, which doesn't make much sense. State-coerced abortion, or a decision subject to a lot of coercion by the father's extended family both trouble me, but obviously, I don't have suggestions for how to improve China.
I guess I'd ask about why the film focused on one of the tiny minority of abortions that take place in the US if the concern is that abortion ends an independent human life.
Oh, 10's questions are useful for pointing out that the film is political propaganda, but of course political propaganda can be great art. Trajan's column, or if you want to stay with film, Birth of a Nation or Triumph of Will are both really good. Film is not good for communicating reasoned perspectives, IMO. It's a medium that appeals to the senses.
I would quibble with the word, "purely" in that sentence, but I'll certainly defend the idea that there is good art which is primarily ideological
Oh sure. I wrote my dissertation on the East German successor to Brecht, after all. And my inclusion of the word 'purely' there was pretty much just my hostility toward the makers of this movie creeping out.
the first thing that I thought of when I read the post was the various posts on Crooked Timber about trolly problems
I like this spelling, but I think it should be "troll-y problems".
Not only did I misspell trolley, I was also largely pwned by 10.2. That's what I get for commenting too quickly.
Possibly relevant: I just noticed that doonesbury.com had a link to the series of strips he did satirizing Silent Scream
[Joan Caucus:] "Rick, It's an incendiary piece of propaganda. There may be a case to make for right-to-life, but that filmisn't it.
Here's the thing that bugs me about trolley problems or "here is virtue, there is gain, which will Polly choose" stories. For most decisions, the dominant factors are incomplete information and interdependence on other circumstances.
The rationalizing impulse to isolate the issues and consider them one at a time changes decisionmaking from something recognizably human, where we're all guessing about three outcomes at once when we make decisions, to a fish tank.
This seems like such an obvious remark that someone must have written about it, but it wasn't Hume or Kant. Has anyone read Sissela Bok's book about lying? Looks interesting, but my favorite site for getting good books in electronic form is gone.
my favorite site for getting good books in electronic form is gone.
The fall of that website has become a bit of an inconvenience for me. Since I'm at a community college, I don't have access to a real research library, and there are many times when I want to look something up, and I want the information quicker than interlibrary loan will come, I often need to scan through the various avenues to free scholarly online books.
I'd heard about this and wondered if this was based on Gianna's story; the fact that I knew her name was that she featured in the Christian teen magazines I had as a kid. Which meant she's spent basically her whole life as a political story.
It is my understanding that in practice many late term abortions occur because the mother either always wanted an abortion but was unable to get one earlier (for reasons like lack of money) or was ambivalent and decided late.
It depends on what you mean by "late-term." Most abortions (~90%) are first trimester. Another almost 10% are "late" but second trimester and well before viability. Cases like Gianna's or the October baby story are beyond rare.
Do you know where I can get information from an outside source about Jessen's story, Cala? For instance, why was her mother seeking an abortion?Were the doctors aware that after they induced labor, the baby might be viable, and were prepared to take lifesaving measures.
Based on how I understand that instillation abortion works, it seems possible that the mother and her doctor did not intend an abortion. They intended to end the pregnancy with the knowledge that the baby that was delivered may not be viable.
There was a similar case in Germany known as the Oldenburg baby who was delivered at 25 weeks gestation and initially not given life saving treatment.
Another almost 10% are "late" but second trimester and well before viability. Cases like Gianna's or the October baby story are beyond rare.
Last I looked, third trimester abortions were 1.3% of all abortions. Since over a million abortions are performed every year, you are still looking at least 10,000 procedures.
Put another way that's 2 third trimester abortions per 1000 pregnancies. That's rare, but not "beyond rare." (E.g. 2 per thousand is roughly the rate of autism.)
I see others have said this, but the questions in 10 are very good. 10.2 especially so. It would be great if students could come out of the course able to address Discuss the ways that limit situations provide productive or unproductive lines of argument.
In any event, I thought "beyond rare" was for babies being born alive after abortions.
Anyway, since I don't have a huge ethical problem with fourth trimester abortions (which were pretty common in history), cases like this one don't really bother me. (From a legal perspective, I think that birth is a great bright line to pick. So I do support laws against parental infanticide.)
Ah, worldwide vs. US, my bad. Let me find a better example.
Identical twins is 3 per 1000 births.
I'd heard it was under 1%, but in any case I think it's just wrong to say that most late-term abortions are being done because someone didn't get her act together in time, if by "late-term" we mean "third trimester."
I don't have anything more about Jessen's story -- just remembered her name. I think her parents were young and unmarried and when she didn't die they gave her up for adoption.
46: I'd pick a year past puberty (or seventeen, to make it easier on the bureaucrats) as the line for retroactive abortions. By then you can tell if you have a Joffrey or not.
Identical twins is 3 per 1000 births.
Huh. Yet there were four sets of them in my high school of 400 students.
Or something to do with the clay mines and the brick plant!
Just more smear tactics trying to allege that late term abortions are just done for the convenience of evil women and to make money for evil doctors.
It is outrageous.
The "Partial Birth Abortion" law wasnt about convenience. It made late term, medically necessary abortions more dangerous for women.
The Republicans didnt care. And liberals were pathetically afraid of dealing with the issue head on.
Yes, "beyond rare" referred to cases like Jessen's, i.e., no medical reason, baby is viable, and survives. The problem is that she's being presented as typical of all abortions. It'd be more accurate to say that "many abortions don't even stop a beating heart."
39: It'll be interesting to see if the Gianna Jenssen story actually holds up in the end. I'd have the same questions about it as rob does in 40, but as far as I can tell, all the claims that her health problems originated in a "botched abortion" and not just a premature birth come solely from anti-abortionist sources (wherein her full name is apparently "Abortion Survivor Gianna Jenssen"), which rather smells of Hoax.
A little poking around suggests that the scientific consensus is that identical twin rates really are random, and that there's unlikely to be an environmental explanation for your location having extra identical twins. Instead the explanation is just that the math here is a little counterintuitive. The odds of a 3/1000 event happening exactly 4 times in a sample of 400 is actually around 2.5 percent. And 2.5 percent is just not that unusual.
(The odds of exactly 5 is around half a percent, exactly 5 is .1%, and it drops off pretty fast from there. So having at least 4 identical twins out of 400 happens a little over 3% of the time. All this is assuming I didn't make some totally stupid mistake.)
Fraternal twin rates, on the other hand, vary quite a lot (both geographically, genetically, and historically).
56: As I understand it the premature birth was caused by the abortion procedure, and so you can't really separate out what was caused by the premature birth vs. what was caused by the abortion.
I get that. I don't actually think there is some enviroscary reason there were an unusual number of identical twins at my school.
59: I never heard of this woman before, so I have no opinion, but I thought LC was suggesting that there was no abortion: that an anti-abortion activist who had been born prematurely and adopted had invented the late-term abortion as a cause of her premature birth.
(Sorry, I looked into that for my own curiosity. I didn't actually know before that google-fugue that identical twinning was random. And my intuition was that the odds of 4 was going to be one order of magnitude lower than that.)
61: Oh, ok, that makes sense.
56: There's also her birth certificate.
On Gianna Jessen, I remember watching some a video from some talk show she was on during a religion class in middle school. I would have seen it in 1992 or '93, so the saline abortion story has been consistent since at least then, when she was still a minor. She and her family were definitely trotting out the story then to tug heartstrings and make people viscerally anti-abortion because they don't want babies to have their skin burned off and so on.
It's plausible but not the only explanation that her CP was caused by her traumatic birth, but whether that means the whole birth process or just the abortion really only matters if you're going to argue the abortion=eeeeeevil side of things. I also don't lend a whole lot of credence to the "doctors said she would never x!" thing as being meaningful, though I see why parents get excited about kids passing specifically those milestones. I mean, Mara's dentist has said some crazy shit about what she'd be able to do that she's surpassed, but that's because he's got some weird ideas about her rather than because she's magically resilient. Predicting the future is hard, yo.
The adopted son of a friend of mine tracked down his birth mother, who was horrified and enraged to be found. It had been a terrible part of her life and she wanted to forget everything. He was extremely hurt, but people should realize that women give up babies for adoption because they don't want a kid, and that this decision is often painful and accompanied by shaming.
On the other hand, another guy tracked down his half sister (the father was his uncle) and they had a fine time.
So Jessen's parents were flogging her story before she was? Huh.
In any case, at some point, parents and doctors decided that the fetus or newborn was viable and that this would be a birth, not an abortion. Sometime after that, a birth certificate was signed. The situation is not like what I gather is supposed to happen in the movie, where the doctors leave the newborn in the garbage and it is rescued by a brave, pro-life nurse.
I don't think you could count this as a pure case of a premature birth, since saline was injected. The question is how they approached the question of whether the fetus would be born viable.
I don't think you could count this as a pure case of a premature birth, since saline was injected.
The only information about this is from her adoptive parents. There is ZERO evidence from any other source that saline was injected. Zero.
If you google for Gianna Jessen birth certificate, there's a document purporting to be a medical record that says 'born during saline abortion' here. I have no idea if it's real or even if it's plausible to someone who knows what such records usually look like, but it's something they're pointing to.
The movie is just another outlandish claim that, even if it were true, would account for .00000000000001% of all abortions.
This is the tatic of the anti's - say outlandish things so we talk about the alleged horrors.
what I gather is supposed to happen in the movie, where the doctors leave the newborn in the garbage and it is rescued by a brave, pro-life nurse
I am rolling my eyes so hard I am in danger of knocking out my contact lens.
69:
Is the birth certificate from the time of the adoption or the birth?
After you finalize an adoption, a new birth certificate can get issued.
I was wondering about 72, but couldn't work it out from the image online. You ought to be able to work it out by name of parents and location of birth (weirdly, the new birth certificate lists the city where the adoption was finalized as place of birth).
Blume's questions in 10 are outstanding.
As for the heartstrings-tugging in the movie, and in Jessen's tale, I somewhat deny feeling any empathy, actually. (Rob's last question in the OP: "Does our ability to empathize with someone like Hannah or Jessen have implications for the moral status of a fetus in the 24th or 30th week of gestation?")
I have the ability to empathize, but I don't empathize, actually. I'm an adopted child, and know that my biological mother may have considered abortion, know that I may therefore never have come into existence, and understand that life's funny that way.
If you click through my link, there are two documents, a birth certificate and a medical record, the medical record is the one that mentions abortion. I don't have any particular reason to believe that it's not faked, but it doesn't look as if which birth certificate it is comes into play; there wouldn't be any reason to reissue medical records other than the birth certificate, would there be?
No wonder I was confused and couldn't find the parents names. Wikipedia calls it a birth certificate, but links to the medical record.
I really don't see any reason to think its faked, and this exercise veers too close to birtherism for my tastes.
know that I may therefore never have come into existence, and understand that life's funny that way
This gets it exactly right. When I was about 12 or 13, I tried to get myself into an emotional lather by taking Back To The Future seriously. "No, really, what if my mom and dad never met? I wouldn't have been boooorn!!!" Then I realized that unless somehow I traveled back in time to experience this trauma directly, it wouldn't be my problem, really, and my premortal soul would just find some other body to get born in, no bigs.
I really don't understand how abortion became such a thing in the LDS.
this exercise veers too close to birtherism for my tastes.
Obviously she is Constitutionally ineligible to become President, because as the product of a saline abortion, she can't be a "natural born citizen".
76:
She is coming forward trying to make money and sell a certain political viewpoint, AND she claims to have gone through an EXTREMELY rare medical situation.
Not being skeptical would be foolish.
72: A birth certificate issued after an adoption will have everything from the original birth except the child's new name in place of the child's old name and the adoptive parents' information swapped out for the birth parents' information. So Lee's legal birth certificate says that her 50-ish grandparents were her parents and Mara's says that Lee gave birth to her but is otherwise exactly like the one we have that says her mother gave birth to her. I've written before here about how and why I think this is fucked up.
One reason I'm skeptical about the medical record is that it lists her name as "Giana" and in 1977 it's incredibly unlikely that her adoptive parents would have kept a name she "came with" rather than given her their preferred name, Gianna. So she was already in their custody at the point that medical record was made, I'd reckon, and the information may well be self-reported by them.
I dont know why I am even discussing this issue.
It doesnt matter if her story is true. It changes nothing.
Plus, the movie changed it to 24 weeks as well, which only further makes this ridiculous.
66: another guy tracked down his half sister (the father was his uncle)
Wait, what?
I'm not bothered by it, because it's the only reason to take her adoptive parents' (obviously, she doesn't know anything first hand) story at face value, and it wouldn't be hard to fake. With Obama, the birth certificate is a sideshow: for Jessen, the circumstances of her birth are the only reason to be interested in her.
82: I got puzzled by that too -- it's very different depending on whether his half-sister's father was his paternal or maternal uncle.
I really don't understand how abortion became such a thing in the LDS.
Because it allied with the Republican party?
Hrm, maybe international adoptions are different in reference to location on birth certificate (cause I know at least one of my brothers birth certificate is the location of the courthouse, not the location of birth).
87: That's possible, but I definitely know people whose kids' birth certificates list, say, Beijing and the (assumed) date of birth and then Mary and John Jones as the parents of Susan Mei-Ling Jones or whatever.
Further to 88, um, not that I'm doubting your brother's experience! I do think there's more variation in international adoptions but especially before adoptee rights movements began to gain steam, which would certainly include '77, the goal was to make adoptive birth certificates look indistinguishable from non-adopted people's birth certificates.
Could also vary by state?
90: Not that I know of, although I know a lot but certainly not everything about this. Kansas, Alaska, and one other state allow adoptees to access their own original birth certificates with no restrictions. Here's a little information on what kind of information changes and what is later available, but you're right that things differ by state and I wouldn't be surprised if local clerks or whoever makes the changes just do things their own way because who would ever know the difference? That may just be me being cynical, though.
I just looked up California's statutes and if a judge agreed that Gianna had compelling cause to have access to her original birth certificate, she could be granted access. But a judge would have to agree and no one else would have the right to petition for it. Adoption law is weird in part for the reason Emerson suggested above, but I think that argument often gets hijacked by adoption agencies and anti-abortion activists too.
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Asked about criticism that Romney is "too stiff," Ann Romney laughed and replied, "I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out because he is not!"
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92: Wow! I thought you must have made that up!
From LB's link:
The sexual innuendo seemed to be lost on her.
Something I'd like to ask students under these circumstances would be to list as many bases as they can think of for having moral qualms about an abortion under these circumstances. Then to think about whether those bases apply to an earlier abortion, and then to using birth control. Then see if they can make their moral intuition about the three cases, late abortion, early abortion, and birth control, consistent for those reasons that apply equally to all three situations.
I like these questions because they are extremely drily phrased, which makes it difficult to associate them with a specific ideological position (obviously Blume's questions, this thread context and tone aside, could also be similarly phrased).
I also think I would feel pretty shitty if personally (well, SOly-personally) confronted with the necessity of aborting a late-abortion fetus. That is, I don't think I'm really well-enough informed to make ethical judgements there but in late-abortion cases I can at least feel slightly empathetic to anti-choicers. So it would be interesting to me to lay out all the details.
Also, if you're already into trolley-realm, you can probably dig up scenarios where twins are joined at birth and there is a likely chance of death of both if no separation procedure is applied and a very likely chance of only one death if they are separated.
Not that I'm equating the last scenario with abortion at any stage!
Also, if you're already into trolley-realm, you can probably dig up scenarios where twins are joined at birth and there is a likely chance of death of both if no separation procedure is applied and a very likely chance of only one death if they are separated.
ISTR there was one just like that a couple of years ago, where the parents refused the procedure and the doctors went to court to override them. One twin duly died; the other lived.
So we unzip Romney and find out that he's not stiff? This still plays into his image as being unable to have fun.
Is it even funnier if Ann was just playing dumb and she's really teasing Mitt for a "poor performance" the other night?
Who even uses the word "unzip" there, unless you're going for the joke. Is she a Democratic sleeper agent?
I have no comment on the ethical or moral implications or questions but I thought I'd note that I was born via C-section at 24 weeks after an accident mechanically induced labor, and had no health problems, and turned out not to require the respirators and other accoutrements usually used for premies. I was born 2 lbs 11 oz, and was sent home in a month, heavier than most month old full term babies. The main reason I was there for even that long was that my mother had some C-section complications and they wanted to keep us together. Apparently many doctors came to check me out, from curiosity. So it's possible, but I've never met anyone else who was so early and so healthy.
Who even uses the word "unzip" there, unless you're going for the joke.
Someone really pure-minded (and stiff).
My impression was that something like 102 was very unlikely, especially many years ago. Am I misinformed? Is there good reason not to assume that the doctors miscalculated the date of conception?
2lbs 11oz is average for 28 week old fetuses. Though it's only 95th percentile for 24 week fetuses, so maybe it's not so weird after all. I guess the moral is that there's more variation in development than you might guess.
104: Your impression is correct, hence the steady stream of curious visitors, but no, they were pretty sure even then that the dates were right. I don't know how they checked (and don't really want to think about it too much) but everyone agreed that I was really that early, and it was really very unusual.
Hrm, the site I was looking at was horribly broken (you get different answers depending on whether you look at the chart use the calculator). Found a real article. At 24 weeks the 97th percentile for fetal weight is 1 pound 12 ounces. I feel pretty confident now that a 2 pound 11 ounce 24 week old fetus is extremely extremely uncommon, and that it's much much more likely that they miscalculated the date of conception.
I feel pretty confident now that a 2 pound 11 ounce 24 week old fetus is extremely extremely uncommon, and that it's much much more likely that they miscalculated the date of conception.
Don't you think this is a little condescending? Saheli said they were pretty sure the dates were right, and you'd think they would have scrutinized this pretty carefully, given the situation. Also, it's not exactly rocket science to figure out the date of conception within a week or so.
According to that article that's 7 standard deviations above the mean. 7 standard deviation events don't happen (10^-10 odds, so we'd only expect one such person on the planet). Now, there's reason to expect that the bell curve approximation is skewed a little on the large end (because fetuses go through a growth spurt at some point), so maybe it's a handful of people on the planet. But given that calculating date of conception isn't super easy, it seems much more likely that it was actually say 26 weeks (when it'd still be pretty remarkable).
Sorry, it is rude to question people's stories. I was just curious.
There's curiosity, and then there's making assertions about how Saheli's parents and all the doctors must have been wrong, and you know what actually happened.
I THINK WE'RE ALL SICK OF SAHELI'S MANIPULATIVE RIGHT-WING MANUFACTURED ANECDOTAL MANIPULATED UNSUBSTANTIATED SOB STORIES
Is that really a medical record? It looks like a recitation of medical stuff that's part of a broader social services record.
The California birth index shows 190 female babies born in Los Angeles County on April 6, 1977. Not surprisingly, none were named Gianna (although, coincidentally, there was a Gianna born in Riverside County that same day, but she's apparently still using her name). It's surely easier now to track back to birth parents than it's ever been. So easy, that the custom of creating incorrect birth certificates will probably die out.
Is it moral to impose normality everywhere ?
The moral of the OP is the importance of finishing the check.
http://proicehockey.about.com/od/hockeyglossarydg/g/finish_thecheck.htm
32
... Birth of a Nation or Triumph of Will are both really good. ...
I have never seen Birth of a Nation but I wasn't all that impressed with Triumph of the Will.
The film may have been technically innovative at the time but is nothing special by current standards.
Not that I have any axe to grind for Reifenstahl, but technical innovation in film-making often dates really quickly. King Kong was genuinely amazing at the time, but it looks pretty daft today. That doesn't take anything away from it (King Kong) as an amazing piece of work for its day.
OK, if you don't accept Riefenstahl as an example, what about Eisenstein?
Or Lissitzky, or Rodchenko, or Shostakovich, or, etc x many
8 is vintage McManus.
Meanwhile, this guy (Scalia) appears seriously confused about the very idea of "insurance". I thought right-wing American jurists were all about the law & economics?
66: My uncle married a woman who was pregnant before he married her (and he was not the father). The father never had anything to do with my adopted cousin, but he has since been able to track down his birth grandfather and has been to visit him.
I wasn't all that impressed with Triumph of the Will.
So . . . much . . . marching. Yawn. But I am still inordinately amused, in that section where members of the HJ are announcing where they're from, by the way the one kid proudly says "Der Kaiserstuhl!"
119 120
I haven't even heard of most of those guys and I am pretty sure I haven't seen any of their films. I don't actually doubt the point, that a propaganda film can have artistic merit, but I think Triumph of the Will may be overused as an example. It wouldn't surprise if I have the same reaction to Birth of a Nation if and when I ever watch it.
re: 124
Well, the ones I mentioned were graphic artists and photographers (Lissitzky and Rodchenko) and the last a composer.
Female babies and babies of African descent become viable sooner, for some reason. I'm not sure how many of those categories Saheli falls into, but that might change Unfoggetarian (9)'s impression of the likelihood of this happening.
I didn't care for the Hitler character in Triumph of the Will. Seemed like a Charlie Chaplain knockoff.
Safe to say, were it released today, Triumph of the Will would bomb.
128: Spot-on imitation of a certain kind of student writing for the Nazi cinema course I TAed.
I can't believe nobody said "Saheli!" I want to, but I don't think you ever knew me or knew that I read your blog. I'm happy you commented here.
122: I think everyone here knows this, but I believe it's a good thing for people to be able to know their biological families and don't think it has any reflection on how good their other families are. I'm glad we know Lee's biological dad's other kids (well, the three that we know of) and I'm very glad that Mara has connections to her family. Her brother and two sisters (9, 8, and 6) will be staying with us for a few days this week and they are all so similar in looks and attitude that it amazes me. I think she'll be better off in the long run for getting to have a connection to them (and, like Lee, getting to see that her parents are not actually reliable enough to meet relatively minor commitments, let alone do the day-to-day parenting work) than if she'd lived with a fantasy version and had to resolve everything in adulthood.
127: While a lot of The Great Dictator is really dated, the scene where Adenoid Hinkel dances with the globe is still fucking hilarious.
Some of the speeches are also pretty great. The most famous in a long lineage of Hitler imitators. The most brilliant ever is probably Martin Wuttke in The Preventable Rise of Arturo Ui.
Speeches? I only remember Chaplin's closing plea for peace, which, IIRC, was very good.
There might only be one, come to think of it. I last saw the movie quite a while ago. But there's definitely one, in which Chaplin lampoons Hitler's speaking style.
Oh wait, I misinterpreted you, thinking you were referring to the one time when we actually get audio of Chaplin speaking.
I am fine for using rare, bad results from abortion to discuss whether it should continue, as long as they are willing to use the far more common bad results of pregnancies carried to term to convince people not to get pregnant.
Hey look! A baby died! Therefore, pregnancy is bad!
I'm not sure I have the exact right question yet, but it seems like there's something along the lines of "Given, that this is a fictional story, how could the film be changed to make the opposite political point?", or "How would you feel differently about the story if it was revealed that Hannah was in fact a serial killer? Would anyone bear any responsibility for the deaths of the innocent people?"
The second question also goes to the questions about extrapolating from extremely rare cases, especially if you can show the kids that multiple murderers are in fact much more common than babies surviving abortions.
How would you feel differently about the story
I know that rh-c's class is doing different things than a lit class would do, and that getting students to work on making an argument out of their intuitions may be a goal, but as someone trained in teaching literature, it makes me cringe mightily to imagine asking students how they "feel" about a story. Maybe instead a question about how elements of the story/narrative would function differently if the serial killer thing were later revealed.
When I used to teach philosophy I was always telling students I didn't give a fuck how they felt about things.*
* nicer language, most of the time.
141: Aren't there ethical theories that are very concerned with people's moral intuitions?
If I didn't address my students intuitions and existing beliefs, I wouldn't be helping them transform themselves morally.
In general, I belong to the reflective equilibrium school of thought, where most of ethics consists in transforming vague and contradictory intuitions into consistent rules.
If you put them in an MRI and asked LB's questions you'd totes be doing some cutting-edge social neuroscience.
Talking about 'intuitions' seems more likely to be productive than talking about 'feelings'. You can have a right or a wrong intuition, but you can't have a wrong feeling. Feelings don't even have to be consistent!
re: 143
I certainly tried to pay attention to intuitions and beliefs, and draw that out and try and make them think philosophically, or systematically and with thought and attention about those intuitions and beliefs. But there was a lot of 'feeling' stuff that wasn't helpful on any level. Especially when it was presented in lieu of argument, and accompanied by the cast-iron belief that 'feelings' were infallible, for vague 'immunity to error through misidentification' type reasons.
Also, tbh, I didn't really see moral transformation as any part of my business.
Talking about feelings also tends to lead to the 'interpretation' excuse. "But that's MY interpretation! You can't say it's wrong!" Again, I don't know to what extent or in what way this translates to ethics/philosophy. But good lord it's common in literature.
126: Female fetuses have a lower mean, but a higher standard deviation. So indeed, you might expect more female outliers. 2 pounds 11 ounces is only 5.7 sigma for female fetuses at 24 weeks. Which means it's only 99.9999993 percentile, or a little less than 1 in a hundred million. So you might expect around one woman person in the US to have been that weight at 24 weeks. Of course you wouldn't expect that one person in the entire country to also have been born at that weight.
I couldn't find good numbers for African Americans. There was a big study on Jamaicans but it's not online. A study of Xhosa suggested that there was not a significant difference in the fetal growth curves.
The big uncertainty here seems to be if the mother has diabetes (either gestational or otherwise). I haven't found the numbers there, but it's plausible that if you look at a sample of pregnant women with diabetes then this would be much less of an outlier.
(Also I made an error in 109, where the error should have been 10^-12 and so you'd expect only a 1% chance of anyone alive having it.)
148 is the sort of thing I have in mind. Feelings, interpretations, and 'it's what I believe, you can't tell me my beliefs are wrong! They are my beliefs!.'
There are several easy places for error to come in on the "date of conception" side. First off, estimating the date of conception is not exact and errors of a week there seem quite common. (Two weeks error is less likely, though almost certainly still more likely than 5.7 sigma.) Secondly, there's a weird naming issue here. If I understand things right, in the technical literature you start with the first week being "week 1." So a fetus in "week 24" is between 23 weeks 1 day post-conception, and 24 weeks post-conception. This does not match with how we name ages after birth, so there's a very good chance that when a non-doctor says "24 weeks" they actually mean "in the 25th week." So that's another easy 1 week error.
In the 26th week the 97th percentile is 2 pounds 6 ounces. Furthermore, growth is accelerating at that point, so you should expect the distribution to skew on the large side. So 2 pounds 11 ounces is totally plausible at that point.
150:Hasn't anyone else read the Carol Gilligan? I have it open, it has dozens of interviews with women getting abortions in a respectful attempt to follow their moral reasoning. I won't try to sum it up, because that is not what it is trying to show. Feelings and relationships and identity.
There is no fucking place to stand outside and above an individual woman's choice where I can judge her decision process as inadequately "grounded."
Whatever. There is no hierarchy, there are no universals, there are no general rules...yet this is not nihilism or relativism or nominalism because there remains a concrete human making a moral decision within a web of relationships and values.
Not that I buy it. But it's a good book.
Whatever. I stand by 8. Nothing for me to talk about.
151: I'm sure no one thought of those things!
Okay, and if you say "Well, if we can't judge this woman's moral reasoning does that mean we can't judge Hitler's?"
And I says:"There ya go, trying to move away from the concrete and immediate to the abstract and universal. This is the patriarchal move, this is the method of control."
And then you says "Situational Ethics?" and I throw Foucault at ya, cause that's the kinda guy I am.
151: Pregnancy math bugs the fuck out of me. They begin by telling you that pregnancy lasts for 40 weeks, which is divided into three 13 week trimesters (where'd the extra week go?), which is equal to 9 months (sorta), which is equal to 280 days from your last menstrual period, even if other times are calculated from the moment of conception and it doesn't really matter because everyone's body is different, except when we decide to force everyone into the same template and induce labor.
re: 152
I don't know what the fuck you are talking about. I was talking [re: dismissal of 'feelings'] about philosophy students in class, not women getting abortions.
157:I know you have no idea what I am talking about.
In every age and country of the world men must have attended to the characters, designs, and actions of one another, and many reputable rules and maxims for the conduct of human life, must have been laid down and approved of by common consent. As soon as writing came into fashion, wise men, or those whofancied themselves such, would naturally endeavour to increase the number of those established and respected maxims. (WN V.i.f.25)...Smith
For fuck's sake, of course "feelings and beliefs" are an important part of "moral reasoning" Aren't they? Are they all doin' it wrong? Everyone's contingencies, material circumstances, and your own affects, interests, and preferences, described concretely, are about all you got.
Shorter Carol Gilligan:Kohlberg was a patriarchal piece of shit.
"Kohlberg's theory was initially developed based on empirical research using only male participants"
But that understates, since women are socialized into patriarchal reasoning very early.
In a way, as a Nietzschean, Gilligan wasn't so tough. Of course universal ethical principles are the Will to Power.
OTOH, actually listening (reading) to woman after woman talking about making moral decisions and remaining non-judgmental, is pretty good exercise for me.
I am fucking loving This book
disdain for judgments or perspectives outside those of one's own group are, for Smith, far worse than simply vices in themselves: they are destructive of good moral judgment altogether. Smith's moral theory thus relies on humility and an openness to difference as a corrective for misguided moral judgments.Smith's proposed method of constant comparison with the judgment of others, especially those outside one's particular group, lends itself to toleration of unfamiliar standards of judgment and a humility in judging different mores and institutions. It encourages skepticism regarding one's own provincial prejudices and caution in mistaking them for a universal standard. If people's judgments improve as they extend their horizon of comparison, it follows that they must take the new perspectives they encounter seriously. Smith's moral theory, I suggest, issues not in a refusal to judge or to compare customs, laws, or institutions, but rather in a posture of humility in the evaluation of unfamiliar practices.
...Jennifer Pitts
which is equal to 280 days from your last menstrual period
Every woman ovulates exactly 14 days later. Duh.
I feel that "feel" is said in many ways, including so as to mean "think".
I really dislike that use of "feel". "I feel like what Foucault is trying to say here is..." could just as easily be said with "I think" or, if you still want to keep a bit more hedging, "It seems to me that..."
re: 158
Again, you are misreading me. It's not that I don't think feelings form part of moral reasoning, it's that the people I am complaining about weren't doing moral reasoning at all, with the emphasis on the reasoning. This was the expression of feeling as a substitute for moral reasoning, often accompanied by a vehement rejection of any attempt to draw those feelings out and ask the person to think more deeply and reflectively about those feelings and the feelings of others as part of a process of reasoning about morality. The trick is try to get them to make use of feelings and beliefs as part of that process. It's a complaint about a type of emotional egoism/solipsism, rather than some dismissal of the sort of approach Smith is talking about.
There is no fucking place to stand outside and above an individual woman's choice where I can judge her decision process as inadequately "grounded."
I agree. I am not going to do it.
Women have terminated pregnancies in various ways for various reasons forever. It isnt going to stop.
So you can choose to make it safe, or you can choose to make it not safe.
It is her body, so I am not going to require her to articulate some reason that meets some standard that I have determined counts as acceptable.
But there's definitely one, in which Chaplin lampoons Hitler's speaking style.
There's a subtle joke in that scene where the simultaneous interpreter is nervously cleaning up the vulgarity of Hinkel's German in the English translation.