The Partial-Birth Abortion ban is currently on trial. Or, I should say, on “trials” – there are three separate trials, in New York, Lincoln and San Francisco.
Judge Richard Casey of the New York trial is making headlines for his extremely biased and pro-life questioning of doctors. The mainstream news coverage is pretty restrained; if you want to hear the disgusting details, you have to visit pro-life news sources, whose unending appitite for gore has them delighted with Judge Casey. (For an example, check out this post at After Abortion, reprinting some pro-life reporter’s “trial notebook.”)
Well, fair is fair – after all, some of the other judges seemed biased towards the pro-choice side. Whatever.
Whatever the lower courts decide, the Supreme Court will definitely find the PBA to be unconstitutional. That’s the current Supreme Court, though. It seems to me that pro-lifers are hoping that by the time the Supreme Court examines the PBA ban, they’ll be dealing with a different Court.
So what’s important for the future of the PBA ban is not what’s going on in the courts, but what goes on in the 2004 election. Here are the options:
- George Bush is elected, and gets a chance to replace one of the “anti-PBA five” (Ginsberg, O’Connor, Stevens, Breyer, and Souter) with a pro-life justice before the PBA ban comes to trial. In this case, the PBA ban is constitutional.
- George Bush is elected, but the PBA ban comes to trial before he gets a chance to replace any of the “anti-PBA five.” In this case, the PBA ban will be found unconstitutional – but only for the time being, because congress will pass a new PBA ban as soon as the Supreme Court lineup does change.
- George Bush is elected, but his appointment to the Supreme Court fails to be anti-abortion enough (this is what happened to Bush Sr, with both Kennedy and Souter), and the PBA ban continues to be unconstitutional.
- Kerry is elected, in which case the PBA ban will continue to be unconstitutional.
So that’s why I’ll be holding my nose and voting for John Kerry..
Okay, good point. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t included the crack about pro-lifers’ appitite for gore. (Although the comment about the judge being biased, which Joe also objected to, seems fair to me; after all, in the same post I also called a pro-choice judge biased).
On the other hand, I’ve never seen anti-death-penalty activists displaying gigantic gory posters in grand central station, so I’m not sure that things are as equivilent as Elkins implies. And if the anti-death-penalty folks did focus on gore that much, wouldn’t that be fair grounds for criticism? (Although that criticism could be put more intelligently and sensitively than I put it in this post, I admit.)
There are two problems with the gore fixation, whether the person fixating is anti-abortion or anti-death penalty or anti-war.
First, it’s an irrelevant tangent. I’m not anti-death-penalty because the electric chair is gross; my opposition to the death penalty doesn’t change if the state executes people using lethally comfy chairs. Similarly, abortion isn’t objectionable to pro-lifers because it’s gross. In both cases, it’s NOT the gore that people are really objecting to.
Furthermore, as Raznor pointed out, just because soemthing is disgusting doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong.
Whether we’re talking death penalty or abortion, fixating on gore is an emotional cheap shot. It’s trying to win the issue not by making people think about it, but by using shock tactics to take a detour around thought and instead go directly to visceral repulsion.
* * *
The funny thing is that Joe is accusing me of trying to hide the gore – when I deliberately linked to the goriest pro-life report about the trial I could find, because I anticipated Joe’s criticism and wanted to forstall it. Apparently, linking to something but criticizing it is now the same as trying to hide it. Oh, well.
Amp said:
“Whether we’re talking death penalty or abortion, fixating on gore is an emotional cheap shot. It’s trying to win the issue not by making people think about it, but by using shock tactics to take a detour around thought and instead go directly to visceral repulsion.”
Which is how much of the pro-Life movement (and I say most because not all pro-Lifers use these tactics, though the tactic is ubiquitous) fights their battle–by using the fetus porn. In fact for some pro-lifers I’ve had discussions with gory pictures of unborn children are what tipped them to the pro-life side. Organizations like the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (http://www.cbrinfo.org/) have their displays of the dismembered unborn that they display on College Campuses and on the sides of rolling exhibits (they decorate trucks and vans with pictures of supposedly aborted babies). They even fly banners from the backs of planes.
So yes, the phrase “unending appetite for gore” is an entirely appropriate descriptor for much of the anti-abortion crowd.
Well, have you ever seen animal rights protestors with pictures of animals mistreated on farms or labs? Are they the ones with an appetite for “gore”? Or are they just trying to draw attention, in our attention-starved society, to something that they believe is wrong? Aren’t the ones who are truly in favor of “gore” those who would dismiss what any animals might go through as somehow beneath any consideration?
And isn’t the same true here?
Joe M.,
I think that there is an important difference between the Animal rights movement and, say, the anti-abortion movement or the anti-death penalty movement. In the latter cases it is the act itself (abortion or execution) that is being protested. In the former, it is the mistreatment of animals in farms or labs that is being protested – not (in the majority of cases) the slaughter for food of said animals. Therefore, IMO, it seems reasonable to float the “gore” if that is what you are protesting. But maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree on this one.
Joe M. sez:
“Woman? What woman?”
Joe asked:
“Well, have you ever seen animal rights protestors with pictures of animals mistreated on farms or labs? Are they the ones with an appetite for “gore”? ”
In the case of PETA I would say yes. However, I don’t know very many animal rights activists who flash pictures of mutilated animals with the same kind of glee that anti-abortion protestors flash their pics. And I’ve never seen animal rights protestors put pics of mutilated animals on the sides of vans and trucks or fly them over stadiums dragged behind planes.
Joe asked:
“Aren’t the ones who are truly in favor of “gore” those who would dismiss what any animals might go through as somehow beneath any consideration?”
No. In fact, I would say that those who dismiss what animals go through in order to provide meat for humans are probably so averse to gore that they simply don’t like to think about it.
Amp wrote:
Sure. That seemed fair to me, too. ;-)
Well, no. ‘Cause if they did that, you know what would happen, don’t you?
Yeah, that’s right. All of the drooling vengeance-mongers would come out of the woodwork, that’s what! They’d all pop open their bottles of champagne, and sit back going: “Yeah! Cool! Looks like he really suffered!” ‘Cause, you know, those guys really do have an unending appetite for gore!
::notices everyone staring at her::
Oh my god. Did I just say that out loud?
Sure. And I agree that the “gore strategy” is most certainly fair grounds for criticism, just as the “emotional delving” strategy so disgustingly beloved by both left and right is. Or the “outright lying” strategy, for that matter.
I deeply sympathize with the sense of moral outrage which I suspect is what leads many pro-lifers to try to utilize the Gore Strategy (haven’t you ever felt so frustrated by someone’s inability to understand what seems to you to be a self-evident TRUTH that you just want to metaphorically SLAP some sense into them?), but that doesn’t mean that I like it or approve of their giving rein to the desire to do it, or that I consider it at all immune from criticism.
That it is. And I’m not crazy about sleazy rhetorical ploys. I’m even less crazy about them when they seem to me to display a certain lack of respect for human dignity, which frankly, Fetus Porn often does seems to me to do–although I do not think that such is at all the intent of those who use it. (And btw, Joe, I’m not crazy about PETA’s Bunny Porn either.)
I didn’t like those Holocaust movies they used to show us in religious school either, the movies of the concentration camps, and for much the same reason: while those films were ostensibly being shown to us to drive home to us the horror of what had happened, I felt that their actual effect was to dehumanize the victims of the camps even further.
If I believed that a fetus was a human being, and an aborted fetus a victim of murder, I think that I would find Fetus Porn very distressing indeed. Really, it’s a bit like waving the police photos of the victim of a serial killer around in public, isn’t it? It does not strike me as very respectful to the dignity of the dead.
But, I think that most of the people who use the strategy are probably driven more by intense frustration and outrage than they are by either disrespect of the dead or by any inherent affection for gore.
Getting back to the original links, though, one of the things that I found most interesting about them was the implicit issue of how doctors can best navigate that fine line between insensitivity and mystification.
To me, for example, “contents of the cranium” is just about as clear as can be. It does not strike me as “euphemistic.” It is a bit more polite than “we’re gonna suck the critter’s brains right outta its skull,” sure, but the meaning is clear, and I think the latter phrasing would be a mite bit…well…inappropriate, myself.
But what of a woman without the education or the vocabulary to know what a “cranium” is?
Although I know that it was not the intent or the main thrust of the article, I found myself thinking a good deal about how difficult it must be for doctors to explain procedures of this sort in ways that strike a good balance of clarity and sensitivity. They were really sort of damned if they did and damned if they didn’t in that Q&A session, weren’t they? If they didn’t explain the procedure clearly enough, they were engaging in mystification. But if they explained it too bluntly, then they would have been open to accusations of being insensitive to their patients.
5. Bush gets re-elected, but the Democrats get a fragile majority in both the House and Senate. The Democrats, developing spines and remembering who they’re supposed to represent, make Bush’s life a living purgatory every time he lobs another pro-life justice in their direction.
Which is why I don’t think there’s a clothespin strong enough to make my olfactory senses shut down long enough to vote Kerry. But I could be wrong. :(
The issue here does not pertain to people’s oppinion. If abortion itself was what each individual believed it was, it would be many different things. Truth cannot change with how one percieves it to be. This is a vital foundation on which everything else must be based if it is to hold any logical and valid substance at all. If abortion is infact, the killing of a human being (which has by many people been proven to be factual and true) then there are only two views that can follow. One is that it is wrong, and the other, is that it is not wrong. If it is wrong, then what the pro-lifers are doing to prevent the killing of babies, is a good thing. If abortion isn’t wrong, then following that same logic, euthenasia must not be wrong either. And if abortion isn’t wrong, (knowing that it is the killing of a human life) then we must conclude that the killing of human life is not wrong.
You’re right, Krista, the whole abortion issue really is that simple. Thanks for stopping by and clearing that up.
I’m going to cut Krista some slack and assume she is a non-native English speaker–it would be tacky to jump on the bizarre syntax if that’s the case.
Krista, I assume you do not believe that ending a human life is wrong under all circumstances, such as in self-defense. I’d also assume you assign different degrees of ‘wrong’, as the law does; that is, killing somebody by accident is not as morally wrong as killing somebody on purpose. That all kinds of puts a dent in your rather binary argument.
fuck the death penalty
fuck the death penalty
“Extremely biased” and “disgusting details”?? I understand that you are a supporter of abortion, and therefore would like as little description as possible. (Everything should be in euphemisms, etc.) What I saw was that the judge asked whether the fetus felt pain, while the pro-choice “expert” claimed to be unfamiliar with the very idea of pain during abortion. Not very believable, which perhaps explains why you wouldn’t like the judge’s questions.
And the phrase “unending appitite for gore” [sic] would more aptly apply to those who, like you, DEFEND the use of abortion procedures that are gory, rather than to the abortion opponents who oppose such procedures but who think that while if you’re going to defend their legality you should have the balls to talk about them.
Joe, have you ever seen open heart surgery? It’s pretty gross and gory. But most people would prefer not to go into the gory details. I guess therefore, open heart surgery oughta be banned, huh?
Hi. First time posting here, although I’m a housemate of Amp’s and Bean’s, and have lurked around here for ages.
While I myself fully support continuing to keep third term abortions legal in cases where the mother’s health or life is at risk (and didn’t much like the tit-for-tat of Joe’s response–as indeed, I was not meant to), I think that I can understand the cause of Joe’s indignation over what Amp wrote.
Are opponents of the death penalty indulging themselves in an “unending appetite for gore” when they talk about the smell of the burning skin of the man in the electric chair, or the convulsions that result from lethal injections?
The extent to which people prefer to focus on the “gore factor” of anything unpleasant is usually determined, I’d say, by how they feel about the practical necessity or moral rectitude of the unpleasant act. It is opponents of the death penalty, not its supporters, who tend to focus on the disgusting and painful aspects of execution methods, and Hawks don’t seem to like to talk about the carnage of the battlefield nearly as much as Doves do. Yet as both a pacifist and an opponent of the death penalty, I think that I would feel pretty damned cranky if I read a post somewhere insinuating that people like me must possess “an unending appetite for gore.”
I mean, come on. This procedure is gory. It’s totally gross, and even if one does not believe a fetus to be a human being in the full sense (or even in any sense) of that term, and even if one believes that it is acceptable–or even a moral imperative–to kill a fetus for the benefit of the health of the mother, it is nonetheless exceptionally unpleasant to contemplate a late-term fetus’ brains being sucked out of its head, its cranium crushed with tongs. Just imagine how much worse that would sound to you if you believed a fetus to be fully invested with human rights, and abortion tantamount to murder! Then maybe you can understand why pro-life people might get a little bit…dwelly when it comes to the gore factor, yeah?
All that said, though, I also agree with Raznor (and with Amp, in a post on another thread) that we do not and should not outlaw things merely because they are disgusting. Sometimes icky stuff is necessary, and we don’t always want or need to hear about the gruesome details. Still, I don’t know if I think it’s quite playing cricket to imply that pro-lifers are intrinsically morbid or gore-luvin’ people. If you shared their beliefs, you’d likely find yourself focussing on the ick factor as well, not only for the persuasive effect you’d hope it might have on others (although surely that would play a part) but also out of plain and simple outrage.
::shrug::
Hey. You know. I’m just sayin’.
Good point Elkins. Although I personally don’t find the brain suction that disgusting when I contemplate it – I just think of that scene at the end of Starship Troopers when that bug sucks the brains out of one of the heroes. Man, a lifetime of violent movies and nothing shocks me anymore.