Breaking News: Turducken!
Bells said:
Can a woman abort at 40 weeks? No. But who waits 40 weeks to decide to abort?
The general abortion issue is not, and never has been, about women.
Oh, wait. It's entirely about women.
Okay, how do we reconcile those statements?
When we look at the general situtation for what it is—the actual processes of discourse and legislation—it is easy enough to find the anti-abortion argument wanting.
For instance, in certain judicial disputes about what a piece of legislation means or intended, judges will often defer to a "common sense" standard:
What does this mean to the average American?
And, yes, it's flexible. And, yes, it is often used as a dodge so that the court doesn't have to do something the judge doesn't want to.
But it's also kind of irrelevant here because our neighbors have so neatly dispensed with it:
Who needs common sense?
Hence all these stupid questions.
What use are they? It's a form of ego defense.
Look at our Devil's advocate. He could not figure out a route to an affirmative assertion of personhood, and thus
settled on fallacy: "Therefor we must prove that a fetus is not a child, infant, baby first and foremost ...."
The problem of proving what something is not is that there is so little to address.
Consider the trap question:
Have you stopped [improper behavior] yet?
As we are aware, there is no appropriate answer if the underlying reality is that one does not participate in that behavior. Now here's the catch:
Not only to you need to prove you don't [beat your spouse; molest your children; &c.], but the other has no obligation whatsoever to provide affirmative proof, or even explain what they're talking about. Here, prove a negative without knowing what negative you're trying to prove.
We can see this process in application throughout this thread.
The topic proposition sees a problematic result when applying Due Process and Equal Protection to a newly-declared class of person. The main response has long been that this conflict and its potential results are fantastic speculation. Very well. So ... what
will happen? We don't know. They won't tell us, and apparently we owe it to them to change the subject.
I mean, it's almost as if they're saying, "Who cares if it's really happening? We don't want to talk about it, so why can't you just change the subject to talk about what we actually want to talk about, which is fetal personhood, the rights of the fetus, the rights of men, the rights of corpses, and oh, by the way, what if the doctor reattaches the umbilical cord and stuffs the baby back inside the mother—would it still be a person then?"
I like the underlying requirement that time should be directionally flexible and accommodating. I mean, come on, if ever you wanted to see the depravity of the anti-abortion advocate, a question requiring time to flow backwards is probably it.
Or maybe it's not time,
per se. But reattaching the umbilical cord and stuffing a baby back inside a woman? The outcome for personhood is no different than if someone tried to attach an umbilical cord to forty year-old stoner and cram him back inside a woman. In this society, once we have our rights, we must do something specific to lose them again—e.g., crime, for instance, can cost a person the right to vote, the right to keep and bear arms, and even some abstract liberties like the right to participate in parenthood. The question of stuffing a baby back inside a woman
requires that this reality be set aside. That is, personhood must be
retroactively and arbitrarily repossessed by society in order to entertain the question.
The psychological query here would be to wonder
why that dispossession is necessary to the logical structure, and whence it comes.
Which brings us back to personhood itself.
How can we disprove this arbitrary ontological assertion? There is
no rhetorical support for it aside from stubborn insistence and appeals to emotion and aesthetics. We must disprove something? Well, what are we trying to disprove? They're not going to tell us.
Consider the argument that we've seen in smaller doses over the years that the implications of LACP are absurd, overly complicated, and therefore not worth considering. Even in the face of facts that these things are already happening
without LACP as the law of the land, they resist.
Very well. There
must be something different about what they're saying compared to what we are perceiving. Unfortunately, they will not tell us what it is.
In terms of this discussion, fifteen months are, at the very least, suggestive, if not indicative.
Now, the way I see it,
this is important. This is my daughter they're talking about. These are my friends they're talking about. What are my cousin's daughters to me in familial lexicon? This is about them. On my volunteer days at the elementary school, I see three hundred young women that this is about. This proposed personhood
demands severe, even radical, reconsideration of a woman's humanity. This will affect the range of decisions available to the next generation, and it would be one thing to point out the absurdity of a woman having to mutilate herself—
e.g., elective tubal ligation to take reproduction off the board—in order to assert her humanity and human rights. (We might also note that since the hypothetical ligation did not include a reshaping of the breast, vaginal obliteration—I can't remember the nifty porn term that sounds so much less ugly—and an attachment of penile prosthesis, asserting her humanity is still something of a laugher. Reproductively viable or not, in American society she's just a woman.)
Our anti-abortion neighbors do not see these sorts of considerations as important, or—
("Infibulation". That's the word. Sorry, beside the point.)
—or ... or ... damn. The flash flood of recognition washed away the trail I was following. (Suffice to say that if I never, ever again encounter the phrase
vulvovaginal gingival syndrome, it will still be one time more than necessary.)
Oh, right. It would seem that either these issues are not relevant to the anti-abortion outlook, or else the dirty secret is that they know and either just don't care or would actively advocate such a narrowing of women's human potential.
We've come to the point in this discussion—are actually well past it, actually—in which the anti-abortion argument is trying to annex into its ranks those who accept
Roe as the law of the land and do not want it overturned. These people, apparently, now qualify as "anti-abortion", "pro-life", or whatever else.
And the real kick in the eggs here is that all of this is deployed in a deliberate effort to suppress any consideration of women's human rights.
One alternative is that they might take a moment to explain to everyone else what justifies this privileged exemption from logic, rhetoric, and basic human decency.
"How can we talk about the humanity of women to people that think this is a issue of mass genocide?" asked our "Devil's advocate".
Well, part of the problem is that as long as that belief of mass genocide is entirely delusional, we
can't talk
to them. We can certainly talk
at them, but like I noted, the factions in the actual public discourse argue
past one another, playing to the gallery for electoral support.
Thus,
the general abortion issue is not, and never has been, about women insofar as women are entirely absent from the human cast of this drama.
To the other,
it's entirely about women because there is no logical structure behind the platform, the advocates refuse a logical structure, and when given a chance to discuss what their policy would
do to women, they would prefer we go forward with their plan without ever actually discussing the implications.
I mean, imagine a discussion that we would never have:
"What is this LACP you speak of? Who believes it?"
―Are you unaware of the bills moving through state houses, and currently awaiting consideration in Congress?
"Why can't you just change the subject and talk about what we want to talk about?"
I mean, we would certainly
never see such irresponsible, discourse, right? But this is also the underlying mechanism, here.
And we've seen for fifteen months what that looks like.
It's time for our neighbors on the other side of this argument to stop dancing around. It's well enough to recognize that they really don't like the idea that they're behaving misogynistically, but it's really, really hard to work around that aspect when they so ardently refuse to engage the issue. What happens to a woman's human rights?
Doesn't fuckin' matter.
Fifteen months?
To the other, it is clear what some of our neighbors, such as Capracus, are trying to do. They're trying to ward off consideration of one set of implications by invoking another. The functional problem with the particular juxtaposition he has selected is that one set of "objectionable" implications (LACP under Equal Protection) is a fairly straightforward set of assertions, while the other (dry-foot) must be questioned according to fantasy.
And what a fantasy that is.
File under "breaking news": A turducken.
(No, really: [domain]/news/local/breaking_news/[file])
I guess it's better than gobquadoo.