Peterson verdict today

A dead-on observation and analysis, to be sure. And it summarizes one of the most thoroughly offputting parts of the whole thing for me from the very beginning...

...so much so, in fact, that when one of the producers from Greta Van Susterin's show on the FOX NEWS CHANNEL called me a few minutes after the verdict yesterday afternoon and asked me if I'd be interested in driving from Napa down to Redwood city so I could sit, as I've sat seemingly countless times before, in one of their tall, blue, folding director's chairs beneath their white tent top so I could be on Greta's program, live by satellite, at 7:00 PM PST last night, I passed... yet again. I'm not saying I'll never do it again, ever; but having refused to do it any more for over a year now, I find myself needing to shower-off the sleaze of it all less and less and less as time goes by.

 

Jimmy, many times I agree with you but must say in this instance your reply above is missing the point of the full implications of Dr. Bear's question. If legislation were indeed passed that legally and officially established that full human life begins at the moment of conception then it must follow that any and all miscarriages would indeed be suspect and thus subject to full investigation. This of course would have to include requirements that doctors officially report all miscarriages to police and child protective services before any woman would be allowed to leave a hospital or any other medical facility after treatment for a spontaneous miscarriage. This would then by necessity subject women who have had miscarriages along with their husbands and other family members to full police investigations including the filing of official reports for investigation of possible criminal activity, since these reports would pertain to a possible murder then it's certainly reasonable to expect that arrests might also be involved. Official reports would also have to be filed by child protective services for investigation of possible child abuse to the point of causing death of that child. Child protective service reports at that level of seriousness would also necessitate arrests as well as temporary removal of any other children in the home and placement of those children in foster homes or state care facilities until investigations can reasonably prove that no intentional wrongdoing was involved in the spontaneous miscarriage.

None of these concerns are 'scare tactics' but simply the facts of how current investigations are handled for suspected cases of child abuse or in cases of suspicious death of a child. If "life begins at conception" were indeed codifed into law then these investigative techniques would have to be expanded to include all deaths occuring through spontaneous miscarriage. There have already been numerous instances where parents of postnatal infants tragically lost through SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) have been subjected to exactly these kinds of investigations up to and including arrests of parents and removal of other children from the home. This of course only furthers the parents' extreme shock, grief and pain at their tragic loss at a time when these things seem permanently intractable. It also causes what can be irrepairable trauma to their families. This is especially true of other children (siblings of the SIDS child) who may not only witness an arrest of one or both of their parents but also find themselves subsequently removed from their homes, restricted from any contact with their parents, and placed in the care of strangers for an undetermined period of time. Miscarriages are far, far more common than SIDS but also involve much physical and deeply emotional pain for parents. Would you really want to see such investigative tactics of innocent parents expanded to each and every miscarriage?

I personally find the idea of elective abortion to be disturbing to the point of repugnance, but for the reasons above I also believe that "life begins at conception" is not anything that should ever be codified into law. You seem to be a reasonable man so I am also confident that you realize the differences between a pregnancy ended by spontaneous miscarriage, one ended peripherally by an abusive spouse or assault by a stranger, and one ended by elective abortion. The single fact that an ended pregnancy is one result of all of these situations cannot logically be pulled out of context in an attempt to justify that these separate and distinct instances are in any way all the same thing. If no distinctions are to be made in those instances then distinctions also cannot be made between 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, manslaughter, vehicular homicide, or justifiable homicide for self defense. All of those situations involve the fact of an unnatural and involuntary death of another person, but those situations must also be considered separately and not lumped together by virtue of their single commonality. There are already laws that cover bodily harm resulting from assault and battery, including intentional harm that involuntarily ends a pregnancy. It's just not at all the same thing as a spontaneous miscarriage or even an elective abortion, regardless of how repugnant the idea of elective abortion may be. Actually, the correct medical term for "miscarriage" is "spontaneous abortion", and the correct term for a woman who has had multiple spontaneous miscarriages is "habitual aborter". But considering the emotionally charged meaning surrounding the very word "abortion" and the endless debates between shrill and unreasonable voices on either extreme of that issue who are never going to find agreement either with each other or with much more reasonable and considerably less shrill voices, it's perfectly understandable why those proper terms are seldom used outside of medical facilities.

Kit

 

Bill (in his fascinating eyewitness account): What was so extraordinary about the scene was the media frenzy. In a sense, the press invented the whole thing.

John: I wonder how many of those exact same people and trucks also spent a few months outside the home where Elian Gonzalez was being kept. What a life.

 

Remember the 1983 movie The Right Stuff? Remember how, whenever the press swarmed around any or all of the astronauts, there was a weird, growing, locust sort of sound in the background?

That about said it all, don't you think?

 

Re: The subject that will never die.

And I can assure everyone here that there are many, many more children waiting to be adopted than that will ever be. Many of those will end up staying in foster care until age 18 when they are rather unceremoniously tossed out and made to fend for themselves.

Yes, the white babies get adopted. However, white babies represent only a small portion of the children waiting for adoption.

I find abortion morally repugnant. I also find warehousing children morally repugnant.

Anyone who believes that there is an easy answer to this problem isn't working hard enough at understanding the question.



Tom Nixon

 

Hi Gregg - I hate this subject too. I think about, for example, the Chinese government that felt the need to pass laws outlawing couples from having more than one child in order to protect their own marginal standards of living. It was an interesting notion, certainly controversial, ethically debatable and maybe they felt they had to do it regardless of whether it was "right" or not. It hasn't really worked however as evidenced by the thousand of Chinese kids that get adopted every year. Most recently it has become legal for Chinese couples to have more than one kid if they pay a fee. To me this very quickly begins to smell very badly and makes me wonder about the motivation of such a modification in the law. In any case, I had asked about the definition of "viability" and you seemed unable to provide one. Maybe I'll look elsewhere. Too bad though, as it seemed you were hanging much of your argument on this notion of viability. Oh well.
Jack

 

Oy.

And that the Chinese government is shamelessly and notoriously corrupt is relevant to anything I wrote... how, again? Or are you citing the Chinese population control experience as an example of the futility of all such programs, generally? If so, do you really want me to spell-out the fallacy of that particular line of thinking? I mean... really?

Your tone betrays your itch for a fight... or so it seems to me at this point; and your dismissal of virtually all else that I wrote in my earlier posting betrays classic, tunnel-visioned, pro-life sensibilities; and fundamentally flawed debating technique. I didn't think that's where we were, here. Please give me a little guidance: Should I be arguing with more suppressed vitriol and unsuppressed sarcasm... just to keep the playing field level, I mean?

At any rate, for the record: You didn't ask me for a definition of "viability;" so please don't try to make it appear to the reader that I ducked your punch. I stand toe-to-toe a whole lot more effectively in this life than that. Your exact words were, and I quote:

Neither the words "define" nor "definition;" nor any word(s) or phrase(s) even remotely synonomous therewith, appears anywhere in your above-quoted prose. You asked me, simply, to "say something further," and that's precisely what I did... assuming -- and apparently mistakenly so -- that the common meaning of the word, itself, was well-known to all.

All that having been said, and since you seem to require something of a spelling out of it, let me see if I can clarify...

• vi·a·ble (adjective) [French, from Middle French, from vie life, from Latin vita]
  1. capable of living; especially: capable of surviving outside the mother's womb without artificial support
  2. capable of growing or developing; as in viable seeds or viable eggs
  3. capable of working, functioning, or developing adequately; as in "a viable alternative"
  4. capable of existence and development as an independent unit; as in "the colony is now a viable state"
  5. having a reasonable chance of succeeding; as in "a viable candidate"
  6. financially sustainable; as in "a viable enterprise"
  OTHER FORM: vi·a·bil·i·ty (noun)
  OTHER FORM: vi·a·bly (adverb)
  From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

I have highlighted in red, above, the specific part of the definition that I had in mind -- and assumed the reader would, as well -- when I wrote, pursuant to your request, "something further about the concept of viability" in my earlier post.

And oh, what I fool I am, therefore... eh? Gimmee a break, will ya? Viability, categorically speaking, is no more a mere "notion" than... oh... let's say... the Eucharist, for example. At any given moment, a fetus either is viable, as defined above, or it's not. It's objective. It's binary. It suffers from no gray areas. It's science. It's medicine. It's nature. It's palpable. Period. Ain't no "notion" to it.

Were that the Eucharist could say as much about itself.

Sorry if I seem snippy, but the infamous "you didn't answer my question" tactic; coupled with your presumably intentional misstatement of the question in the first place as part of said tactic; and then the dismissive "you seemed unable to provide one," and all that that implies to the reader about what you'd like them to believe is an inherent weakness in my argument... well... what can I say... it ticked me off.

If you're gonna' poke me with the debate stick, just be sure you come to battle armed adequate weapons and tactics... either that, or bring extra Neosporin and Band-Aids.

 

The legal test is whether or not Connor could have lived out of the womb. After 6 months, it is possible to live outside of the womb and murder is normally charged for these cases. This case didn't present any issues which would result in case law.

If memory serves me right, California just passed a law protecting fetuses and making a separate crime in the case where the mother is murdered and the fetus dies. (I know there is a fixed time - probably after the second trimester)

 

The foregoing is not quite accurate; and a careful reading of the article to which I earlier referred everyone would, I believe, help to clear it up a bit.