Yeah, well you know who would make a good VP candidate for Obama? Your mother! (Well, somebody's mother at least.)

So is Kaine pro-life?

It doesn't matter. I've been reading the WaPo for a while now and I can say with complete authority that Kaine is a non-entity. If he had a personality, apparently he misplaced it at some point.

You don't want a non-entity on your ticket. If you really want a non-entity on your ticket, you pick nobody.

It doesn't seem like Kaine is going to move Virginia or anybody else for that matter; but he's familiar to pundits, so that's why the choice seems 'obvious' to them, aka 'He's one of us!'.

It would be a really dumb choice, without even getting into any consideration of whether he's pro-life, anti-death, pro-goat or just patiently waiting for our alien overlords.

max
['Near as I can tell, Obama ain't dumb.']

Eh. The guy's governor of Virginia -- of course he's going to be somewhat more conservative than many of us would like. If that conservatism winds up expressed as as incoherent pandering that has no actual legislative effect on people's lives, I say we should be counting our blessings.

I find Kaine to be a fairly uninspiring choice in general, but it does seem like a stretch to think that the veep's past redstate maneuvering will seriously undercut Obama's position on abortion. Who knows if he'll change his tune when/if he's on a national ticket? I wouldn't be surprised. At the very least he'll be moderating his already mild language on the matter.

Anyway, we might know soon.

Jubal Kain? Kain Toad? Mark of Kain?

Obama seems to be drawing everyone into his net and playing everyone against everyone else. Firedoglake has a piece up about his flirtation with the "Purpose Driven Life" guy, who has eliminationist affiliations (including African eliminationists who have been implicated in the massacres of hundreds of people).

I may end up agreeing with Bob. Certainly, the day after the election it will be time to think about running candidates in the 2010 primaries AND figuring out ways to put pressure on Obama.

One Fat Englishman predicts a Blair: a smooth, devious, neoliberal with a strong neocon streak.

One Fat Englishman predicts a Blair: a smooth, devious, neoliberal with a strong neocon streak.

To be fair, if I were American I'd be working hard for BHO, on the grounds that I'd quite like to wake up on Jan 21st.

Anyway, yesterday nobody had ever mentioned this Kaine guy, and now you can't go anywhere without running into him. Obviously Governor of Virginia is a pretty big deal, but has he ever actually done anything? As such? This is the press corps again, isn't it?

Jubal Kain? Kain Toad? Mark of Kain?

Kubla Kaine.

If Obama goes with a bland, centrist nonentity like this, I say Mutiny!!

Obviously Governor of Virginia is a pretty big deal,

Not really, no.

but has he ever actually done anything?

Not really, no.

5: Me, too. What I worry about is waking up thinking that maybe Hillary (not McCain) would have been less bad.

Max, who, in your view, was the last "inspiring" veep candidate? (I'm guessing Dick Cheney inspired some people in 2004, but probably not in 2000.) And why do you say that Kaine won't help in Virginia? Do you have any evidence for that contention?* He's a very popular governor of a state that if Obama can win it makes the electoral math nearly impossible for McCain. He's also, apparently, a good manager. So, of the realistic choices, who's clearly better?

None of which should be construed in any way as an endorsement of Kaine. I think I'd rather Sibelius or Napalitano. But I'm not exactly inspired by either of them. And I suspect that Obama would like a swing-state cracker to balance the ticket. For a while, I thought Rendell made sense. But he's too Jewish much of a loudmouth. And while PA's going Obama no matter what, Florida almost certainly isn't, I don't think. So having a the-Jew-is-using-the-Black-for-muscle-problem doesn't seem worth it. Wes Clark? I suppose I see the rationale. But he's a lousy campaigner, especially in that he has a hard time with message discipline, which seems like a must for Team Obama. So, in the end, I'm stumped. And, given the givens, Kaine seems like a reasonable choice.

* I'm not trying to be a jerk; I'm trying to become informed.

10: Just keep reminding yourself that not only did she vote for the war, but there's every reason to think that she's for more more like it. And yes, Obama's been annoying, but surely he deserves some credit for staying ahead of a candidate who, while frail and prone to gaffes, is a Republican war hero and darling of the press. Also, Obama hasn't been that awful since the FISA debacle.

And yes again, "hasn't been that awful" is precisely how high I set the bar for presidential candidates. And, apparently, for veep candidates. Seriously.

his policy is to be so incoherent on the issue that people will stop pursuing it
Sounds like the perfect person to match up against a McCain/Romney ticket.

I was actually thinking of Tubal Cain and Virgil Cain. But there is a Jubal Cain. Tubal and Jubal were Satanic figures.

Jabal, Jubal and Tubal Cain are sons of Lamech the First with Adah (Jabal and Jubal) and with Zillah (Tubal Cain). Jabal was the father of those who live in tents and keep livestock. Jubal was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. It is highly peculiar that these patriarchies survived the deluge (we submit a possible solution in our article on the Chaotic Set Theory). To Tubal Cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron, and whose sister was Naamah, no patriarchy is subscribed.Jabal, Jubal and Tubal Cain are sons of Lamech the First with Adah (Jabal and Jubal) and with Zillah (Tubal Cain). Jabal was the father of those who live in tents and keep livestock. Jubal was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. It is highly peculiar that these patriarchies survived the deluge (we submit a possible solution in our article on the Chaotic Set Theory). To Tubal Cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron, and whose sister was Naamah, no patriarchy is subscribed.

but it does seem like a stretch to think that the veep's past redstate maneuvering will seriously undercut Obama's position on abortion. Who knows if he'll change his tune when/if he's on a national ticket? I wouldn't be surprised. At the very least he'll be moderating his already mild language on the matter.

I'm not sure about this. There are a bunch of Hillary die-hards who are already suspicious of Obama on abortion and would likely take having Kaine on the ticket as further evidence of Obama's having a very weak commitment on choice. Whether these are Hillary voters Obama stands a chance of getting anyway, I don't know.

Based on his 2006 SOTU response, I think "Benzo Kaine" would be an appropriate nickname.

Kaine doesn't excite me (and I don't thin khe'd really be that good of a pick), but I'd take him over Evan Bayh in a skinny minute.

who, in your view, was the last "inspiring" veep candidate

Hubert Humphrey in 1964? He wasn't pretty, but he was a somebody. Mondale was a power.

If Obama picks a center-right non-entity, I will consider it an encouraging indication of the size and nature of BHO's ego.

There are a bunch of Hillary die-hards who are already suspicious of Obama on abortion and would likely take having Kaine on the ticket as further evidence of Obama's having a very weak commitment on choice.

Anybody talking from inside the faith-driven discourse in American politics is going to sound dodgy on abortion. To the extent that choosing that discourse is a tactic not a prnciple in the US, that may not mean a damn thing in Obama's case and we may be pleasantly surprised. I note that according to wiki, Kaine did the right thing wrt an attack on HPV vaccination in VA.

Anyone remember the suspiciously leaky VP selection process in 1984, where the Mondale campaign let slip that it was considering leading figures from pretty much every ethnic group and interest group in the Dem coalition?

I suspect Obama could be doing something like this with Kaine. The Virginia newspapers are eating it up, reporting the rumours and speculation, creating lots of free media and positive image associations for the campaign. Is this happening in Indiana, too?

Kaine is a stalking horse. Just keep telling yourself, that, Minivet. It'll be all right. (breathes into paper bag)

I'm not sure what could convince the die-hards; Obama's record is pretty solid.

One Fat Englishman predicts a Blair: a smooth, devious, neoliberal with a strong neocon streak.

This sounds very likely except the "strong neocon streak" seems to me unjustified and excessive pessimism (a good description of Blair though).

Is this happening in Indiana, too?

Yes, and it's leaking over into the Ohio press. "Midwesterner Obama takes serious look at Midwesterner Bayh. Midwest matters!" That sort of thing. It's actually playing very well here, though I, like Apo, might hang myself if Bayh's actually the pick.

Does anyone here happen to know if Kaine has ever said anything of substance about the war?

Remember - you heard it here">http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_8024.html#729114">here first.

I didn't think he'd choose Kaine because he's only been in office a year or two. But while he's not a thunderer on the stump, Kaine's a decent guy and a good manager. I'd like the choice - but then, I'm more moderate than the average of the Unfoggetariat.

Damn HTML.

The one time I saw Obama speak here in Virginia, Tim Kaine introduced him. I was surprised by the chumminess between the two. Both Harvard; share some general history (some town in Kansas; yadda yadda, good TV).

The pick would surprise me, but not that much. Kaine's a southern Catholic, who might swing Virginia (especially on the coattails of Mark Warner, who's running for Senate and quite popular; Kaine is perceived by many as Warner's successor and thus shares the glow, rightly or wrongly, of Warner's adept handling of the state). Leaves Obama exposed on the foreign-policy-experience thing, but Obama seems to be running the table on that issue right now.

Kaine's not my first choice, but that's mostly because I don't have a first choice at all right now. Which also bothers me.

One thing that hasn't been noted enough is that Obama doesn't owe the netroots much. He has an organization which uses the internet effectively but independently. He got the benefit of several years of independent netroots activity, but he doesn't owe Kos or anybody anything the way a certain number of new Congressmen do.

So, just as with the 2006 Congress, the Obama nomination will tend to disappoint. The Democrats have a lot of important constituencies, and liberals and the netroots are only two of them. And both in the Democratic Party and the U.S. government, the cards are stacked against liberals.

Kaine's a southern Catholic...

Minorly interesting - would that make him the first Catholic veep?

Kaine's not my first choice, but that's mostly because I don't have a first choice at all right now.

Yes. But I'm not bothered by my ambivalence. Because it's the vice presidency we're talking about.

Also, a weak-tea, local-color profile of Kaine. The comments are probably more fun than the article.

Also also, it seems odd that Kaine isn't exactly shutting down the rumors that he's going to be the choice.

Following links from The Gspot to Huffington Post I found this by Arianna Huffington:

Don't ask me why, but I actually watched Kaine's inaugural address on C-SPAN, and I was stunned to hear him dare compare the cause of Virginians like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson to our cause in Iraq: "They stood here at a time, just as today, when Virginians serving freedom's cause sacrificed their lives so that democracy could prevail over tyranny."

Iraq as a war to ensure that democracy can prevail over tyranny is George Bush's talking point. God help us if it's also the talking point of the man the Democrats have chosen to respond to him after the State of the Union.

And during Kaine's run for Governor, he adopted another Bush talking point -- that it would send "a horrible message" to "cut and run" in Iraq. Could that be any further from Murtha's message that Iraq has become a civil war -- a civil war being inflamed by our continuing presence?

31 was me. And 32, while explicable with the, "well-he's-the-governor-of-Virginia" argument, is pretty disheartening.

"...because nobody is encouraging abortions."

I am. I think that many people who do not have abortions are in fact making the wrong choice, both prudentially and morally, and in fact _ought_ to have abortions. The world would be a better place if many people who give birth instead had an abortion. Not just pro-choice, pro-abortion. That's me.

I don't think VP nominations make any difference in elections. But about 1/3 of vice-presidents go on to become president. So you want to pick someone who would be a good president.

I agree with minivet that Kaine is a stalking horse. I have zero, you know, evidence for this. Nonetheless, I think the VP pick is going to be a surprise.

"...because nobody is encouraging abortions."
I don't encourage abortions: I cause them. With my boyish good looks and annoyingly fertile semen, I've got more dead kids than Auschwitz. Apparently 9 months is more than enough time to decide that you don't want any of that anymore.

And how you all go about your business without collapsing in a general woo! re: Blume and Sifu is beyond me. I'm still wooing.

I don't think VP nominations make any difference in elections.

I don't think they make any positive difference, but they can still hurt a nominee.

about 1/3 of vice-presidents go on to become president

And a higher percentage go on to be the next nominee. Since it isn't yet clear to me that Obama truly stands with the wing of the party I'd like to see ascendant, I'd really, really like some confirmation that they're at least getting thrown a bone.

I'm still wooing.

Too late. They're both taken.

Gore/Lieberman is an interesting example. I know I didn't foresee that, and I'm not sure anyone else did either. But I don't think it would have made Gore a worse president.

34: That's an easy thing to say from the outside. You think we'll there are too many people on earth and the fetus is not a person so abortion would be a good thing. It all makes sense in the abstract.

But the fact is that many many women find abortion to be a difficult, even traumatic, experience. Sometimes pro-choice people say this is just because of the stigma attached to abortion, but this seems detached from biological and human reality. The symptoms of post-abortion depression look a lot like post-partum depression. And real human beings will always complicated emotional relationships with pregnancy and reproduction.

So, no, abortion is not going to ever be a good thing. At least, it is not something that some outsider should call a good thing.

And they're not going to agree to a MMF marriage. Because they're feminists.

But I don't think it would have made Gore a worse president.

But would it have made Lieberman a less bad candidate in 2008?

Did you know there's an Austin rumor that Jenna Bush got an abortion in high school? The story goes that she had an appendectomy scheduled at a local hospital two weeks in advance. Or something like that.)

Jenna's high school boyfriend has been working for Bush for most of the last decade, and somehow managed to get into his boss's alma mater for an MBA despite his lack of a college degree. Coincidence?

I don't think VP nominations make any difference in elections.

Eagleton.

I currently am holding two hopeful Obama theories, non-conflicting.

1) Obama as FDR. That as the economic shit hits the fan, he will teleport to the far ideological left of Chavez. So I am watching the economics, and hoping Obama remembers where he came from. South Chicago.

2) That Obama's plan is forty years of Democratic dominance. This will start center-right to pick up Virginia and other swing states. Ten years Ohio & Pennsylvania, twenty years Texas. Thirty years your median Democratic Congressperson will be to the left of Ted Kennedy, and the President an LBJ, without the war stuff. Or with war, this is America.

3) Or he could be Jimmy Carter.

But I am not paying much attention to politics for a while. Diktator Obama has grabbed the laurel, and will do & get what he wants/can for about a year. He is good enough, world historical politician, that y'all just need to get your popcorn.

Eagleton.

Quayle.

34: Our own Dr. Benway. Wiki does not mention that Dr. Benway offered an abortion to every pregnant woman he happened to meet.

44: Well, he might have still been a Democrat.

I guess I figure if we get to the point where we're coming to the end of a two-term Obama presidency, and it's time for the next nominee, we can worry about it then. I'd like it if Obama picked someone liberal, but I'd like it more if we won the election.

But seriously, how often do VPs swing the Ps policy? I think 'I can't stand you but you bring in a swing state' has been far more common.

1) Obama as FDR. That as the economic shit hits the fan, he will teleport to the far ideological left of Chavez.

FDR is actually a good calming example. If there had been netroots in 1932, they would have castigated him - he promised to balance the budget!

McGovern wouldn't have won with anyone else as VP. GHWB won the first time with Quayle, and I don't think he would have beat Clinton with a different VP (like who? Dole?).

abortion is not going to ever be a good thing

Caroline Weber begs to differ.

Nonetheless, I think the VP pick is going to be a surprise.

Ooooo! I hope it's me!

I know of an effective MMF marriage -- two brothers and one woman (all white and rural) during WWII. It was the outcome of poverty and desperation and was intensely conflicted, with hard feelings surviving to this day.

I hope it's you, too, Po-Mo.

McGovern wouldn't have won with anyone else as VP.

Surely the Eagleton fracas would have seriously hurt any candidate, strong or weak. (Unjustly, obvs.)

GHWB won the first time with Quayle, and I don't think he would have beat Clinton with a different VP (like who? Dole?).

I agree here.

42- Doing the right thing is often hard, though, isn't it? Any my position isn't based on their being too many people on the earth (I don't really have an opinion on that) but rather on the idea that if you're not in the situation to provide a decent up-bring to a child, or if you don't really want to have one, you shouldn't have a child. Abortion is a morally neutral act in itself- neither good nor bad. But in certain situations I think it's the morally best thing to do. People disagree, of course, but that doesn't make them right, even if doing the right thing is hard for them.

I generally agree that VP nominees are unimportant unless they're bad, and are normally chosen for rather stupid reasons.

I'd like to remind everybody of my previous prediction, in case they forgot.

58: The trouble is, of course, that 'decent upbringing' isn't well defined. What's decent? Food, clothes, shelter? Nutritious food, brand-name clothing, single-family home? College-bound?

57: Agreed that Quayle didn't flip the election for Bush (if anything, it was Perot), but I still believe that he hurt him in '92, and didn't help at all in '88.

Anybody talking from inside the faith-driven discourse in American politics is going to sound dodgy on abortion.

Francis Kissling for VP.

Surely the Eagleton fracas would have seriously hurt any candidate, strong or weak. (Unjustly, obvs.)

Maybe if the hypothetically-strong candidate had kept Eagleton on the ticket, it might conceivably have made a difference (and if the election is within 50 votes, anything might make a difference). But, you're picking a hard case for yourself, since Eagleton wasn't actually the VP nominee.

The 1992 election was unjust. George Pater was an excellent president. he just got saddled with a lot of Reagan-era baggage and a recession during election time.

Francis Kissling for VP.

Exception, meet rule. (But if she wants the job...)

Who are probably the best debaters out there in the potential VP running? I really would prefer someone who's a decent policy partner closer to the Clinton/Gore model as a VP, but I also really really want someone who can slap the other VP candidate around in the debates.

This is actually the main reason I was less keen when Edwards was getting mooted, since I remembered the 2004 debates, when he couldn't successfully take on a delusional, paranoid grandpa from Waco.

Agreed that Quayle didn't flip the election for Bush , but I still believe that he hurt him in '92, and didn't help at all in '88.

Maybe he made GHWB look good in comparison. People vote on a lot of crazy things, and some of them voted based on the VP, but not many.

It's conceivable that Lieberman got Gore a few thousand votes in Florida, which was almost enough to make a difference. If Gore had chosen Jeanne Shaheen in 2000, he might have won NH, and, assuming all else equal, that would have put him over the top. But you can't really plan that sort of thing in advance.

(if anything, it was Perot)
According to exit polls, Perot voters were split 38-37 Clinton-Bush on their second choice.

61- you're right, cala- but that doesn't really change the point. First, just because it's hard to find where the cut-off line is doesn't mean there isn't one or that there's no clear cases. Surely it's not the case that if we have border-line cases we can't make any distinction at all. Secondly, I'm not advocating (of course) that people be _required_ to have abortions. That, too, would be wrong. Simply, I'm arguing that in many cases abortion is not only not wrong but is the morally right thing to do, and that when, in such cases, people don't get an abortion, they have done something wrong. (Note that, given that I'm not a utilitarian, it doesn't change this assessment if things work out okay in the end.)

The only candidate under discussion I'd be at all excited about is Sebelius--who seems to have managed to be both more progressive & effective & more popular than Kaine in freaking Kansas, plus she's a lady. And the main strike against her, the completely meh response to the state of the union, applies with equal force to Kaine. He has a better shot at carrying his state, but is a one term governor elected with a tiny majority really such an asset? He seems neither as popular as Warner nor as compelling as Webb. That said, I prefer him saying annoying things about abortion due to some combo of red state politics & Catholic guilt, to Bayh both doing & saying crappy things about national security, & generally being a DLC hack.

Biden'd be okay. Probably good in the debate, though he is gaffe-prone. He's overrated on foreign policy but he at least does take it seriously & know his stuff, unlike Bayh who gets the usual village points for being "serious" for serving on the committee to liberate Iraq, voting for the war, etc.

69: out of curiousity, do you believe abortion is ever morally wrong, or is it just neutral or good?

Not that my vote mattered in the slightest, but Lieberman was a very large part of the reason I voted for Nader in 2000.

42,58: I was just talking to a woman the other day about how Queen Anne's Lace has been used by women as an abortifacient through the ages. She presented the scenario as "kitchen-knowledge passed down mother to daughter without knowledge of the men". (I have no idea if that's true or not.) But it's very easy for me to picture a world where early term abortions aren't traumatizing to women at all, any more so than puberty, at least, as long as it's the woman's choice.

Lieberman was a very large part of the reason I voted for Nader in 2000

I know several people, particularly in the gaming industry, who felt the same.

Maybe a good versus bad VP choice makes a 1% difference in your likelihood of getting elected, which is a lot, as electioneering choices go, I guess, but not much compared to the 1/3 chance that a VP (or 1/6 chance that a VP nominee) has of becoming president. My advice to Obama: pick the person who would be the best president. There's only so much that a choice like that can hurt you in an election anyway.

I guess that's my advice to McCain, too, not that they care.

71- Katherine, I don't think that abortion, as such, is ever wrong. But, like many morally neutral actions, it can be done for reasons that are wrong in all sorts of ways. It can be done out of a bad character, or reflect badly on one's character, for example. Assumedly it could, like other morally neutral acts (killing a fly, say) be done in a way that it's harmful to one's moral sensabilities or development though I think these cases are vanishingly rare. It could also be done so as to cause injury to another person. In all these cases it would be bad as a means or because of its effects, but I don't think it's ever wrong in itself.

Obviously, the pun here involves "the mark of Kaine."

(But we would also have accepted a pun involving Solomon Kane, the 17th century Puritan who fought evil with his friend, the African shaman, N'Longa.)

Kaine is Able.

77: that might make sense if a second or third trimester fetus were physically similar to fly.

What irritates me, really, is that in the circles I run in, statements like yours are more socially acceptable than "actually, I think some abortions are morally wrong, though they should be legal."

Prior to about 1850 in the US, abortion was not at all stigmatized (nor illegal). The dominant attitude towards women who had abortions was that they were "poor unfortunates" who had made a mistake. Condescending, but not demonizing.

There isn't much historical record, but in that environment, too, many women seemed to experience abortion as emotionally difficult.

For abortion to not traumatizing at all, I think we'd have to reach a Utopian level of clarity in our attitudes towards sex and reproduction.

Matt: I'm no longer sure what you mean by morally neutral. You seem to be bracketing all of the things that make an act morally significant (save harm to others), and then declaring abortion to be morally neutral. I suppose if you do that, I'll agree. A first trimester fetus has the moral status of a fly. But really, this is only one component in the decision.

I find abortion politics more interesting the VP politics.

Tom Daschle? Oy.

81: traumatic compared to what? Not getting pregnant, absolutely. Going through pregnancy and birth, it is extremely plausible to me that first trimester abortion is less traumatic than that for a majority of women even right now.

It is generally very, very, very annoying to me how many people insist on debating abortion as if there's a light switch that zaps from "not a person" to "person" at the moment of fertilization or the moment of birth, when that contradicts everything we know about how the process works physically.

Kaine is a headfake. The Obama campaign has been too competent, too professional so far to believe that he would let his VP choice leak out in advance and become the subject of intense speculation. I say he headfakes to Kaine, and makes a surprise announcement (Sebelius?) for maximum effect.

Rob -- I think what Matt's saying is that you can do something wrong by doing almost any action -- I can do something wrong by throwing a ball, or writing a letter, or driving a car (if I throw it at someone to hurt them; if I reveal someone's secrets; if I'm stealing the car). But that doesn't make throwing a ball, or writing a letter, or driving a car wrong in itself. So the distinction he's making is whether you can do something that's wrong by having an abortion, or whether the abortion is ever wrong in itself.

69: Then I'm not sure what you mean by saying that you're 'pro-abortion.' But this:
First, just because it's hard to find where the cut-off line is doesn't mean there isn't one or that there's no clear cases.

But it might speak to whether you, as the person who isn't pregnant, is in a good position to judge.

Last night on the NewsHour some McCain economic adviser (Nancy Pfotenhauer, apparently) and Jason Furman were on, and Pfotenhauer was asked about the ad which blames Obama for currently high gas prices. She stood by the ad, and claimed that Obama's opposition to off-shore and other increased drilling is a large reason why Democrats in Congress aren't going for it, and that changing the likelihood of increased supply of crude in the long term (seven to ten years is my understanding) not only would cause gas prices to drop but already has, in that McCain and Bush's support for off-shore drilling was a causal factor in slightly lower prices. But other than Furman citing to the Energy department report, they basically dropped this topic at that point.

My questions: are there price models in which expectations of future supply play a role and is there any reason to believe that model applies to gasoline?

" A first trimester fetus has the moral status of a fly"

A blastocyst does, yeah, as far as I'm concerned. I took the morning after pill without much of a second thought about the possibility of preventing implantation. Ending it towards the end of the first trimester because of worrisome test results would have been quite a different story. The first trimester is 14 weeks long & a lot of stuff happens. There's no magic-zap moment between the trimesters, either.

Katherine, I think we are on the same side here. Certainly one most noticible things about post-abortion depression is how much it mimics postpartum depression. So in those cases, yeah, the abortion is not more traumatic than a pregnancy would have been.

I am not interesting in judging abortions from afar as either good or bad. Bitchphd and others have emphasized how conterproductive the "Abortion is morally wrong but still should be legal" attitude is. I agree, but thought that Matt was being counterproductive from the other side, which I why I piped up.

88: I can't really imagine a pricing model for crude where an incread in US local drilling are anything larger than a second order effect, at best.

Oh, yes, and I totally agree that the continuity of biological development means that we have to talk about a continuity in moral status. Also, all analogies to animal moral status are imperfect.

I believe that how untraumatic an abortion is a function of the degree to which the mother feels being pregnant will wreck her life, versus to what degree she can see carrying the baby to term as an okay possibility. In other words, how much she categorizes the abortion as "relief".

93 makes a lot of sense, even if it isn't the only factor

Interesting that the most pregnant woman in the thead is also the most anti-abortion on a moral basis. Some day that could be you, ladies!

But it's very easy for me to picture a world where early term abortions aren't traumatizing to women at all, any more so than puberty, at least, as long as it's the woman's choice.

puberty is pretty traumatizing, isn't it?

are there price models in which expectations of future supply play a role

There are such price models, but soup has it in 88 because the offshore drilling capacity would be so minimal. Hell, look at the Brazilian oil fields announcement only a couple months ago, right before oil spiked above $140. And I thought that was supposed to be a much bigger reserves addition than most of what we'd find offshore.

Also, if there's any spare capacity left (which isn't really the case, admittedly), most such models predict that oil companies will start pulling more money out of the ground immediately upon the expectation of future large additional production, so as to smooth out the spot prices and earn more money at current higher prices. This would result in lower spot and near-term futures prices.

In the case where there's no spare capacity left, you would only notice the lower price in futures that reach out far enough to hit the anticipated point when new capacity comes online, which would be in 7-10 years in this case. Needless to say, no commonly-traded oil futures contracts go out that far.

Some day that could be you, ladies!

Heck, it's been me. Three times. And didn't change my views on the moral status of abortion any of them. If the argument you were making was "Pregnancy will convince you that abortion is immoral", it's silly. If it's something else, I didn't get it.

One of my friends needles me about being a Democrat, and his wife is due to deliver their first kid any day now, so he needled me with a text that said 'OBAMA WANTS TO KILL MY BABY.'

I could not think of a suitable response so I made some comment about McCain's age.

More seriously, it seems to be a truth among my friends that whatever they were pre-pregnancy, they hold that more so during. 'My sweet baby!'/'No way I should have to put up with this against my will.'

Who are probably the best debaters out there in the potential VP running?

Biden can make a forceful statement when he wants to. He's my choice, pretty much, not that I think that it's important or that I think anyone cares about my opinion.

puberty is pretty traumatizing, isn't it?

No, yeah, definitely. But (in an idealized paperweight snowglobe) it's just traumatizing because your body is changing, and not morally traumatizing.

98. Cala seriously needs some new friends. no wonder she talks to 47 year old men on the internet.

I'm still pro-choice, but this messed with our minds:
We were trying to have our first kid and had a positive test. She went for the first couple appointments and the HCG levels were not increasing properly and they said she was going to miscarry. The doctors said she could get an abortion so that we'd be able to try again sooner or we could just wait for it to happen naturally, we decided on the latter but considered the former. It turns out the lab mixed up samples on the second HCG test and things were fine and we sometimes think about how we almost accidentally aborted our now 4-year-old.

A friend of mine recently told me that she is pregnant. Since I know she's not interested in having a child at this time, I was initially kind of freaked out. I asked her -- cautiously -- what she was going to do, and she said, very matter-of-factly, well, here's what I've found, and began listing off clinics in the area.

It was as though she had pressed a button and reset the conversation -- what I had initially misread as "traumatizing experience" actually ended up being a conversation about "unexpected medical procedure." We chatted for a while, I offered to drive her to the clinic, and then we changed the subject.

This is just an anecdote, and not probative, but it really struck me that this doesn't have to be a traumatizing experience at all. I don't think that she necessarily feels that having a kid will wreck her life, either -- she just doesn't want one and doesn't need one. There was no other calculation. I was impressed.

Queen Anne's Lace is related to hemlock.

104: So is celery.

Kathy G has been blogging the dickens out of the veepstakes. Alluded to upthread by 32.

Celery is related to Queen Anne's Lace????

Carrots are. Queen Anne's Lace is just wild carrot.

95: actually, no. I'm actually about exactly where I was beforehand except with more intensity & confidence. That includes more intensity & less wishy-washyness on the pro-choice bit too. I described pregnancy as "invasive" about once a week during the first trimester. Man, that sucked, and I wanted this, & didn't have especially bad physical symptoms. I have also expounded at length about how only male idiots who didn't listen to women would think it was obvious that life began the moment sperm met egg--I always thought that view was idiotic but now I also find it INSULTING. And I would find it awful to end it now, it would take something very, very, very seriously medically awry, but that's all the more reason I wouldn't need the Christian right making things worse & setting up hoops for women & doctors to jump through based on caricatures.

I do acknowledge a tendency, especially for wanted/planned pregnancies, to--I don't know if anthropomorphize is the right word, but you project emotions about the future baby onto the current fetus. But while there's a visceral reaction to seeing an ultrasound & finding out the sex, there's also a visceral reaction to the period when the only physical manifestation of The Miracle of Pregnancy is feeling like crap all the time.

and carrots.

Thanks 88, 96. I guess it's unrealistic of me to expect that kind of discussion on tv/radio, but it would've been nice.

Also: parsley.

I could not think of a suitable response

"I do, too."

And the main strike against her, the completely meh response to the state of the union, applies with equal force to Kaine.

My main exposure to both Kaine and Sebelius is their SOTU responses. I found them both remarkable for their utter unwatchability. Are there less spellbinding speakers on the national scene today?

Which isn't to say that I'm against picking either of them.

pwned by LB, but yes, they're all related. Poison hemlock looks a lot like carrot tops.

109, 110: Katherine said nothing about feeling like carrots all the time, and I don't see how you can deduce that from what she said.

However, my pregnant wife did feel like carrots at 3:00 in the morning, and the munchmunchmunchmucnh munch was kept me awake.

I described pregnancy as "invasive" about once a week during the first trimester.

The Missus frequently referred to the famous "birth" scene in Alien when discussing her pregnancy.

102: !!!

I guess it's unrealistic of me to expect that kind of discussion on tv/radio, but it would've been nice.

Tell me about it. That's why I assiduously avoid tv political shows, even when my roomie insists on watching them sometimes.

88

"My questions: are there price models in which expectations of future supply play a role and is there any reason to believe that model applies to gasoline?"

There are such models. Basically if future supply is constrained producers may be able to make more money by withholding part of current production and selling it at higher prices in the future. You can think of it as allowing future consumers to bid for a portion of current production. As oil runs out we can expect this effect to start affecting the price but it is unclear how much it is currently doing so. It depends on how much unused capacity there is and this is uncertain.

88, 119 - This is countered by Hotelling's Law, in which expectations of a future supply of another energy source tell you when to sell your oil. As soon as another energy source comes on the market that is slightly cheaper than pumping and moving oil, all that oil in the ground isn't worth anything anymore. If you had perfect future vision, you'd want to sell all your oil now, timing the last drop to the day when we have a big breakthrough on solar films.

Forgive me. Hotelling's Rule.

I appreciate the emotional impact of 102, but since we're dealing in anecdotes, I'll offer the story of my cousin, who got pregnant at 16, considered an abortion, but then decided to have the baby, IMO because she thought it would persuade the father to marry her.

As a teenage mother, she resented her child, failed to give him the love and attention he needed, etc. Later in life, she married a nice guy and had a bunch more kids, to whom she appears to be a reasonably good mother. So what happened to the first child? He's a functionally illiterate HS dropout with a criminal record, basically unemployable, has serious psychiatric issues, and is estranged from his family.

IOW, the cost of bringing unwanted children (or children for whom one is ill-equipped to care) into the world (to them and to society) is not nil.

LB somewhere up above- yes, that's just about exactly my position. I really don't understand Rob's or Cala's objections, though, I'm sorry to say, unless Rob's is just a remark on rhetoric. I'll agree that my take isn't popular but I'm pretty sure it's the right one as far as moral philosophy goes.

IOW, the cost of bringing unwanted children (or children for whom one is ill-equipped to care) into the world (to them and to society) is not nil.

This is true. One of the really annoying things about many anti-abortion crusaders ime is their limited (in some cases zero) interest in the issues about what happens after birth. It's all very well to say that's someone elses problem, but this doesn't actually make any of the problems go away.

I was gonna say, I was taught Hotelling's law by a law professor who gave us the linear city model and then said, "And this also partially explains what drives politicians to the center," and I couldn't figure out how that applies.

123: I'm not sure I was criticizing as trying to clarify what you meant by being 'pro-abortion', because I could see thinking someone should not terminate a given pregnancy without being pro-life. And so I wasn't sure what followed from that. As it turns out, not much.

Further to 122, trying not to be too callous about it but for many very young mothers & couples, there is an opportunity cost to having the child that may preclude later children, or economic stability for them.

`pro-abortion' seems to be a pretty bad descriptor for any position I've actually heard, including matt's.

unless Rob's is just a remark on rhetoric.

More epistemology, really. I suppose if you were an all-seeing archangel, you could look down and say "of the 1.3 million abortions last year, 1 million were objectively the right decision to make. Plus, there were 1 million women who should have had abortions, but didn't. Therefore the abortion rate should have been higher."

But, you know, I'm not that archangel, and I really have no way of judging any of those numbers.

Rob, surely you don't think either that 1) there are no clear cases in morality or 2) whether something is right or wrong depends on being certain that it's right or wrong? If you, as you should, reject those views than I don't see why you're objecting to my point. This isn't a harder case than many other moral choices unless you think think abortion in itself is immoral (in the way, say, a Catholic might.)

See, this is what I mean: we're all perfectly free to judge women for bringing unwanted children to the world because of the social costs. But any discussion of abortion as morally problematic because of the status of the fetus--even a basic acknowledgment of basic biological facts which matt has deemed morally irrelevant in his philosophical wisdom--is "shaming." Bullshit. Either we should trust pregnant women to make their own choices & mind our own business, recognizing that human nature being what it is odds are some choices will be less than ideal, or we should discuss all aspects. But somehow, talking about the moral claims of the fetus, if any, is crazy fundy-talk, but we can get all Richard Posner about how burdensome it is on society for the wrong women to give birth.

As I've said before: I am fully on-board that we should trust women to make the choice, but I think that as many of them think its the best choice as currently do reflects a societal moral failure to: (1) adequately provide access to & education about contraception, including emergency contraception (2) adequately support parents. Using the word "moral failure" in there generally gets me a mildly hostile reaction from less conflicted pro-choicers, and yet no one objects to comments like matt's. It really pisses me off.

Matt, I think we are close to agreeing. Yes there are clear moral cases, and the possibility of morality doesn't depend on there being certain moral knowledge.

Actually, I am enough of a moral realist to say that there is some objective fact about what the right number of abortions should be. I don't want to call myself pro-abortion, though, because I have no idea what that number is. Maybe there should be fewer abortions, even if you keep the rate of contraception use constant.

I was just talking to a woman the other day about how Queen Anne's Lace has been used by women as an abortifacient through the ages.

I wish I could remember where I originally saw this article, but it made a strong impression on me. It was mostly surprising for me to think about how effective (and relatively safe) herbal abortifacients could be.

When historians mourn the lost wonders of the ancient world they tend to mean the Colossus of Rhodes or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos of Alexandria or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. To that list, Riddle might add one seemingly unremarkable candidate: a species of giant fennel known as silphium to the Romans, that once grew in North Africa. In the seventh century B.C., a band of Greek settlers from Thera founded the city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya. "What they found," Riddle writes, "must have made them question the oracle's advice to go there." The landscape was parched, the people unfriendly and Greece dishearteningly distant. But Cyrene, it turned out, had a single asset -- silphium -- that was enough to make the colony rich.

...

In the epilogue to Eve's Herbs, Riddle describes a dinner party he once attended in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He was telling a public health nurse named Mary about his research, he says, when she mentioned that some of her clients were taking an herbal contraceptive. Intrigued, Riddle asked her what part of the plant they were eating and whether they took it before or after sex.

"Told that the seed was ingested after intercourse, I guessed that they were taking Queen Anne's lace, about a tablespoon. It was then Mary's turn to be surprised, and she asked how I knew.

Ignoring her question for a moment, I told her, "Thank you, you have just provided me with my only source since the 17th century for its use!"

I should look up that book.

Opportunity cost to the parents

I've thought about this w/r/t the unsuccessful pregancies that preceded our children. We were devastated at the time, but OTOH if those embryos had survived to term we would not have had the two children we have today. I conclude from this that pretty much any argument that proceeds from ex post reasoning about the eventual outcome (you might have killed Einstein, you might have killed Hitler, my cousin's child might not be an unemployable felon) is suspect.

But any discussion of abortion as morally problematic because of the status of the fetus--even a basic acknowledgment of basic biological facts which matt has deemed morally irrelevant in his philosophical wisdom--is "shaming."

Which thing matt (ntfo) said are you getting this from? I just re-read all of his comments, because I hadn't seen that, and I still don't. He's said repeatedly that more people are wrongfully not having abortions than are wrongfully having abortions, but that's a separate disagreement.

Well, since this has been sidetracked into abortion & oil, I won't feel too guilty about boring you.

Been downloading a bunch of oil portraits by Ilya Efimovich Repin. Period roughly 1875-1915. Some might say they are overly dramatic, Repin is called the "Father of Soviet Realism" for his exciting dramatic set pieces of crowds. If you can remember the iconographic portrit of Stalin, well, you know what I mean. I find his portraits more interesting, the writers look pensive, the scientists reflective, the politicians determined. You can look at his woman in a garden, and somehow know she was a leftist intellectual. Almost corny.

I guess I am talking about the earnest, the lack of irony in a true revolutionary milieu. I just read up on Manet & Baudelaire, the flaneur thing that became way cool and has been since. Just thinkin.

Carry on.

Repin's Musorgsky portrait is one of my icons. Musorgsky was on his deathbed.

135: I'm not getting that from what he wrote, though I think he's falsely implying that the only basis for considering abortion at any point during pregnancy more problematic than flyswatting is religion, when actually, I reject both his position AND the fundie/catholic position based on what I know about how pregnancy actually works.

I'm saying that many pro-choice people tolerate/have no objection to discussion of why it could be morally wrong NOT to have an abortion, but do object to/do not tolerate discussion of why it could be morally wrong to have an abortion. It's socially acceptable in certain circles to judge women for one choice, but not the other. It really annoys me.

134: It's a tricky thing to get into since of course you can't know the eventual outcome. However, in at least a statistical sense I think you can pretty easily point to the difficulties in practice with very young parents (the only target of that comment). The effects are less pronounced with lower socio-economic expectiations, it seems.

"He's said repeatedly that more people are wrongfully not having abortions than are wrongfully having abortions"

He's said it's impossible to wrongfully have an abortion: it is either morally neutral or good.

This is countered by Hotelling's Law, in which expectations of a future supply of another energy source tell you when to sell your oil.

What Shearer was describing in 119 is Hotelling's rule too -- the alternative source is a twist or special case on it. If you expect future price increases, then current consumers have to bribe oil owners more to sell their oil now. Basically people today have bid against the hypothetical future consumers of tomorrow, with an advantage because we can pay now. As you say, a twist is when you assume the price of the resource will drop significantly sometime way in the future.

I was taught Hotelling's law by a law professor who gave us the linear city model and then said, "And this also partially explains what drives politicians to the center,"

Different work by Hotelling -- the law and the rule are different. Busy guy.

Repin masterpiece

(Actually, the most common reaction to discussions about abortion being morally problematic is to caricature the position as "abortion is icky." Not saying anyone's particularly doing this on this thread, where the word "icky" does not appear. But it's pretty common & I think it's come up in past abortion threads.)

The "what if I'd aborted my four-year-old" argument applies to every non-baby. "What if I'd missed / caught my plane", "What if the condom hadn't broken", "What if we'd had a condom", "What if I'd married X instead", "What if I'd gone to bed early the way I'd planned", etc. It can even apply to cases like "What if I hadn't fucked that total stranger while drunk" or "What if I hadn't been raped".
In short, it's wrong to think of potential people as actual people, and the formerly possible non-birth of a present actual person as the same thing as the elimination of the actual person.

I remember a line from the Seventies: "If it were men that got...would be a Sacrament."

Do people still repeat that?

It never had much impact on me, I think because "Sacrament" didn't have much significance for me personally.

No, this is the repin masterpiece.

Which is why it wasn't actually an argument right? Except for labs not fucking up the bloodwork.

147 to 144.

I think because "Sacrament" didn't have much significance for me personally.

It's just a frackin' dilation and curettage. Or something.

If Dr. Kevorkian were alive, he'd be a pretty good VP candidate.

I like Kaine. He taught one of my classes in law school. I don't agree with all of his positions, but he is generally smart and good.

I find thinking that abortion is morally good (obligatory, though non-forced? brownie points?) based on the likely outcome of the life of the child to be viscerally repugnant. Especially since the reverse -- Jenna Bush's hypothetical child probably would have more money than me, and probably grow up with better future prospects -- would be hardly countenanced as an argument to why a given abortion would be morally wrong.

It's too close to the 'maybe the child you abort would have been the one to cure cancer.' I don't see a way to take into account the future prospects of the child in one case, but not in the other.

FL always fucks up the bloodwork, along with everything else. The motherfucker.

138, 139, 143: I find the "abortion is morally problematic, but should still be legal" position a hard one to engage with. That doesn't make it wrong, I just have a hard time conceptualizing what the moral status of the fetus should be, if it's significant but short of personhood, or how to balance that moral status of the fetus against the rights of the woman in a way that allows me to say something meaningful or interesting about it.

I end up tonguetied because I can't think of anything to say that won't sound dismissive, only because I don't get the position clearly enough to really talk about it.

120

"This is countered by Hotelling's Law, in which expectations of a future supply of another energy source tell you when to sell your oil. As soon as another energy source comes on the market that is slightly cheaper than pumping and moving oil, all that oil in the ground isn't worth anything anymore. If you had perfect future vision, you'd want to sell all your oil now, timing the last drop to the day when we have a big breakthrough on solar films."

Unfortunately the alternatives to oil look likely to be much more expensive than even current prices.

Somewhat on-topic -- can any of the unfoggeteers tell me why manual vacuum aspiration is less readily available than d&c? From what I can tell, it is supposed to be safer.

139: There was a thing on broadsheet recently which included a third hand reference to research that shows that women who have babies as teens have *better* long term economic outcomes than women who don't (presumably controlling for initial income level makes a big difference here.)

I've been meaning to at least get to the second hand source, if no the primary one, but I'm already wasting too much time on this.

In any case, this has serious implications for anyone who wants to take the "poor young women should have more abortions" line.

One thing that hasn't been noted enough is that Obama doesn't owe the netroots much.

I saw an interview with him (by the odious Gwen Ifill), where she said "So, Senator, regarding FISA, many of your supporters have criticized..." and he interrupted her to say "many bloggers have criticized me.."

In short, it's wrong to think of potential people as actual people, and the formerly possible non-birth of a present actual person as the same thing as the elimination of the actual person.

Of course, what we are talking about here is the elimination of an actual "person," right?

I think it's dangerous to attempt to justify abortion-rights by trying to diminish the moral status of the fetus at various stages. I think the issue is whether the state should be allowed to force an individual to act as a host for another life. The moral status of that second life seems irrelevant.

A Typical Repin

Another

Another

See the drama? The Mussogorsky is great. But I am always interested in the illuminated quotidian.

154: I have much the same problem; I don't find it morally problematic (which I certainly wouldn't label `pro-abortion') and find that position has been difficult to clarify in practice.

102, 147: I've heard a couple of similar stories, enough that I'd counsel anyone thinking about aborting a wanted pregnancy because they've been told about a birth defect or something to triple check. I got a triple-screen test with Sally where some moron told me there was a 1/6 chance that she had a spina-bifida birth defect based on the results. Three days later she called back and said "Whoops, 1/66, not 1/6." Honestly.

It's socially acceptable in certain circles to judge women for one choice, but not the other. It really annoys me.

I think folks are talking past each other a bit here, perhaps based on their different social circles. I pretty clearly don't hang in the same sort of crowd Katherine does.

I live in a country that I perceive to be unduly restrictive on abortion rights, and I travel in a social circle that is roughly in sympathy with the country at-large.

If I hung out with people who were unwilling to acknowledge moral relevance of any fetus at any point in a pregnancy, I might find it annoying too, especially if I lived in a country where such opinions were likely to have significant influence on public policy.

As it is, being annoyed with pro-abortion absolutists seems a bit like being annoyed with pacifists - I don't agree with either view, but I think public policy would be considerably improved if those views had more influence than they do.

See, this is what I mean: we're all perfectly free to judge women for bringing unwanted children to the world because of the social costs. But any discussion of abortion as morally problematic because of the status of the fetus--even a basic acknowledgment of basic biological facts which matt has deemed morally irrelevant in his philosophical wisdom--is "shaming." Bullshit.

Not bullshit at all - might be wrong, but it's clearly the logical consequence of the view that a foetus isn't a person.

Unfortunately the alternatives to oil look likely to be much more expensive than even current prices.

so does oil. More to the point, there aren't really drop-in alternatives to depleting stored energy --- that's pretty much a one shot game.

154: I think it's a position that many people fall into having once been pro-life, so more out of habit than thought, but here's a stab at it:

Version one: a) the fetus isn't a person, but it isn't a tumor, either so b) it has some moral weight, so shouldn't be a decision taken lightly c) but since the fetus isn't a person, the state has no right butting in.

Alternate view: consciousness comes into existence in degrees, and the closer to consciousness something is, the more seriously we should take terminating it. But, since the law requires bright lines, the best bright line is no restriction on abortion.

I think it's dangerous to attempt to justify abortion-rights by trying to diminish the moral status of the fetus at various stages.

How dangerous? An eight week fetus is half an inch long. Can you explain to me how an entity half an inch long can possibly be a full human being without using an enormous set of theological assumptions?

Also related to abortion -- I've never understood where the biblical justification for being anti-abortion comes from. Leviticus is quite clear that the fetus has lower moral status than a full human being. Against that, the only thing I've heard quoted is this obscure passage about how "in your mother's womb He knew you", which to me just seems to be about God's omniscience.

160: Those are great, thank you.

164: Well, or the view that "a fetus isn't either a person or something else that while not being a person does have rights or moral standing." While that's the view I hold, I recognize that there are people who hold the "not a person, but still morally important view".

John's Mussogorsky link didn't work for me, so I'll give another. I am presuming.

Whinin' along with Brian, "I wasn't made for these times" or whatever, still plowing thru the Israel. and up to Van Enden & Plockhoy in their own ways, dying for Revolution.

How can it be Romantic?

Well, I'm not really that interested in convincing people that an individual women's abortion is morally wrong, as I have said repeatedly. Making that judgment would require information that I don't have access to. What pisses me off is that people who jump down by throat for being a bad pro choicer for saying: "actually, the rate should be lower, that's a good public policy goal" have no problem at all with people arguing about it being morally wrong NOT to have abortions.

As far as the "moral status of the fetus argument"--What's not to get? It's not really hard to understand thinking that the moral status of an 8 month old fetus & a 1 day old blastocyst is meaningfully different, right?

why manual vacuum aspiration is less readily available than d&c? From what I can tell, it is supposed to be safer.

eh, I don't have a good answer to that question other than perhaps the perception that it is potentially less effective and that you tend to stick with the procedure that you know best and has the most versatility.

167- Or is that "knew" in the biblical sense?

154

"I end up tonguetied because I can't think of anything to say that won't sound dismissive, only because I don't get the position clearly enough to really talk about it."

A reason for thinking abortion is a serious decision is that forcibly aborting someone's fetus against her will is considered a serious offense. Is it automatically ok to do it to yourself even if it is seriously wrong when someone does it do you? See also suicide and murder.

While we are on the topic, those fabulous ultrasound machines are not going to help bring people to the pro-choice side.

158: Carrying this theme a little farther, one of the things Obama seems to have offered his supporters is an end to conflictual politics and a return to consensus and good feelings. It seems far too close to Broderism -- equating anti-Bush feeling to the Clinton impeachment.

So the Obama people, compared to the netroots, are on a completely different, opposed page.

It's not really hard to understand thinking that the moral status of an 8 month old fetus & a 1 day old blastocyst is meaningfully different, right?

It gets hard to understand once I start trying to pin it down. I know what rights I think people have. I think it is wrong to treat animals cruelly, but not wrong to kill them humanely. I can't come up with any other models for something with moral status that isn't a person. This doesn't make the position wrong, I just don't myself have a useful way to conceptualize what follows from something being a non-person with moral status, and I'd need to figure out a way to think about that to engage with the position.

"Alternate view: consciousness comes into existence in degrees, and the closer to consciousness something is, the more seriously we should take terminating it. But, since the law requires bright lines, the best bright line is no restriction on abortion."

close enough. I am theoretically okay with some restrictions on later term abortion, except in practice I trust women not to have late term abortions for other-than-serious-medical reasons a lot more than I trust Republican legislators to write reasonable, rational restrictions that do not result in a lot of unnecessary trauma for a lot of women, & medical danger for some.

174: Rape is a major crime, even though people choose to have sex all the time! What a major hypocrisy!

Or maybe, just maybe, consent about what happens with one's own body has a little something to do with legality of an action.

It's not really hard to understand thinking that the moral status of an 8 month old fetus & a 1 day old blastocyst is meaningfully different, right?

Exactly.

I don't understand what the problem is with giving the the fetus some moral status that isn't a full person, and that status increases as the fetus develops to become more fully human. It always seemed rather common sensical to me. Although Roe has some terrible supporting reasoning, I thought the general idea that the state does have more interest in preserving the life of a third-trimester fetus (because it is much closer to becoming human) than a first-trimester one is an appealing compromise.

But obviously a lot of hard-core anti-abortion sentiment isn't about *solving the problem*, it's about the culture war, preserving the cultural centrality of reproduction, opposition to social change in the role of women, etc. At an even deeper level, ensuring the moral superiority of evangelicals to the broader culture -- you basically portray the entire secular world as genocidal. Against innocent little babies.

What pisses me off is that people who jump down by throat for being a bad pro choicer for saying: "actually, the rate should be lower, that's a good public policy goal" have no problem at all with people arguing about it being morally wrong NOT to have abortions.

I really haven't seen much of this in practice, but you seem to be experiencing it as common. Interesting.

LB, it's a goddamn continuum. Yes, it's counterintuitive & weird and hard to conceptualize, but we know that's how the anatomical development is happening, and the alternative positions--zap! at fertilization, zap! at birth--are IMOludicrous given the facts of biological development. It's pretty hard for me to engage with YOU, given that I can't tell whether or not you're actually defending the affirmative claim: "a blastocyst and 38-week old fetus have the same moral status."

If you're going to pick a single zap-moment I'd say the beginning of consciousness, but I don't know that we can actually pin that down very accurately.

Against innocent little babies.

I like to imagine that the babies are suicidal. Aaaauuugh, don't jump! Too late! Oh well!

178: Right, and there's also the pragmatic aspect. The last thing I'd want if a pregnancy blew up in my face before the 23rd week is not being able to find a doctor capable of helping because some damn legislator is worried about hypothetical Welfare Queens aborting babies so they fit in their Prom Dress.

159: Of course, what we are talking about here is the elimination of an actual "person," right?

A thousand times no. In the cases I mentioned, all that was in question was whether a specific ovum would be fertilized by a specific spermatazoon to produce a specific zygote which would eventually grow up to be a specific person. By that standard every male elimates millions of persons every day, and every female eliminates approximately one specific person every month.

After the fact you can say, "What if we didn't have Jimmy?" And if abortion is in question, then you can think "What if Jimmy were cut up with razorsharp blades?" But the not-having-Jimmy part is equally true for contraception, withdrawal, or simple failure to copulate.

What 177 said. But further, to 180 One problem (for many people, anyway) I see with this approach is that I really haven't heard any good argument while that process does not extend beyond birth.

I don't know that we can actually pin that down very accurately.

Onset of puberty works for me.

Is it automatically ok to do it to yourself even if it is seriously wrong when someone does it do you? See also suicide and murder.

See also masturbation and sexual assault. James, this is the sort of analogy that properly gets analogies banned.

178: That I can follow, although the way I end up thinking about it is that sometime in the third-trimester or so, the fetus becomes a person, and aborting after that point in the absence of medical (including psychiatric) need, or birth defect approaching non-viability, would be homicide (but as a matter of practice, the likelihood of third-trimester abortions I'd consider unjustified is low enough that regulation is unnecessary and counterproductive). I'd be troubled by biological evidence that a fetus was able to engage in conscious thought at a developmental point where abortions are common, but I haven't seen any.

The idea of sliding-scale moral status as it applies to a fetus that hasn't developed to the point of consciousness, and therefore (IMO) personhood, is where I get confused and have trouble talking about it.

189: This is a question that gets more interesting the better medicine gets at saving premature babies. (Still probably a good reason to keep birth as a bright line.) Does viability entail consciousness? Doesn't seem to.

The idea that a fetus could lack rights in any serious sense but that some abortions could be morally wrong for reasons that are more or less internal to the act itself is nicely developed by Ronald Dworkin in his book _Life's Dominion_. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a clear account of moral and legal issues in the area. I think it's wrong, though, because I don't think his "dignity of life" argument works. It's not a crazy view but it doesn't move me and I don't find the argument otherwise compelling.

It's not quite right to say that I think an abortion can never be wrong- it can be done for bad reason and it's not unusual, or even incorrect, to say that something that's morally neutral but done for bad reasons was wrong. (If I paint my house blue because I know it will really, really annoy you, saying that it was wrong to paint my house blue would be natural and not incorrect.) But, it can be misleading so I'm trying to avoid that here. Similarly, if you met someone who said they wanted to be a mother, and was 7 months pregnant, but then got an abortion because the chance to take a nice vacation came up, you'd probably think there was something wrong with this person. But that wouldn't make having the abortion wrong. (Note that I think such cases are extremely rare, if they happen at all.)

In general, though, I mostly agree w/ LB here.

The idea of sliding-scale moral status as it applies to a fetus that hasn't developed to the point of consciousness, and therefore (IMO) personhood, is where I get confused and have trouble talking about it.

Well, working out the details is tricky, but the basic concept should be uncontroversial. Lots of moral reasoning appropriately takes continua into account. Disassembling a bacterium is a matter of different moral consequence than tearing the wings off flies, which in turn is different from torturing a chimpanzee.

190: I wouldn't be at all surprised if perfectly reasonable looking definitions of consciousness would lose newborns too. The physical act of birth may be a natural `bright line' in some ways, but a progression-to-consciousness isn't one of them as far as I can see. Your point about improving technologies shifting viability shows how even that bright line is a bit fuzzy.

177 is what I would say if I was better at thinking and writing. Late-term fetuses through very early infants all seem about the same moral level as higher-intelligence animals to me. They're capable of feeling pain, more or less aware that stuff exists, but don't really have any sort of human personality as such and are still utterly dependent on people for their existance. So it's hard to say what that really means from a government regulation standpoint. I'm not altogether comfortable with government sanctions for those who hurt or kill animals, even if I think such people are kinda sick fucks. I know there's enough blood on my hands. Hell, I'm about to go for a cheeseburger in a few minutes.

Of course, once a baby is viable (and healthy) or born, it's likely easier to give it away. That's the main difference I see between infanticide or animal abuse and abortion. The former has an obvious alternative in giving the dependent away instead of harming it.

As for when a fetus/baby hits full personhood, that's a tricky question as soup says in 186. I'm tempted by Apo's answer in 187, though I know in all seriousness I'd peg it much earlier.

191: I'm not following. Attaching a bad motive to housepainting (neutral act) makes painting my house blue wrong, even though there's nothing bad in and of itself about blue paint. Attaching a bad motive (your example) to an abortion (neutral act) makes having the abortion... not wrong?

What am I missing?

190, 193: Yeah, I have some sympathy for the idea that consciousness and personhood show up post-birth, making birth a useful bright-line for the moment when rights should be seen as attaching as being sufficiently conservative to catch all 'persons'. But that's a neuroscience question, and I'm not an expert.

193: Earlier I meant 'bright line' not in terms of consciousness, but in terms of something easy to pick out for legislative purposes. Born or not born is easier to figure out than conscious or not conscious.

Newborn's brains are sort of going 'bzzzzzzz'

182: I tend to view the continuum as extending well after birth. That screaming little lump of meat may well mean the world to the parents, but there's no way it's fully human. On a purely theoretical level I'm pro-choice through at least age two, and I think there's a halfway decent case for extending the limit to puberty. The practicalities of regulating legalized infanticide are tricky, though.

||

DoD sez KBR wasn't responsible for the electrocution of that showering soldier.

|>

198: has everybody heard Abby Hoffman's answer when he was asked his views on abortion?

"I'm Jewish, we don't believe the fetus is fully human until it obtains a PhD"

Presumably an MD or JD will also do.

From that article, it says they weren't aware of the hazardous condition. It doesn't say that they weren't responsible for the shoddy work that created it.

||

They've cracked the Antikythera Mechanism!

|>

196/197: It's easy to see the practicality of birth-as-bright-line for legislative purposes etc., I was just pointing it out because it implies that in any continuum-of-consciousness arguments used to infer continuum-of-moral-status, birth isn't obviously even a notable event.

202: Wow!

Presumably a[...] JD will also do.

Not according to Paul Campos.*

* Original piece by Campos missing, oddly enough.

195- Cala- yes, not following, though perhaps due to my unclarity. I'll try again. Acts which are morally neutral can be done for bad reasons. It's common and not usually inaccurate to say that the act was bad. We can do this because we know, via context, that the act itself isn't the sort of thing that _could_ be bad (painting your house, swatting a fly, etc.) I contend that having an abortion is in that morally neutral category. (Many disagree but I think they are wrong. I'm leaving that aside for now.) The confusion is that, since many people think having an abortion is, at least sometimes, bad in itself, despite the motivation, it's unclear what people mean if they just say "getting that abortion was a bad thing to do." Do they mean it was a bad thing, whatever the reason? (A catholic or someone who thinks all life has , just in virtue of being alive, "dignity" that must be respected, might think that) Or do they mean "the sounding context of the abortion show that you were doing a bad thing in this way." Because of this unclarity I've tried to not use the common way of saying things but a more precise one, one that might be common enough in a philosophy text, but it's been confusing people here. I'm sorry about that, but there's a limit at what one can hope for in a blog comment.

I also think that togolosh in 198 might be joshing but I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that position.

See, matt, this is the other point where I disagree with your approach. I don't think we can isolate "the act itself" from all the other factors that you mention. The motivation is a part of the act. The outcome is a part of the act. The expected outcome is a part of the act. I don't see why you are making some of these more central than others.

OT bleg:

Does anyone happen to know a reliable source for info on non-chlorine alternatives for swimming pools? There's lots of info online, but who's to be trusted? It's for "a friend."

On a purely theoretical level I'm pro-choice through at least age two, and I think there's a halfway decent case for extending the limit to puberty. The practicalities of regulating legalized infanticide are tricky, though.

I assume the tongue is at least partially in cheek here (even for the "purely theoretical" bit), but I'd just like to note, as someone re-experiencing the continuum, that babies become recognizably human within months of birth. The first 4 weeks (or so) they're less responsive/sentient than week-old puppies, but by 3 months it's very hard to point to the child as anything other than a tiny human.

The biggest problem with birth as the bright line (and I understand LB's point that it's a nec. one legally) is, of course, that "full term" is 38 weeks, but up to 42 weeks is "normal" - no need for induction or other intervention (aside from grapes, sex, long walks, and other useless folk remedies to speed mama's relief).

209: Other than ozone systems? AFAIK, for public pools, at least, it's chlorine or ozone, no other plausible choices.

It's possible there are organic/folk options out there for backyard pools, but they're not used by pros.

I was just pointing it out because it implies that in any continuum-of-consciousness arguments used to infer continuum-of-moral-status, birth isn't obviously even a notable event.

But obviously birth is a discontuity for another reason: The moral relevance of the mother in this equation changes dramatically at that moment. There is zero inconsistency in being pro-choice and anti-infanticide.

A lot of abortion arguments - on all sides - involve ignoring the existence of the other factor in the moral equation - either the mother or the fetus. (This is what Katherine rightly objects to.)

The pro-infanticide argument does this twice - first by ignoring the reasons a fetus is morally relevant during pregnancy, then by ignoring, post-pregnancy, the most important reason the woman involved is morally relevant.

199: Someone who fears death should not join the military. Duh.

211: I'm talking backyard. So no salt water or natural filtration by mimicking a pond?

213: Also, to tie the two themes of this thread together, someone who fears death should give strong consideration to not being born.

The first 4 weeks (or so) they're less responsive/sentient than week-old puppies, but by 3 months it's very hard to point to the child as anything other than a tiny human.

My experience as well.

To advance any farther on this issue we will need to solve (1) the mind body problem (2) the problem of our knowledge of other minds (3) the problem of the definition of conscousness. I actually think these difficulties makes this issue fun.

At first I was thinking that I disagreed with Katherine's arguments here, but, thinking it through, I think her arguments make sense, but her milieu may be skewing her feelings about them. IOW, I think that 163 is basically right, and disagreeing with those who are too "pro-abortion" for one's tastes should go in the "no enemies on the left" category. I'm not even prepared to acknowledge a "But it's bad for the movement/politics/optics" claim, for the same reason I don't buy it on the war - the failures that led to Iraq had not one iota to do with the giant puppet people.

Furthermore, since there's no shortage of actual people getting heard in the media to say that "abortion is murder," I really don't see the harm done by a few people on blog comments saying "abortion is an underutilized solution."

209: Kraaby,
There was a big article in the NYTimes about "natural swimming pools" a year or so ago. Oh, heck, I will look it up. Okay, here!

I've only skimmed the thread, so someone may have already mentioned this, but Neil the Ethical WW wrote a piece on a fetus's moral status: http://ethicalwerewolf.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html (scroll down to March 26). I'm pretty sure he also wrote it up as a journal article.

218: Thanks, babe!

Re: 198

Jus make the State Mommy and allow it indefinitely, when needed for population efficiency ratios, soldiers, food supplies......

But obviously birth is a discontuity for another reason: The moral relevance of the mother in this equation changes dramatically at that moment. There is zero inconsistency in being pro-choice and anti-infanticide.

which is, in context, pretty much exactly what I've said, so I'm not sure what you were getting at there.

again, I'm not stating this is my position, but this:

The pro-infanticide argument does this twice -

is only correct if the fetus is morally relevant during pregnancy, which is by no means a given.

I understood the conversation to be about one type of argument for why moral weight might be given to the fetus, is all.

206: I haven't read the Dworkin, and I understand why you'd want to avoid the construction 'abortion is wrong', but that's a very, very narrow construal of the action. And I think you'd have to say that painting the house wasn't wrong. But then from there it's easy to say that making this stabby motion with my hand wasn't wrong, it was the pointy bit of metal and the man's tender flesh at the end of it that made it wrong. I'm not sure what advantage splitting hairs like that gives you.

I'm talking backyard. So no salt water or natural filtration by mimicking a pond?

Salt water sounds highly impractical to me, but I've never looked into it. From what I know of pond construction, it's a pretty big can of worms, and unless you have an actual natural source of water, resource-intensive.

You could almost certainly rig up some sort of clever, almost Living Machine-ish system that could be beautiful, but it would take a LOT - of water, of electricity, of maintenance, of inspired design. And I still think the end result would be more like a (clean) farmyard pond than a swimming pool with fresh water in it.

Your best resource would not be a website, but some regional-type person who has built real ponds - she would know about how much waterflow would be involved, how much intervention (e.g. with pH), &c. Maybe call university landscape architecture depts to see if you can find someone who knows someone.

208- Rob, I don't completely disagree- all action is done under a description, after all. But, surely we can strip away certain aspects and describe certain things in one way or another and look at certain aspects. My question is then whether "having an abortion" is an action like "murdering someone" where the badness is in some way written into the action, or whether it's more like "moving my arm around" which has no moral valiance at all when described that way. And, surely we can distinguish having an abortion and the reasons for doing it. And, it seems to me, that when we do this, we have a different sense than with things like murder, lying, stealing, etc. Given these facts I think my distinction, while not as tight as I'd make it if I were writing a journal article, is good enough for blog comments and not that hard to make sense of at all. In fact, I'm sure you can make perfect sense of it.

210 - I'm mostly serious, but the practical issues are very important to my way of thinking about philosophical questions. At some level theoretical idealizations are necessary, but they can lead to a great deal of stupidity.

218: Well there you go. I'd note that what I was envisioning in 224.2 is pretty much what is diagrammed in the NYT article.

Nice work, oud.

I really don't see the harm done by a few people on blog comments saying "abortion is an underutilized solution."

This is correct in the "no more circular firing squads" sense, but I don't think in the long term it's necessarily true, because the best political and practical course, in my opinion, is just not having the "abortion debate" on the right-wing's terms anymore, and basically making the entire thing about universal access to birth control (and the scary wingers trying to take your birth control pills away). Abortion won't just magically go away in this case, and even in post-universal-healthcare-with-free-BC-for-everyone utopia, it will still need to be kept legal for medical reasons, but continuing to debate this in these terms is I think a non-starter politically. It's not really going into "enemies on the left" territory to object to comments like 207 - both in and of itself, and politically.

And, surely we can distinguish having an abortion and the reasons for doing it.

I guess what I'm saying is that you're willing to say 'Abortion can be morally good', even though you believe the abortion itself is neutral, because you see the reasons it could be good, but you're drawing the line at 'abortion can be morally wrong', even while you're acknowledging that the reasons are wrong. It's the disparity that's striking. (And it's not because I'm expecting journal quality logic.)

226- then we probably agree, togolosh. I'm happy about that.

223- I think the question is how to best and most naturally describe the actions. Often it's fine to say that an action was wrong when, if you were speaking more precisely, you'd say that doing the action for the reason you did it was what was wrong. As for the later example, it depends on what you intend. If you're being negligent, or if you're deranged, then we might well describe the facts that way. If you intend to murder someone then that's the best way to describe it. If someone intends to commit a murder by having an abortion then their moral worth is less, but since it's an impossible attempt, and because results do matter morally, it's not the same as an actual murder and of course should not be prosecuted as such for reasons both of morality and legality.

I'm puzzled by what the actual argument for the two year old thing would be, & generally tend to suspect that it's an annoying provocation to be all transgressive & shocking rather than a serious position. Verbal ability, if nothing else, doesn't signify consciousness?

229- No, your mis-describing my position. I'm saying that abortion is morally neutral and can be done for good or bad reasons, that people should do it if the reasons for it are strong and should not do it for bad reasons, but that there are really not many cases where people do it for bad reasons, and that even in the cases where people do it for bad reasons there are probably also good reasons that apply to them, too, even if they don't recognize it. Also, that the bad reasons for having an abortion are not the sorts of things that should make it a legal issue, at least not generally. (Maybe it could be part of a tort or something, but the cases would be really rare.)

Consciousness is very apparent long before verbal ability.

Why is going on vacation a bad reason for having a late-term abortion if the act itself is morally neutral/unproblematic? Planning to climb Mount Kiliminjaro wouldn't be a bad reason to avoid getting pregnant at all, so...

233: oh, absolutely.

Maybe call university landscape architecture depts to see if you can find someone who knows someone.

Good idea. This is for someone in Houston, so good university resources. I'll tell him to try the county extension agent as well. Thanks.

231: My comments, at least, on consciousness were more aimed at the 2 week end than the 2 year end. I think matt & tooglosh have left the `consciousness' argument and are talking about something togolosh labelled as `fully human' but I'm not sure how that's meant.

we're all perfectly free to judge women for bringing unwanted children to the world because of the social costs.

No, we aren't. Except of course inasmuch as we're all perfectly free to judge women, period, it being like a national sport or something.

I am fully on-board that we should trust women to make the choice, but I think that as many of them think its the best choice as currently do reflects a societal moral failure to: (1) adequately provide access to & education about contraception, including emergency contraception (2) adequately support parents. Using the word "moral failure" in there generally gets me a mildly hostile reaction from less conflicted pro-choicers, and yet no one objects to comments like matt's. It really pisses me off.

I object to Matt's argument. I just don't have time today to get into it. I agree with both your points, and would add a third: the moral failure to (3) actually value children and mothers. Not just "support," not just "give lip service to," but *actually consider children and mothers important*. As important as, say, the GDP or social security or road construction or banking or employment.

All that said, I still think that talking about the morality of other people's abortions is wrong.

but that there are really not many cases where people do it for bad reasons

The ones that do exist are pretty uniformly horrible, however, and in light of that, this:

and that even in the cases where people do it for bad reasons there are probably also good reasons that apply to them, too, even if they don't recognize it

is completely dickish. Your position seems to be completely outside the personal choice/bodily sovereignty rubrics, so you know, I'm not quite seeing where it's really any different than the sorts of arguments that were made in favor of eugenics.

236: Please keep us (or me) informed - I'm very curious to know what happens.

Have the local Abortion boardmembers convene at each pregnancy (which by law shall be reported within a week or so after,er, knocked-up-edness), and apply the natal-fiduciary function to the particular birth-context. Recommend abort and/or sterilization if high probability that fetus will be "epsilon".....

Yeah, I understand the two-week end of the argument. I'm not sure of it, but a neonate is pretty non-conscious seeming.

Brock Landers (serious prolifer, if you didn't know) was arguing "Two-year-olds aren't really human" or something like it pretty hard in a thread a while back. He was working from those experiments where you put a sticker on an animal's head to see if they recognize that their reflection in a mirror is really them (that is, if an animal is truly 'conscious' they'll look at the mirror and think "Oh, I've got something on my head" and feel for it. I don't remember the details, but maybe chimps and dolphins do, but no other animals?), and apparently kids don't start passing that until somewhere around two.

This strikes me as a deeply bizarre argument to make, so I probably haven't represented it fairly, but Brock was making some argument at least vaguely along those lines.

JRoth is correct that my complaints only make sense about a very, small liberal milieu, if at all--obviously, in the country at large, I think that pro-lifers have too much power, Christianity gets too much deference, etc. And, I seem to also be somewhat wrong about the pro-choice reaction to judging women for NOT having abortions (though b has always been good about being pro-mama too so it's not surprising).

Verbal ability, if nothing else, doesn't signify consciousness?

Some measure of consciousness alone is not enough in my view to confer full humanity. I'd consider dogs to have consciousness for certain, and African Grey Parrots are smarter than most two year olds.

Consciousness is very apparent long before verbal ability
my 1 mo nephew ignores his toy making sounds, but if to tap him gently and rhythmically with the toy he stops crying instantly b/c he feels the touch and takes the tapping sound as mother's heart sounds

242 was to 231.

Yes, you can do salt-water pools. I don't know how, but they exist. Ogged, pbuh, swims in one, and Mr. B.'s coworker's apartment complex has one.

Having an abortion to go on vacation wouldn't be anyone's business but the woman doing it, but I seriously doubt anyone actually does that, so it's a total strawwoman.

Okay, I'm outta here. Have a fun afternoon, kids.

I'm not sure of it, but a neonate is pretty non-conscious seeming.

Right, and I wasn't proposing anything in terms of an argument for/against abortion here either, just musing on the consciousness to infer moral weight stuff.

236, 240: Me too! I finished that NYT article desperately longing for one.
As for saltwater, lots of beach clubs near my ancestral village (yours, too, homegirl) had seawater pools. (Do you remember Peninsula House?) They just pumped it straight in (and out).

I seem to also be somewhat wrong about the pro-choice reaction to judging women for NOT having abortions (though b has always been good about being pro-mama too so it's not surprising).

In all seriousness, I have never been in as pro-mama an environment as when I went to the march for women's lives in 2004 (I think it was). The idea that pro-choice folks are anti-mama is by and large a fiction. (Individual young people who think that everyone should have abortions because of population growth or sprog-hating notwithstanding.)

Togolosh, why "full humanity" as opposed to the normal consciousness or pain as standards to determine what we have the right to terminate at will?

consciousness alone is not enough in my view to confer full humanity

GWB is too human, he can't hide behind animal protection laws. What if there's no clear answer to "what are necessary conditions to call a living thing human?"

FWIW, 232.last (that bad-reason abortions probably wouldn't be a problem for the state) makes sense to me. I can't get on board (at all) with matt's dismissal of the "moral significance" of late-term abortion - they happen because they must, but they're no more desirable or elective than, say, an amputation - but I think that an approach to first-term abortions that treats them as not-inherently-fraught* is probably about right.

* Obviously they will always be fraught for some women

247 salt water pools are great, but I've not run into one that wasn't right on the coast and using seawater as source. I don't know how it's done otherwise

(Which, of course, is why the term is "pro-choice" rather than "pro-abortion." Blah blah. Ok, really going now.)

Individual young people ...

B, if you're still reading, ooc why young people. I haven't run into that sort of position often, but the few times I have, it hasn't skewed young at all.

As for saltwater, lots of beach clubs near my ancestral village (yours, too, homegirl) had seawater pools. (Do you remember Peninsula House?) They just pumped it straight in (and out).

Well of course that would work. Hell, if you had an onsite freshwater spring pumping 100k gal./day, you could have a freshwater pool with no treatment at all - just empty it every night.

I wonder, though, that I never heard anything about saltwater pools when my last firm was researching a big pool project. Maybe client-directed.

On an intellectual level, I find "human beings have moral status because they're conscious" arguments more convincing than "human beings have moral status because they're the same species as you" arguments, but in real life I think the latter may drive my reactions at least as much.

Hell, if you had an onsite freshwater spring pumping 100k gal./day, you could have a freshwater pool with no treatment at all lake to swim in.

Verbal ability, if nothing else, doesn't signify consciousness?

You'd think it would, but then you read Glenn Reynolds and you wonder.

PDBS has an appropriately posh municipal pool with a chlorine free purification system. I'm not sure what technology it uses, but the water does not taste notably salty. Apparently the capital costs of the system are quite a bit higher than the chlorine system, but the operating costs are much lower, not least because the pool doesn't have to purchase as much chemicals and the components do not corrode as fast.

but then you read Glenn Reynolds and you wonder

I'm pretty sure you could teach a cretin to repeat "Heh" and "Read the whole thing" over and over again.

The idea that we shouldn't judge women for having or not having an abortion is a very odd one. If the point is that it's often awfully hard to know what someone is experiencing and this can make it hard know what to think in a particular case that's surely true and good advice. But, sometimes you can know perfectly well what the relevant considerations are and it's not hard to make a case one way or another. And, assuming we can do this in a particular case, why should abortion be any different than any other part of life as far as making moral judgments go? (Note, of course, that I don't think the moral judgment is enough to base a legal rule on.) This doesn't imply that someone other than the woman should make the decision, of course, but the idea that we can't or should not say the decision is a good or bad one (either morally or prudentially) is really strange and not at all obvious.

Glenn Reynolds was replaced by a perl script in 2001.

But, sometimes you can know perfectly well what the relevant considerations are...

This is the sort of thing that works better in theory than in practice, but perhaps that's what you meant. There is nothing inherently special about abortions this way, of course.

261: Sounds like ozone, but hell, I didn't even know about saltwater (although I'm sticking with soup that it's a coastal phenomenon).

Here in Pittsburgh we just use riverwater, which comes with its own chemicals.*

* Not actually true anymore. The rivers are clean when the sewage hasn't overflowed into the recently. Come visit!

Togolosh, why "full humanity" as opposed to the normal consciousness or pain as standards to determine what we have the right to terminate at will?

Because then I can't eat bacon. I'm floundering around trying to put together a clear and concise explanation of my thinking here, and realizing that it's probably not worth it. Practicality dictates a bright line, and the only sensible place to put that line is at birth.

Also, I second Katherine's 258

225

"... My question is then whether "having an abortion" is an action like "murdering someone" where the badness is in some way written into the action, ..."

This is a bad analogy because murder is that subset of killing that we have decided is very bad. There are killings allowed by law which it is still reasonable to consider to be morally problematic.

The xtian right and soccer-mommy feminists both error in viewing abortion as a rights issue (when does "personhood" start, consciousness, full humanity, yada yada yada): it's more like a planning and crowd control (and crime prevention) issue.

JRoth, just the other night, while meeting the delightful rtfs and snarkout, we talked of Pittsburgh's many wonders.

Also, Davis has salt-water pools. But the water does not come from the coast, so far as I know. It's just a much less intense chemical process than chlorination.

Also also, by way of ignoring the abortion thread, I'd like to note that I, too, suspect that the Kaine thing is a ruse. Sibelius just makes too much sense. And the free media in Virginia (as in Ohio because of Bayh) is awfully sweet.

JRoth, just the other night, while meeting the delightful rtfs and snarkout, we talked of Pittsburgh's many wonders.

Ever since you began summering in Cleve, I've been thinking about suggesting a Pgh meetup for y'all to roadtrip to. But things keep coming up, somehow.

A Pittsburgh meet-up would be great. Take all the newbs on the Incline! Go to Primanti's and get indigestion! Run amok near the universities!

Oh, JRoth, I don't remember whether I answered about my little sis and her bicycle: she's not sure yet, but she has just decided to live in Oakland near Pitt, so I think the subject will be re-opened soon.

Hell, if you had an onsite freshwater spring pumping 100k gal./day, you could have a freshwater pool with no treatment at all - just empty it every night.

Austin has 2 fantastic spring-fed pools, no emptying required. One is an actual pool with concrete walls & such. The other is essentially just a huge swimming hole, with ladders, etc., added, and some equipment to direct the water flow. No chlorine in either, but closed periodically for cleaning. Fecal coliform after big rains, doncha know.

Both about 68 degrees year-round.

What, I mention fecal coliform and everyone skeddales? To talk about Toby Keith?

274: What, Toby Keith doesn't remind you of fecal coliform?

Speaking of pools, 95 in the shade with thunderstorms this morning, so I take the dogs to the lake runoffs/creeks. Run, swim, run, swim, creek is 50+ feet below me lined with rough rocks the size of basketballs. Climbing that is how I sprained my wrist. Dogs are standing in water up to their chests watching me call and tell them it's time to go home. And beg. And threaten. And bribe.
And scream. In 102+ Heat Index sunlight.

For an hour. The magic word? The lady's name. Bastards.

As far as rugrats, under 5 and between 15-25 I don't care what you do to or with them. Cages. Reservations. Whatever. Just keep them off my lawn.

why should abortion be any different than any other part of life as far as making moral judgments go?

Because there is no other condition of life that is remotely comparable to pregnancy. Pregnancy is not an action; it is a condition. A unique condition, during which the woman's body is actually *creating another human being*. If you think about it, it's pretty ridiculous to think of this as an occasion for moral judgment.

256: Most of the rigid anti-kid people I've run into are pretty young and (over)-reacting to their perception that other people expect them to have kids. But maybe there are older people who are really that immature too.

A unique condition, during which the woman's body is actually *creating another human being*

Isn't that why the decision to terminate the pregnancy is fraught with moral judgments? It's not like have a cyst removed. To me it is more like removing life support from a child who has hurt in an accident. Tragic, if you must, but probably necessary. Apologies for bad analogies. Banned.

If the decision to terminate the pregnancy is fraught with moral judgments, then it also requires a moral language that takes account of that unique condition. Most moral language starts from the principle that we are making decisions about how one complete human being should treat another. I'm sure the philosophers can point to work on the bleeding edge that addresses this inadequacy, but the words you and I have rely upon (masculine) language that doesn't account for the person-creating-another-person status and relationship.

273: Um, emphasis on the verb "creatING." The sperm does not contain a fully-formed little humonculous that just needs a petri dish to grow in.

IOW, what Wrongshore said.

273, B? Are you suggesting that the little homunculus needs a dirty Austin swimming-hole to grow in?

3, 8, whatever. I haven't had a beer yet today. Can't type.

Pittsburgh really is great. We'll certainly be going there for long weekends here and there as long as we're this nearby, or my mother will have my head on a platter.

No arguments there. I'm not pushing for overturning Roe, although I think it was poorly decided. (IANAL). I also agree with Wrongshore, that the language fails us. Please, who isn't "pro-life"? Although there was one commenter upthread who seemed a little glib about being "pro- abortion". We all shall die, it seems unjust when one dies at the hand of another.

it seems unjust when one dies at the hand of another.

AARRGGHH. Failing to become fully alive /= dying.

But maybe there are older people who are really that immature too.

Oh, c'mon. What is there to like in a toddler? Would anyone like, become good buddies with the two-yr-old in the next neighborhood? Is friendship even possible? "Look shiny thing!" So neat (right) to see a lump become something approaching a human being, and then regress back into lump as they approach college.

Sez you. I think I like it better when all that female stuff gets handled in the menstrual hut. Midwives, etc. I don't need to know.

The gynophobia of straight men is so weird.

Ain't it the truth. Hell, I'd go gay if the thought didn't squick me so. At least I'd have a better chance at knowing why my room mate was acting weird.

People have wondered how I managed a vasectomy in my early twenties. Genetic history and a little conversation and the doctor almost paid me.

What is there to like in a toddler?

They believe anything you tell them.

Plus, cute butts.

You spend the first two years wondering if they will talk and the next sixteen hoping they will shut up.

286: Bob, my grandnephew is more fun than 99% of the adults I've known. This has been true since he was about 1 1/2.

hmmm...nobody calling me out on the dissing of twenty-yr-olds. Buncha college teachers.

5-15, before they serously start choosing socialization/rebellion, are fun people.

Hey, the hatin on babies doesn't make me a bad person or anything, does it?

294:John, I didn't say they couldn't be fun to watch or interact with, the growth is astonishing, especially for the owner. Dogs are better. Can't take your 2-yr-old human to the park and let 'em run into the woods.

Until this second, I honestly thought (American, at least) men being uncomfortable about menstruation was a TV sitcom stereotype with no basis in reality.

Dogs are lacking in the growth and learning aspect. Every time you throw the stick, it's a new and exciting experience for them.

296. No more or less uncomfortable with menstruation than other bodily functions. I prefer not to know about other's bowel movements as well. Except for the trophys. Everybody likes that.

The Flickr group awaits you, TLL.

5-15, before they serously start choosing socialization/rebellion, are fun people.

I'll have to let PK know that he's not supposed to be as backtalky as he is for another 8 years.

What is there to like in a toddler?
my 1.5 yo niece has a great sense of everything nice, the other day she pointed to my sisters pedicured toe nails and said 'nice'

'

read- my daughter just got back from her trip to the Gobi- she says it is the most beautiful place she has ever seen. The nomads live a hard life, but watch solar battery powered satellite tv at night. She has had enough goat for a while.

nice that she liked the place, it's rough
i'm going next week and into the wilderness of Khentii, not Gobi

Mongolia has more and better scenery than anywhere. Or so I've been told.

I like bob's 276 a lot, even if I disagree with his sentiments about the under-5s.

Bob, if you think that under-5s don't have interesting things to say, you haven't been paying attention to Iris's amazing take on the Greek gods, as occasionally reported here. I mean, I know I'm biased, but seriously, (some) kids say some funny/clever/insightful things!

I'm not sure Misanthropic John's pro-toddler take is going to win any hearts or minds.

Don't take it personally, Roth. You might be one of the 1% of adults that I think are as much fun as a toddler.

Or not. Not enough information.

Thanks, John.

Or not.

even if I disagree with his sentiments about the under-5s.

Like, nobody is defending the young adults.

Anybody have a name for those white limestone rocks DFW faces creekbanks with? Really rough, basketball size, edgy & pointy, to keep soil from eroding and maybe to keep people off the banks.
I wouldn't even know what to google.

Are they in wire baskets? Those are gabions.

just rocks maybe, decorative
yeah, my country is beautiful
not like the Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon though :)
people expect a lot, then they get disappointed
i always think it's better to not expect much and you'll get surprised, about anything, just generally
we sure love our country and badmouth her only among ourselves but never to others, and don't like when others criticise her, but it's like that everywhere maybe
just now some really extensive mineral exploration is going on in the countryside, they say
my friend works for the tourist company as a guide and she told me that in some places whole mountains are excavated away, so pity
i wish people'd do that development thing more like gentler, though maybe it should be done sooner or later

The generic term for rough stone sloping retainage is rip-rap, but I've no idea what DFW specifically uses.

312:Rip Rap it is. Thanks

310:We also use the chicken wire stuff, usually under bridges.

The Gobi is also the home of the long-eared jerboa, which is a seriously cute little rodent.

Those ears are pretty big.

There must be nothing within miles for them to get snagged on.

AARRGGHH. Failing to become fully alive /= dying.

Most pro-lifers would disagree with you strongly about whether an embryo/fetus is "fully alive."

Actually, I don't think anyone should deny that it's *alive.* It's taking in nourishment, it's growing, it's moving, it's reacting. It's whether it counts as a *person* that's the issue.

Saying that it isn't alive is like the caricatures of pro-choice in Sunday School: they don't think it's ALIVE, but isn't that dumb, because we have ultrasounds! Lookit the baby feet!

It's whether it counts as a *person* that's the issue.

Even that seems like such a dead end to me -- the whole debate degenerates into "Is not!" "Is too!" I'd really like to force all the pro-lifers to frame their discussion starting from the premise "Even if it's not a *person*..." and all the pro-choicers from the premise "Even if it is a *person*..."

The first time I explained the concept of abortion to Rory -- who is back in the US in another hour!! -- she declared herself pro-choice. I tried to be balanced, too -- "Some people think it's killing a baby and shouldn't be allowed and some people think it should be up to the woman to decide if she wants to stay pregnant until the baby is born." It was interesting to me how quickly she went to "It's the woman's body, so she should decide," and "What if she already has too many babies and can't afford more?" I think I might have identified the Republicans as people who think it shouldn't be allowed, though, so that might have influenced her perspective...

Yeah, the "human life"; "when does life begin" framing is questionbegging -- the fetus is always human tissue, and always alive, but that doesn't distinguish it from a donated pint of blood. Anyone accepting that whether a fetus consists of human tissue and is alive is morally dispositive of whether it is wrong to abort has accepted that it's always wrong to abort.

People arguing about abortion tend to accept the "when does life begin" language, and interpret it as "when does personhood begin", but that just leaves you sounding factually confused. Better, albeit intitially more irritating, to quibble about the language.

I think I might have identified the Republicans as people who think it shouldn't be allowed, though, so that might have influenced her perspective...

Kids get to use hermeneutics, too.

I tell my students early on that the proper question is not "when does life begin" or even "when does personhood begin" but "what is the moral status of the fetus." Students who keep asking "when does life begin" usually end up failing. I don't have to fail them over this one issue. But if they haven't been paying enough attention to phrase the damn question right, they have invariably missed too much other information to pass the course.

It's whether it counts as a *person* that's the issue. . . . Even that seems like such a dead end to me

Agreed, and I think LB's got it right. But I do think that *fully* alive works (for my purposes); yes, of *course* it's alive, but it's obviously not independently alive, and *the* thing pro-life people ignore is the fact of pregancy, i.e., that mommy is *doing work* to actually turn that "alive" DNC into an actual baby.

and *the* thing pro-life people ignore is the fact of pregancy, i.e., that mommy is *doing work* to actually turn that "alive" DNC into an actual baby

Yes. Precisely. Even if we conceive of the embryo/fetus/baby as fully alive in utero, is there any other circumstance under which one human being is legally obligated to sacrifice his or her body to keep another person alive?

322, 323: I think this runs into problems as well, as the stage at which you can keep preemies alive keeps rolling backward. The focus on the status of the fetus is kinda beside the point, IMO; the real issue is one of bodily integrity/autonomy for the mother.

324: I think that's exactly what B and I were saying in 322, 323.

as the stage at which you can keep preemies alive keeps rolling backward

perhaps not

323, 324: Hrm. I buy the 'violinist' argument -- that even if we're talking about a person, that there's no obligation for one person to devote their body to keeping another person alive. But my feelings about abortion are pretty heavily governed by my belief that at the stages in pregnancy where abortion is common, the fetus isn't something much like a person at all (unthinking, unfeeling) and so abortion isn't just permissible, it's not strongly morally weighty.

Like, an eighth-month abortion is something that I'd agree, under the violinist argument, should still be within the woman's discretion. But that gets into the range where I'm in doubt about the personhood of the fetus, and I'd therefore find such a decision difficult and weighty, just like I'd find unhooking the violinist difficult and weighty. My feelings about early abortion, on the other hand, are strongly determined by my beliefs about personhood of the fetus at that stage.

I think that's exactly what B and I were saying in 322, 323.

Oh. In that case, 322 and 323 get it exactly right?

You have to wonder if anyone's thinking about a submerged in saline/supported by IV fluids and nutrients into the still-connected placenta treatment for extreme preemies. Or, rather, people have been talking loosely about 'artificial wombs' forever -- I wonder if anyone medical is anywhere close to trying it.

like the caricatures of pro-choice in Sunday School: they don't think it's ALIVE, but isn't that dumb, because we have ultrasounds! Lookit the baby feet!

More about this experience, please.

Instead of a violinist, I think that we should think of the fetus as a teenager sagger with a boombox on his shoulder.

But white!

327: Of course, at that 8-month stage there's the possibility of attempting to "unhook" in a way in which the baby might be able to survive "unhooked." Would a late-term abortion be medically easier than a live induction? I certainly don't know. And I don't really know how that would affect my feelingsat that stage, either. But your comment did make me wonder that.

I Don't pay,

More about this experience, please.

I'm not sure I know what you want but around these parts there are tons of billboards and ads and messages that essentially say: Abortion is murder.

They'll say "My heart beats at X days and abortion stops that' or 'I smile at X weeks and abortion stops that" and the framing of the issue is that this is a person who has a beating heart and who smiles and thus abortion is murder.

Maybe I'm stating the obvious because at least around here we see this stuff all over the place.

It's the "in Sunday School" part I'm curious about.