Words Matter: The Trouble with "Reproductive Rights" and "My Body, My Choice"

 

Much as I support the last resort of abortion, I cringe every time I hear someone use that phrase, "My reproductive rights," or "It's my body: I should have control over it."

It's been a relief to see that the fight over abortion has in many states come down to a discussion of up to what week of gestation is abortion going to be legal, or, conversely, where to draw the line after which you cannot have an abortion--6 weeks, 21 weeks, etc. This suggests the American public, without ever really discussing it in an academic  way, has accepted the notion that abortion is and should be all about where you draw the line.

Plenty of folk, I suspect the majority of my fellow citizens, are willing to allow abortions, but they are repelled by infanticide. 

28 weeks

But when does the same procedure (a D&C or suction curettage) drift from being an abortion to infanticide?

 Certainly, when I saw a "salting out" procedure as  medical student at The New York Hospital, I was shaken and appalled. That 28 week fetus sure looked like a real baby to me, and it was shaking and moving like a living thing as the nurse placed it on a stainless steel tray and rushed it into a utility room off the delivery suite and we stood there watching it. Did we watch it die? Or did we simply stare at something not yet quite born? Whatever it was, it struck me on some visceral level as wrong.

The mother, on the delivery table had looked at the receding back of the nurse carrying that fetus away and she said, teary eyed, "I'm so sorry..."

She may have been sorry, but it was definitely her choice.

On the other hand,  later that week, I looked over the shoulder of an OB-GYN resident as he scraped out a 4 week conceptus during a D&C and he kept wiping his curette on a 4 inch square gauze pad, examining the red goo, and saying, "Nope, that's not it," or "Okay, that's it," because that stuff was so unformed it was difficult to be sure what it was. That looked like an abortion to me, not infanticide. 

It was the difference between potential and fully formed realization.

So, when I hear a women assert, "It's my body. I get to decide what happens to my body," I can only think: At a certain point, it's NOT just your body; it's two bodies and one of them is not you and has the right to develop and to live and breathe.

24 weeks

In all of this, I should hasten to add, I am a male, not a female, and have never been and will never be pregnant, and have never had something growing inside me which I might think is so connected to me, it IS me and cannot be separated from me in any meaningful way.

And that whole rap about, "I am in control of my own body," strikes me as a bit odd. Once you are pregnant, you actually are no longer in control. If you want to end that pregnancy, you cannot simply close your eyes and say, "End it." You need someone else to help you do that. So you are not, in that important sense, in control of your own body. Something is happening inside your body you need others to help change.

If you read Justice Harry Blackmun's actual opinion in Roe v Wade it is  striking how little law there is in it. Most of it is an examination of the problem of how to determine when something crosses over from being a potential life to being an actual life with rights of its own. Blackmun finally settles on the idea that once the fetus is capable of survival outside his mother's body, it qualifies as a distinct human life, i.e. he draws the line at "viability."

He also says he knows that line will get closer and closer to conception as medical science develops the means to sustain life using technology, but at the time Blackburn was writing, about 1973, it was about 22 weeks or thereabouts.

(He actually spends very little time on the law, the Constitution, searching for an implied right to privacy--a mumble which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg found disquieting. She never liked the Roe decision.)

Having said all that, the whole idea of "It's MINE!" or "IT'S MY BODY" or "I have a right to be in control of my own body," strikes me as unsettling and obtuse.

What this line of attack says is that the other side, the Right-to-Lifers, have no valid point at all. That those people are trying to force a woman to do something with her own body she doesn't want to do, that they are violating her body with their insistence she carry the baby to term, as if that developing fetus were nothing more than a growing tumor, or a cyst expanding inside her.

But at what point does this expanding mass inside a woman acquire "rights?" 

To say that life begins at the moment of conception, strikes me as medieval. Well, not exactly medieval, because at one point in the Middle Ages, the whole concept of conception was pretty vague, and they defined life as beginning at "quickening" when the mother first felt the fetus move.  But then later they said life began when the baby drew in its first breath. The line was for ages a moving target. The Church accepted abortion for centuries, then changed. Once the new knowledge about a sperm and an egg being united, the Church heard a different word from God.

But a two cell thing is not a human life, in my eyes. Might one day become that, but isn't now, any more than a tadpole is a frog or a caterpillar a butterfly. Conception is time zero, but there are a lot of steps which have to be successfully negotiated before you call something a human being.

The "heart beat" line, by the way, is ridiculous. You can see a contracting clump of cells within a few weeks of conception but just because it contracts does not make it a heart. Muscles contract and they are not hearts. Just because it moves fluid and makes a sound does not make it a heartbeat. Gut structures do all that. Swoosh, swoosh. You really do not have anything which qualifies as a heart or heart cells until somewhere in the vicinity of 22 weeks. 

My point is, however, that the anti abortion crowd has a point: At some point this debate is about more than the mother. To keep repeating, "This is all about ME," is to deny the other side a certain respect which, much as they may be unappetizing, they do deserve.

It's all about you, up until a certain point in pregnancy-- when and why can be argued-- but at some point it's not just about you; it's about two people, one of whom is you.

To say abortion is simply a matter of "defending women's health" is so specious as to barely merit a response: An abortion does not improve a woman's health, ordinarily. It may well relieve her of a burden, but, apart from that tiny percentage of women who would be in physical danger from carrying a child to term, it does not improve the woman's physical health to end a pregnancy. It may well be her right, if it's early enough, but if she allows the pregnancy to progress too  far, there is another set of rights involved. 

To say that holding a scalpel up to a full term baby descending the birth canal is simply a matter of "women's health" or "women's rights" loses me and, I suspect, a lot of other citizens.

Simply chanting slogans may make some folks feel empowered, but it persuades no one. 

But then again, maybe demonstrations and protests are not about persuasion. They are about display and feeling a sense of solidarity. 

Voters, citizens, however, at some point have to do some thinking.

Inexplicable: Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump and the Poisoned Chalice of Testosterone

 Charisma is what Teddy Roosevelt had.

Quentin Roosevelt 

Ebullience. Joy. Exuberant insistence.

"You must never forget: Theodore is six [years old]," his lifelong friend, Cecil Spring Rice, said of him when Roosevelt was in his 40's.

People gravitated toward him in any room, because he was having more fun than anyone else.

He created a fantasy world of heroes and giants and giant slayers and lived in it. He played cowboy and soldier and naturalist, explorer, big game hunter and philosopher and he was a dilletante in all these arenas.

He was a professional only in politics and writing.

He believed gentlemen ought to treat women as ladies and that ladies should produce lots of children, if they were well bred, intelligent and the right sort, which is to say, the right class of women. But he also supported the vote for women.

The best day of his life, he never tired of saying, was the day he got to play soldier and charged up San Juan hill in the Spanish American war in Cuba. 

Make Believe Soldier

When he got a letter from his son, who he had pushed to join the Army air force, the letter describing Quentin's first "kill" of a German fighter plane, Teddy replied that no matter what happened now, Quentin had had that "crowded moment" of heroism and honor and glory and that is what men, real men, were made for.

A Real Man

Teddy begged Woodrow Wilson to allow him to form a cavalry regiment, as he had done in the Spanish war, as Teddy dreamed of reliving those days of glory, but Wilson and his Secretary of War demurred, and when pushed they finally told Roosevelt he was too old and, in any case, cavalry charging across a field waving swords in the face of machine guns, artillery, tanks, barbed wire and trenches was simply suicidal, and what America needed were real soldiers, trained to fight a modern war, not men captured in arrested development playing out childhood fantasies.  Undeterred,  Teddy urged each of his sons to be the first to volunteer, the first on the front lines.

Quentin lying by his plane: 2 bullets in the brain

Quentin, of course, did not last long. His honor devolved into a shattered corpse with two bullets in his head. He was found by his airplane and given a military funeral by the Germans, who also believed in honor, but who noted he was inexperienced and brought down by a professional German pilot, who actually knew what he was doing.

Teddy loathed and fulminated against weak, soft, quiet men, and particularly Woodrow Wilson, who was cerebral and without brass balls. 

Playing Cowboy

Like Trump, Teddy had no use for shithole nations, although he would never have been so vulgar to use that phrase, but the meaning was the same. He called the autocrats of Columbia "monkeys" and he thought that allowing dark races from Southern Europe freely into America was "racial suicide."  On the other hand, Teddy respected certain Black men, who he  had met on the range when he was playing cowboy, and he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, which got him vilified in the South, where Senators speculated about this Black man rubbing his thigh under the dinner table along the thigh of Alice Roosevelt ("Princess Alice") Teddy's alluring daughter.

A Real Soldier, A  Real Man

So Teddy bloviated about how his sons were heroes, the first to answer the call of duty and honor and he pushed them all, shamelessly, to prove themselves in battle, as he had done and what did that get him?

A dead son.

Playing Frontiersman

A father, six years old until he was 60, and, ultimately a shattered boy man, whose recklessness and joy brought disaster to his family and, if there is any real thing as shame, then it should have brought shame to the man who thought he knew enough to instruct others about what a worthy life should be.

Dumb Liberalspeak: Indians not Native Americans

 Driving along, listening to Rush Limbaugh, in the old days, I used to laugh a lot. He was just so absurd, so enjoying himself, and one could only imagine what most of his audience was like--and they, clearly, could not matter.  They had to be the boy with the banjo in the holler. How many of them could there even be, people who bought what he was selling?

The actor was actually Italian

But now, with Rush in charlatan heaven, I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) and the experience is not a laugher. It's the agony of fingernails scratching on a blackboard--but, wait. I'm dating myself. Nobody has known what a blackboard is for decades. 

NPR is so relentlessly politically correct, it has become so precious, it is almost impossible to listen to without shouting, "Oh, SHUT UP!"

Most common words and phrases on NPR are, in no particular order: "The most vulnerable,"  "economically disadvantaged," and "terrified" and "challenged"--as in "vertically challenged" (short), or "intellectually challenged" as in stupid or even retarded--and "urban poor" as in Black, African American or Negro (which is vintage Martin Luther King), also "scared" and "frightened" and "scary" and "unprecedented" and the overall gestalt is that of a radio network portraying the world as a threatening place, and its listeners weak, cowering, terrified, mostly feminine, and often prepubertal, unable to defend themselves, except by whimpering and huddling helplessly together,  and hoping some benign, big hero will ride to their rescue.

But one word you will never hear on NPR (or PBS) is "Indian."

Because, you know, "Native Americans" are hurt deeply by being called "Indians" and they find it insulting, and they fall to one knee and tears roll  down their cheeks at such overt racism, and insensitive, predatory language. 

But then, I remember the irreplaceable George Carlin, who had this to say about "Indians."

"I call them Indians because that's what they are. They're Indians. There's nothing wrong with the word Indian. First of all, it's important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached "India." India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan. More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus's description of the people he found here. He was an Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, "Una gente in Dios." A people in God. In Dios. Indians. It's a perfectly noble and respectable word.

So let's look at this pussified, trendy bullshit phrase, Native Americans. First of all, they're not natives. They came over the Bering land bridge from Asia, so they're not natives. There are no natives anywhere in the world. Everyone is from somewhere else. All people are refugees, immigrants, or aliens. If there were natives anywhere, they would be people who still live in the Great Rift valley in Africa where the human species arose. Everyone else is just visiting. So much for the "native" part of Native American."

So, there you have it. "Indian" is derived from indigenous people of God. What's wrong with referring to a people or peoples who are people of God?

And that whole idea of "Native" really irks me. As Carlin points out, "Natives" don't own this continent because they got here first. They did not arise from the soil in New England or the Great Plains. They likely migrated here across the Bering Straight, or in boats. They often look quite a lot like Asians, because that's where they migrated in from. But they are not native, as in originating here. They were clearly displaced, but they did not own the land any more than anyone else can "own" land. Ownership is a construction of government.

Kids Who Really Did Need Protection

Just a brief digression: there are no native people and there are no native fish or grasses or trees. Things arrive in some area of geography, and they find a climate, temperatures, food sources amenable to their genomes and so they exploit a niche and flourish. But then some other living thing arrives, a snake fish, a Norway maple tree, a rat, a snake and they are then "invasive" species which are BAD and we must eradicate.

No: Every species is an invasive species. We just like some more than others.

In New Hampshire the beautiful Norway maple with its maroon leaves are illegal: no nursery can sell them, and you cannot even transport them across state lines.

Why? Because some arborists at the University of New Hampshire, do not like maroon trees, and they testified before some legislative committee of bowling alley owners, retired postal workers and restaurateurs and they called Norway maples "an invasive species."

Norway Maple

Of course, you almost never see Norway maples growing free in the forests or parks or free spaces in New Hampshire. You see them around schools, houses and other places where people who love their lovely maroon leaves (which turn bright crimson in the Fall,) have planted them--before the legislature was enlightened by the UNH faculty of horticulture. If this is an invasive species, it is a remarkable docile, well behaved invasion, only appearing where it was invited, or in this case, deliberately planted.

Now back to the Indians.

During the COVID lockdown, the New Hampshire Democrats opened their virtual convention with a group of Native Americans pounding on drums for the longest fifteen minutes in the history of time, to remind us that they were here first and "we," an invasive species, displaced them.

Now, I'm not saying what European immigrants did to the Asian immigrants they called "Indians" or "redskins" was a blessing or a good thing. White, European Americans ruthlessly murdered not just Indians, their children and wives but also the buffalo, and all that was dreadful and movies like "Little Big Man" and "Dances with Wolves" and books like "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Custer Died for Your Sins" have made this case.

But Indians are Indians, as far as I'm concerned and I can hardly abide NPR nowadays. I may get desperate enough to start listening to network news. At least there you have the open hucksterism of commercial news. They are selling stuff, but at least they have few pretensions they are actually dealing in the truth. "Coming up, a story which could save your life!" Or, "Miss this story and you may well seal your doom!" Or, "And now a heartwarming story from Topeka, Kansas..."

"Wait a moment, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Now, THAT would be news.

How to Beat Charisma with Ideas

 When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire during the 2016 primary season, I asked her how she intended to beat a candidate of charisma (Trump) with a campaign of policy.

She seemed stumped, momentarily, and admitted she had never been asked that question, but finally said she thought she had charisma.  

What most Democrats seem to think is they can continue to talk about policy (Women's rights to control their own bodies, i.e. to have abortions, transgender rights, gay rights, rights of the disabled, rights of minorities) and they can use this approach to beat the Trump stand in's running for Congress, Senate, state seats, and ultimately, Trump himself.

But, what I hear from so many folks, like the Black cab driver in Chicago, and a White machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts is nothing about policy. All they talk about is how old Joe Biden is.  Or they like that "Trump talks like I do: He talks about shithole countries, and that's what they are, you know? He's just brave enough to say it."

So how do you beat that?

Canvassing door to door for Hillary Clinton, I met enough people who said they would have voted for Bernie but they would not vote for Hillary, and it was the way they said it, the looks of disgust on their faces that really rocked me.

That taught me that if you're going to beat Donald Trump, you'd better do it with something real, and you cannot appear to be parsing your words so as not to offend the gays or the Blacks or the immigrants.

But, of course, Bernie was seen as too radical by too many people.

So what to say? 

Well, history may offer some clues.

In 1910, a wealthy American Aristocrat, Theodore Roosevelt,  went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had battled slavers with the sword, and he spoke about the upcoming election as another battle in that effort to perpetuate the American experiment.

He began by laying down some basic principles:

1. He noted that even Lincoln had observed that in every modern industrialized society beyond subsistence farmers, a struggle between those who produced and those who profited. And Lincoln concluded that "labor is superior to capital."

2. Corporate Greed Over Common Good

Teddy, who lived in a mansion with servants, insisted that property rights must henceforth be secondary to to those of the common welfare, and society should strive to undermine "unmerited social status."

He said, "The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been to take from some men or class of men the right to enjoy power or wealth or position or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows." That meant that the corporate elite should not be able to buy votes in Congress. 

"The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation."

(Apparently, SCOTUS disagreed in Citizens United, when it said corporations have the same rights to free speech as individual citizens.)

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall not be the master of the man who made it."

That might take a crowd a moment to digest. But then:

"The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

(Does Elizabeth Warren say anything different, when she notes that the man who owns a company which employs workers taught to read and write at public expense, who ships his goods over publicly built roads and pumps his waste into public air owes something to society?)

To this end we need to protect 

        a/ A graduated income tax

        b/ Taxes on inheritance on big fortunes

3. The Rigged System: 

With "channels of collusion"  between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government.."The people must insist on complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs...the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes" must be regulated. 

4. Ecology:

He went on, as Edmund Morris notes in his Roosevelt biography,

"The great central task of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security," is imperative.

5. Supreme Court Reform:

Essential is Supreme Court reform making the "judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions." And we need a judiciary which favors "individual over property rights." 

6. Importance of a Strong Central Government

to wit:

a/ child labor laws

b/ workmen's compensation laws

c/ safety and sanitation in the workplace

d/public scrutiny of all political campaign spending both before and after elections.

Note that even as long ago as the turn of the 20th century, in 1910,  the wealthy aristocrat, a member of the ruling class saw that campaign finance scrutiny was essential to a functioning democracy.

In 2011, President Obama made the speech available on his White House website.

I would propose that the Democratic candidate who is picked to run against Trump--or any Democrat running against any Trump Republican (a tautology) simply begin by reading the Republican Teddy Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech, and when he is accused of being a communist, an anarchist, a socialist, he can simply shrug and say, "Well, all I'm doing is quoting a famous Republican," and move on.

The Past Is Not Dead; It's Not Even Past

 

Faulkner was wrong about a lot of things, and not even close to my favorite writer, but he did get one thing right--the past is not even past.

Fitzgerald knew that, and said as much in his famous last lines of the Great Gatsby, "So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

When I got to college, I could not fit any history course into my schedule, being a science major and having to fulfill a range of required courses, but since graduating more than half a century ago, I've luxuriated in the time to read any history whenever I like, and it's been wonderful and revealing. 

Lately, I've been reading Edmund Morris's two final books about Theodore Roosevelt, a man I thought I knew enough about to never want to know anything more about him, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The man is a contradiction, wrapped up in a paradox, folded inside an incongruity.

He was born to great wealth, but despised the effete, bloodless privileged classes, although he aspired to be a member of the "ruling class." He embraced the idea of proving manliness by violent engagement in war, which he bragged was the only way a real man could emerge as a fully made man, and yet he finessed two different peace settlements--the Russo-Japanese War and a conflict over Morocco which would have thrust Germany into war with France. He did not think Black African savages were "ready" for self rule and yet he invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, infuriating the entire block of Confederate states.  He was a man who reveled in slaughtering animals, proving his manhood like some pre Francis Macomber, but he was an ardent conservationist who wanted to protect wild animals and their habitats.

He was erudite enough to quote scripture from the Koran to clerics on his visit to Egypt, wowing them to the extent that he was the first infidel they ever saw fit to gift a copy of the Koran. Visiting the Balkans, he expounded on the history of those troubled areas, astonishing and delighting the populace. 

But most of the problems he confronted we are still dealing with today: Separation of church and state--he was indifferent to organized religion, having worked out his own sense of ethics as a "gentleman"--wealth inequality; the control by a small number of "special interests" (that was a phrase then) over the rest of the nation; the rape of the environment by coal and oil monopolies; the willfulness of non democratic governments to dominate economies and countries which have elected forms of government;  the overwhelming of the working man by the owners.

He did not believe international disputes could or should be arbitrated by judicial bodies like the World Bank or the Hague. He thought the manly thing to do was to settle conflicts with war. So he led the charge into the Spanish American War. But then, he gave Cuba its independences more rapidly than anyone expected, and after presiding over the rape of the Philippines and facing ongoing insurrection there, he bargained for an early settlement.

He faced, during his Presidency, what every President since the Civil War has faced: the fact that through generational efforts, the South has Won the Civil War, as Heather Cox Richardson, among many others has argued. They simply never stopped resisting, lynching, suppressing their Negroes/Blacks/African Americans.

He rejected the irrational, the unprovable and decisions and ideas based on blind faith as a retreat into the Middle Ages, the time before the Enlightenment, but he never succeeded in defeating that willful blindness.

Almost every really good history is based on what happened in the past as it is revealed in the words and pictures of those who lived it--diaries, newspapers, newsreels, books--but good history writing is not really about the past; as you read it you are fully aware you are reading about issues we still grapple with today. The demagogue who appeals to the lowest intellect, to the emotional masses who feel deprived, resentful and are hungry for revenge has always been with us. The sense of outrage of the mass of working folks who know the system is designed in a way which means they can never win--"the game is rigged." The inclination to look for explanations in "God" and, as Christopher Hitchens calls it, "That invisible dictator in the sky." George Carlin saw the same "Invisible God in the sky, who will punish you with everlasting hellfire, misery and suffering--But He LOVES YOU!"

Some problems get solved, over time. Technology and social  organization eliminates mass starvation and food insecurity for most people, goods and services become more widely available, even if unevenly. But many problems of ignorance, economic grievance, racial intolerance, religious strife persist. 

This is where Donald Trump thrives. He wants to take us back to the good old days when men were men and  women were under the thumb of men and America was Archie Bunker white and everyone was happy, and even before that, to the time of the Kaiser and the Royal families who ruled Europe and Africa and Asia.

He is careful to not play the race card too overtly, because A/ He doesn't have to--all he has to do is say the dark illegal immigrants from South of the border are "an infestation" or talk about "shithole nations" and everyone knows he is full out Archie Bunker

B/There really has been progress in some ways in race relations which he cannot undo, and he can appeal to the macho in Brown Hispanic males if he is not too obviously racist.

As you get older, you don't get quite as angry and frustrated when you hear Trump or hear his acolytes echo his nonsense: You just shake your head and smile, because you know you've heard that line before and you know how that plays out.