A Complicated Day
May. 4th, 2022 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI had a lot of trouble sleeping last night. However, I did wake up with a plan (I always do; it is my superpower). The plan is pretty simple. If what I want is for the school system to teach kids about how complicated and difficult decisions around reproductive care are, and that’s why we leave it up to each individual along with their chosen medical care and other care providers, with some extra special fraught when the person who is pregnant is a child themselves, and the school system is not and has never done that, it’s time for Mama to step up and do it herself.
My intention was to start with the Irish experience, as it is recent enough to be directly relevant in other respects (medical care and women’s place in society was a lot different in 1973, when the right was recognized in the US, than it was after 2012. The Irish experience between 2012, when Savita Halappanavar died because of poor medical treatment directly related to restrictive abortion laws, and 2018, when those laws finally started to be corrected effectively, is going to feel much more relatable, if only because it is a developed, European nation and the events overlap with my son’s lifespan.
However, as I worked my way through those events, I realized that it was going to be too much information to absorb. In an effort to clarify sepsis, I thought to go to a relative who died in our past (death occurred in the 1920s) as a result of sepsis secondary to incomplete abortion — exactly the same as Savita Halappanavar, but simpler documentation to work through and maybe would hit closer to home, because a relative, and a woman who didn’t want a second child with her husband, who she’d married at 15 when he was twice her age.
But again, that was also complex, and I started thinking through what really is the rhetoric around those who seem inexplicably to want to kill women. And the answer is: the belief that human life begins at conception. That sent me back to wikipedia to better understand the products of conception, and _that_ my very dear reader, was revelatory.
I have a _delightful_ frame for my curriculum now and I could not be more excited to share it with anyone who will listen. Human life cannot begin at conception. An ectopic pregnancy, a blighted ovum, a molar pregnancy — these are all the products of conception. And NONE of these can under any circumstances ever lead to a human life. Period. So. I will build from there. And I absolutely am not going to make any kind of declaration about when a human life begins because I don’t care. My goal is to put the focus on where human life comes from, which is from a reproductive human with a functional uterus, and to emphasize that if you are in favor of human life, making sure that the source of human life is well cared for and safe is Job 1.
My intention was to start with the Irish experience, as it is recent enough to be directly relevant in other respects (medical care and women’s place in society was a lot different in 1973, when the right was recognized in the US, than it was after 2012. The Irish experience between 2012, when Savita Halappanavar died because of poor medical treatment directly related to restrictive abortion laws, and 2018, when those laws finally started to be corrected effectively, is going to feel much more relatable, if only because it is a developed, European nation and the events overlap with my son’s lifespan.
However, as I worked my way through those events, I realized that it was going to be too much information to absorb. In an effort to clarify sepsis, I thought to go to a relative who died in our past (death occurred in the 1920s) as a result of sepsis secondary to incomplete abortion — exactly the same as Savita Halappanavar, but simpler documentation to work through and maybe would hit closer to home, because a relative, and a woman who didn’t want a second child with her husband, who she’d married at 15 when he was twice her age.
But again, that was also complex, and I started thinking through what really is the rhetoric around those who seem inexplicably to want to kill women. And the answer is: the belief that human life begins at conception. That sent me back to wikipedia to better understand the products of conception, and _that_ my very dear reader, was revelatory.
I have a _delightful_ frame for my curriculum now and I could not be more excited to share it with anyone who will listen. Human life cannot begin at conception. An ectopic pregnancy, a blighted ovum, a molar pregnancy — these are all the products of conception. And NONE of these can under any circumstances ever lead to a human life. Period. So. I will build from there. And I absolutely am not going to make any kind of declaration about when a human life begins because I don’t care. My goal is to put the focus on where human life comes from, which is from a reproductive human with a functional uterus, and to emphasize that if you are in favor of human life, making sure that the source of human life is well cared for and safe is Job 1.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 10:47 pm (UTC)Awesome article
Date: 2022-05-05 12:56 am (UTC)However, it does not address the specific component that I am interested in focusing on. The underlying idea in this rejection of “pro-life” and in “pro-life” is sort of a “zygote maximalist” perspective. The basic idea is that every fertilized ovum _could_ grow to become a human being. And yet, not only is that not actually happening even _absent_ any birth control efforts (this awesome author’s calculations), BUT some enormous fraction of ova could not _ever_ become humans, either because of molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, PUL or genetic defects incompatible with life. But just because they cannot become human life themselves does NOT prevent them from killing the woman they are growing inside.
This failure to understand that there are tons of fertilized ova that will not _and cannot under any circumstances_ lead to human life is crucial to my particular approach in 2022. The approach you reference was freaking brilliant in 2012. However, we are now up against people who are looking to define life begins at conception and wipe out not just access to abortion, but also access to many forms of birth control and other reproductive care, based on the thesis that a fertilized ovum _could_ become a human, when that is manifestly _not true_.
I actually failed to understand this until I started looking at it, and R. didn’t see it and Priestess didn’t see it. I think this may be a new(ish) perspective. My goal is to help people understand that if you _genuinely_ want more babies, and more life — and I firmly believe that a lot of people do want this, whether I agree or not — then you need to focus on preventing the deaths of women who want to produce more babies but who are about to be killed, or whose reproductivity is about to be eliminated by these fertilized ova that _can_ kill but _cannot_ grow to be human life.
Re: Awesome article
Date: 2022-05-05 08:10 pm (UTC)Re: Awesome article
Date: 2022-05-05 08:38 pm (UTC)The idea of sperm + ovum = fertilized ovum as the beginning of a human being is what I am calling Zygote Maximalism. Again, not a new perspective.
The part I think is new, or new-ish, is interacting with zygote maximalism by pointing to the many, many fertilized ova which _could never ever ever_ become a human being, either because of where they wind up or what is inside them or whatever, with specific paths identified of course — and I’m shopping for as many paths as I can find.
Arguing that cake batter is cake is a little kooky. But if the cake batter has been made with salt instead of the sugar, or no rise agent, or there is a lit stick of dynamite in it, or is put in an oven that is not functional or whatever, well, that cake batter is never going to be cake. Precisely when the cake batter becomes cake is a question, but some cake batter can never become cake, so saying it is cake when it is in the batter stage is beyond kooky. It’s just wrong.
I haven’t seen this perspective before. You may have.
I think that this perspective is _currently useful_ because if it isn’t even real cake batter but it retains the ability to kill the person who the cake batter is in, refusing to provide cake batter removal care is wildly counterproductive, extremely not pro life, and arguably murder.
Re: Awesome article
Date: 2022-05-05 11:16 pm (UTC)I think for a lot of the people who've been invested in this thinking all their lives, it comes down to a kind of fatalism, that you aren't supposed to change what God has planned for you. Oddly enough this is completely compatible with a hyperindividualistic worldview: you just have to believe that your job is to accept what the universe throws at you, and all your energy should go into coping, making lemonade out of lemons, you know the shit. It's a common response to abuse or other traumatic experiences (a lot of Depression babies, like my parents, had a tinge of this kind of thinking - I was fortunate it was only a tinge), and you can see why.
The difficulties surrounding this debate
Date: 2022-05-06 01:04 pm (UTC)“I have definitely had arguments like that with anti-choice people, most of whom just said that we don't know which fertilized eggs could kill people, and if there's a chance that they wouldn't, we should take that chance because”
The only part of my approach that I think is innovative is restructuring the story of the path from sperm and egg, to fertilized ovum, and then what happens next. The article you shared did a _great_ job of showing just how many fertilized ova get flushed by an egg producing person who has a uterus, who is engaging in potentially reproductive sex with someone who is providing sperm, and who are mutually not engaging in any effort to avoid reproduction. And I think we’ve all heard over the decades the stories of pregnant persons who died in the course of giving birth, or went blind or whatever. This is a path that creates some fairly precise moral conundrums:
Should I save the mother or the baby (people asking this question never frame this as pregnant person. Please prove me wrong)?
The baby has significant developmental problems that may / are probably / definitely are incompatible with life outside the mother (ditto). Should we continue with this and hope for the unlikely, taking some major risks along the way, or should we end this now? Specifically, this descends rapidly into a lot of poorly informed discussion of trisomy and what lives are worth living.
Etc.
I have never seen anyone frame this as:
Fertilized ova may be incapable of becoming babies under any circumstances but can definitely become cancerous and sicken or kill the pregnant person. This would be something like a blighted ovum, or a molar pregnancy. This particular reframe takes the moral conundrum from, “The pregnant person should risk their own life, on the off chance of a new life” to “The pregnant person should die, because they had an egg combine with a sperm, and the resulting cancer is going to kill them.”
A lot of people when they _first_ encounter that second one tend to get really ratcheted, because they’ve heard babies compared to cancers before. But it turns out it can actually be true. I _also_ want to point out that I do recognize that there is at least one long-standing religious group out there that is _still_ going to oppose treatment for that molar pregnancy, but that’s not on anti-abortion grounds per se; they’re opposed to _virtually all_ medical care.
Ectopic pregnancies are a huge problem in this debate, because of the persistent misinformation you describe.
It is probably the case that my approach is such a technical argument (some fertilized ova can NEVER become anything but a mass of potentially illness and death-causing tissue, therefore, it is wrong to describe all fertilized ova as human life and the removal of that human life from the pregnant person as murder) that it serves no useful purpose in a debate with a person who _already has a longstanding, sociocultural commitment to believing that human life begins at conception_.
However, a technical argument that is useless in a debate with a committed opponent _may_ be a useful pedagogical approach which creates a group of people whose perspective on sexual reproduction has a greater degree of immunity to the arguments of the people wandering around saying But the Murdered Innocents. If the first thing that pops into someone’s head when someone says, “Human Life Begins at Conception! Every fertilized ovum is Sacred!” Is, but what about molar pregnancy? Then the resulting interaction is at least going to be a little different.