Monthly Archives: July 2008

Explaining Obama, Defining Abortion Terms

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One of the reasons we as a nation cannot sensibly discuss the abortion issue is that most people don’t know what the bleep they are talking about. Most American adults seem to know next to nothing about the physiological realities of pregnancy and gestation. They know there is sex at one end of the process and a baby at the other, but what goes on in between is, um, hazy.

Today there’s much hysteria coming from both Left and Right about some statements made by Barack Obama over abortion. Since what he said pretty much squares with my own opinion going way back, I’m having a hard time seeing the Big Bleeping Deal. However, when people like Jeff Fecke, who is normally fairly sensible, makes statements like “So Obama went and said third-trimester abortions shouldn’t have legal protection yesterday,” then I despair of ever having a sensible conversation with ANYBODY on this issue.

Obama essentially said he agreed with the Roe v. Wade guidelines, with one exception. That is, while Roe v. Wade allows for a physical and mental health exception to third-trimester abortion bans, Obama said maybe there shouldn’t be an exception for “mental distress.” And that’s it. But to read some people you’d think Obama just joined the Right to Life movement.

But here goes … Quoting Obama from an interview in Relevant Magazine:

Strang: Based on emails we received, another issue of deep importance to our readers is a candidate’s stance on abortion. We largely know your platform, but there seems to be some real confusion about your position on third-trimester and partial-birth abortions. Can you clarify your stance for us?

Obama: I absolutely can, so please don’t believe the emails. I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother.

Now we have to stop and define “late-term abortion.” What is “late-term”? During their long fight against intact D&E abortions, the Fetus People conflated intact D&E with “late-term abortion,” even though D&E is mostly a second trimester procedure, which in my book is MID-term. In fact, to a lot of Fetus People and even normal people, “late-term abortion” is a synonym for what the Fetus People call “partial-birth abortion,” even though there are other procedures that can be used to terminate a second- or third-trimester pregnancy.

So our first source of confusion is, exactly what does Obama mean by “late-term abortion”? When I use the phrase I mean third-trimester abortion, regardless of the method used. Since the interviewer had just mentioned third-trimester abortion, I’m going to assume that’s what Obama meant by it.

If so, what Obama said basically confirms the Roe v. Wade decision. Roe v. Wade permits states to ban third-trimester abortions, as long as there’s a “life and health” exception made for the mother. As I wrote in a couple of posts last year (“Late-Term Confusion” and “More Late-Term Confusion“), most states have had such bans on the books for a long time, and NARAL has been OK with this, because it conforms to Roe v. Wade guidelines.

And I suppose I had better explain trimesters, because based on comments flying around the web today I’m the only bleeping woman on the planet who has ever been pregnant and knows what trimesters are. A pregnancy is nine months long, right? Stages of pregnancy are divided into three three-month periods. Months 1-3 are the first trimester, months 4-6 are the second trimester, and months 7-9 are the third trimester. There are medical and physiological reasons these three stages are distinctive; they are not just arbitrary divisions the Supreme Court thought up. I will get into more of these distinctions later.

Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.

This is a departure from Roe v. Wade, because Roe v. Wade allows for a mental health exception as well as a physical health exception in third-trimester abortions. The question in my mind is whether a third-trimester abortion might be helpful for a woman experiencing emotional or psychiatric stress. My thoughts:

There are many reasons third-trimester abortions are different from first- and second-trimester abortions. One big difference is that once the pregnancy has entered the third trimester there’s a likelihood the fetus will be viable, meaning it can survive outside the womb. Most of the time if a third-trimester pregnancy has to be terminated because of the mother’s health, every effort will be made to save the baby. It is unusual, although not unheard of, for the baby to have to be sacrificed to save the mother.

On the other hand, until very late in the second trimester there is zero possibility a fetus will survive outside the womb. From about the last week of the second trimester until about the end of the seventh month — well into the third trimester — survivability is iffy, but possible. After that the odds the baby will survive improve considerably. So are we straight on this point?

The problem with terminating a third-trimester pregnancy because the mother is emotionally or psychologically stressed is that you’re probably going to end up with a live infant, but one with more medical problems than it would have had if the pregnancy had gone full term. And this could cause the woman more stress in the long run. This is not sensible.

Regarding “mental distress” — as someone with intimate experience with severe postpartum depression, I appreciate mental distress as well as anyone. But by the third trimester it’s too late to avoid the physiological effects of pregnancy and childbirth, and if we’re talking about a purely psychiatric condition I suspect, medically, it would be extremely unusual for termination of pregnancy to be necessary or even helpful.

On the other hand, if it is discovered that the fetus has an anomaly that is “incompatible with life,” as the med journal articles put it — meaning there is no way the fetus will survive more than a few hours after birth — and the mother wants to terminate rather than live with the heartbreak, I say let her terminate. That’s a point that needs to be clarified.

Also, please note: In the case of elective abortion — meaning, IMO, a woman aborts because she doesn’t want to go through with the pregnancy — by the time you hit the beginning of the third trimester, you’re too late. You are as pregnant as anyone ever was. You’ve probably put on most of your pregnancy weight. You’ve gone through all the physiological and hormonal changes. Your innie is now an outie. And abortion at that point is a big bleeping deal medical procedure every bit as difficult as childbirth itself.

I’m explaining this because remarkable numbers of people don’t seem to understand why defending a right to elective abortion in the third trimester is insane. No woman in her right mind willingly carries a pregnancy that far and then decides to abort. Doctors won’t perform such abortions, anyway. Even Roe v. Wade permits states to ban third-trimester elective abortions.

And NARAL, please note, is fine with states banning third-trimester abortions as long as the “life and health” exception provided by Roe v. Wade is included in the ban. Again, most states have had such bans on the books for a long time.

However, I believed back in the 1970s that NARAL made a big mistake by not supporting some clear legal gestational limits for elective abortion based on the Roe v. Wade guidelines. Without such clear limits, the Fetus People have been able to market many urban legends about women in their ninth month of pregnancy suddenly deciding to “kill their babies” and terminate a healthy pregnancy. Most states eventually adopted gestational limits, but people are so confused about what’s legal and what isn’t that the urban legends seem credible.

Well, back to Obama —

The other email rumor that’s been floating around is that somehow I’m unwilling to see doctors offer life-saving care to children who were born as a result of an induced abortion. That’s just false. There was a bill that came up in Illinois that was called the “Born Alive” bill that purported to require life-saving treatment to such infants. And I did vote against that bill. The reason was that there was already a law in place in Illinois that said that you always have to supply life-saving treatment to any infant under any circumstances, and this bill actually was designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, so I didn’t think it was going to pass constitutional muster.

The various “born-alive” bills are based on the common Fetus People fantasy that infants aborted in the second trimester might live if only they had some medical care. They won’t, until possibly the very last week of the second trimester. Until then, any infant born by any means, gentle or otherwise, will die.

Ever since that time, emails have been sent out suggesting that, somehow, I would be in favor of letting an infant die in a hospital because of this particular vote. That’s not a fair characterization, and that’s not an honest characterization. It defies common sense to think that a hospital wouldn’t provide life-saving treatment to an infant that was alive and had a chance of survival.

Of course it defies common sense, and I very much doubt it ever happens, law or no law.

So that’s what Obama said, and according to RedState Obama is “rejecting at least some of the extremism of NARAL, Emily’s List, and other radical abortion organizations.” The only place where Obama and NARAL actually may part company is on the issue of mental distress, and in that case I might lean in Obama’s direction myself, as I said.

And for the record, I support elective abortion for any reason until about 20 weeks’ gestation, and all data for years have shown us that nearly all elective abortions in the U.S. are performed by about 15 weeks’ gestation.

For the Monks of Tassajara

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If you follow the other blog, you’ve seen my updates on the wildfires threatening Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Soto Zen monastery in the Carmel Valley/Big Sur area of California. This is a gripping story that, at any other time, might be getting more of the nation’s attention.

I believe that Tassajara is the oldest Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere, and it is certainly the oldest Zen monastery in North America. It was established in 1966 by the San Francisco Zen Center while the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was abbot.

In brief, wildfires that had been burning since mid-June began to threaten the forests around Tassajara, and the guests and most students were evacuated June 25. A crew of 22 students, mostly monks, defied orders and stayed behind to prepare to save the buildings. They’ve been cutting back brush and hooking up sprinkler systems. Although they promise they will leave if the fire becomes life threatening, local authorities insisted they provide names of their dentists for identification purposes.

Here’s a video from a local television station about the monks. Naturally, there’s also a blog about saving Tassajara, called Sitting With Fire.

Although the buildings can be rebuilt if lost, losing Tassajara even temporarily would be devastating to the San Francisco Zen Center; first, because the monastery can’t get fire insurance, and second, because programs for guests at Tassajara are a big source of income for SFZC. So, although all things are impermanent, if Tassajara burns it would be a huge setback that would ripple throughout much of American Soto Zen.

A post from yesterday evening on the San Francisco Zen Center site says the fires continue to creep toward Tassajara. Two fire trucks came to bring the monks hard hats, goggles and foam.

Most poignantly, on Tuesday the monks requested a copy of Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra. This “sutra” is a poem composed by Snyder in 1969 that has been beloved by American Zen students ever since. It’s probably been 20 years since I first read it, and it’s still a delight. So please read it if you never have, and re-read it if you have read it before, and then think some good thoughts for the monks of Tassajara.

Shame

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I would like to believe our country didn’t used to behave this way. Scott Shane writes in today’s New York Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

I say I would like to believe that our country didn’t used to behave this way. I was brought up thinking that everything we stood for was, um, against this. Maybe I was naive.

(Of course, you know what righties will say. It’s not torture. It used to be torture when Communists did it, but now it isn’t because it’s us doing it.)

See also “Truth Is Out on CIA and Torture” and the Talking Dog.

Destroying Feminism

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I said a few weeks ago that if second-wave feminism weren’t already dead, Hillary Clinton’s campaign would have killed it. And may I say it was exactly this sort of self-absorbed whining that strangled feminism lo those many years ago.

Yes, Hillary Clinton got hit by a lot of really ugly sexism, but it wasn’t why she lost the nomination. If anything, the sympathy vote was her biggest asset. And it would be really great if people could just address the sexism issue without wrapping themselves in the gloriously self-indulgent mantle of victimhood. I could also do without the self-pity, the score-settling, and the denial of Clinton’s own bad behavior during the primaries. Thanks much.

Fantaticism in Politics

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Over the years Arthur Silber has been one of the most insightful writers on the blogosphere. Thus I was surprised and sorrowed to see him fall into the “Obamabot” meme.

Based on anecdotal evidence from some clearly fanatical Obama supporters, Silber implies that Obama himself is a cult leader and (based on the title, “It’s the 1930s, and You Are There”) dangerous. Silber doesn’t use the word “fascist,” but it hangs over the post like a bad smell.

Yes, there are fanatical Obama supporters who have attached to Obama as the Savior. But if you have any understanding of fanaticism, you would appreciate that fanaticism is self-created, and the object of a person’s fanaticism can be entirely innocent of causing whatever emotional pathologies are fixated on it.

For this reason, I find Silber’s conclusions astonishing:

Depending on how this campaign develops, and depending on how Obama conducts himself and — very significantly to me — how Obama’s most devoted supporters act, I may conclude that, if you vote, you should vote for John McCain. Unbelievable, I realize, but I may have no choice but to think that the alternative is far too dangerous to countenance.

What alternative? Does he think Obama intends to turn America into a Jonestown cult and hand out Kool-Aid?

My primary reason for supporting Obama is that his considerable organizational skills and his resonance with younger voters could bring about a political realignment and a shift in political culture that progressivism can build on in the years to come. I keep saying I don’t think he’s liberal Jesus and that I expect him to make mistakes and take wrong turns. I am less interested in what I think he will do than in what I think he might help to enable, which is an America in which progressive ideas at least can get a fair hearing.

Some of his recent turns are disappointing, particularly his stand on the FISA bill. I’m not making excuses for that. I realize he’s probably doing it for political expediency to help him win the election in November, but I still don’t like it.

But does that make McCain the better alternative? Hardly.

One of the frustrations I had during the Endless Primary was that so many Clinton supporters clearly were operating on some level of fanaticism even as they screamed about Obamabots. You couldn’t talk to them. They’d literally get wild-eyed and dredge up dark suspicions about Obama’s motivations and possible ties to right-wing extremism, suspicions based on nothing but their own overheated imaginations. And I do think the Clinton campaign cultivated this fanaticism to some extent, particularly as time went on and it was about the only thing the campaign had going for it.

But, ultimately, fanaticism is about projecting. Fanatical Clinton supporters were not fixated on the real Senator Clinton, but on a Hillary Clinton who lived only in their own heads. This is part of the nature of fanaticism.

Awhile back I wrote quite a bit about fanaticism and religion. Religion is a force that does attract fanaticism, no question. Many religions encourage absolutist thinking, and many of them are pinned on some sort of messianic concept of Salvation coming to us from Above. But not all religious people are fanatics, and not all religions are dangerous cults.

Further, a fanatic can be fanatical about nearly anything. And often the cause of the fanaticism, the root of it, has little to do with the object of fanaticism.

Let’s revisit Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.

Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world. Once the harmony with the self is upset, he turns into a highly reactive entity. Like an unstable chemical radical he hungers to combine with whatever comes within his reach. He cannot stand apart, whole or self-sufficient, but has to attach himself whole-heartedly to one side or the other. …

… The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources — out of his rejected self — but finds it only in clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. … The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justice and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to. …

… The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted. His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached. [Hoffer, The True Believer, HarperPerennial edition, pp. 84-86]

In other words, usually people become fanatics because of their own emotional neediness, not because the object of their fanaticism, whatever it is, seduced them into it.

We are living in way too interesting times, darkened with paranoia and suspicion. Too many of us have lost the ability to stand back and analyze politics (and ourselves) with anything resembling objective detachment. So most of us are projecting frantically and perceive national figures as archetypes of good or evil instead of as the flawed, frightened, imperfect human beings they actually are.

But let us understand why this is happening. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

I realize Obama doesn’t have a big track record, but he does have a track record, in the Illinois Senate as well as the U.S. Senate. And his record is pretty solidly progressive. So I have a hard time understanding what dark, horrible thing Silber thinks Obama is going to do.

Everybody: Get a grip.