Not just taking this
Still the Times – sorry it doesn’t provide links for individual pieces the way Guardian Live (for instance) does.
Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, was seated in the same Planned Parenthood where she chose to have an abortion after an assault, listening to providers and advocates talk about the challenges of their work at a roundtable when her chief of staff passed her a phone. The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Sitting in the same place where it was easy to access, and sitting in the same place where those rights were stripped away from people who right now are in the same situation that I was in,” she recalled. “It broke me down. I was just in shock.”
“The thing that I haven’t reconciled in my head is the majority of Americans did not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” she said, adding “we have to make it clear that we are not taking this and just saying okay.”
I’m much the same. Like everyone else I knew it was coming of course, but the arrival is still a shock and a disgust and a horror.
The right to own murder implements is so important, it needs to be enshrined at the federal level. The right to govern one’s own body however can be left to each state.
And now we wait for the inevitable TA rhetoric demanding, still, that the left center trans people and in doing so hand ammunition over to the right in this most critical time.
Here’s a new slogan:
Abortion doesn’t kill people, guns kill people.
I know many protest that abortions kill people, but at the point abortions are done, they are not yet people, not in any sense of the word we would recognize. When I was shown an ultrasound of the fetus before I had my abortion, it just looked like a smear on the film.
iknklast:
That’s right. We do not burst all in an instant into conscious, self-aware existence. It only dawns on us slowly. My earliest memory is of learning to walk unaided, making the enormous distance across from the armchair to the settee all by myself. My mother later told me that it took place when I was 8 months old. (She was present when I did it.)
Thus a foetus is neither conscious nor self-aware, and thus arguably not possessed of what the religiously-inclined call a ‘soul’. Neither is an embryo. Otherwise, every Catholic woman would be obliged to bring her used tampons and sanitary napkins to church in order to have the last rites gone through over them by the priest; just in case they contained somewhere within, an embryo with an immortal soul.
And life doesn’t begin at conception, it just kind of continues. Sperm and egg are both living. What do we say about all those that don’t survive, all those millions who get absorbed? Do they go to Heaven, or Hell? What happens to the seed that is spilled or otherwise never even gets into the vaginal canal? Will men be held accountable for the mortal sin of not having sex when they orgasm? And me, there’s no hope for redemption because of a vasectomy. I am a murderer.
Does an egg have a half-soul?
Too many unanswered questions!
Not even joking. There’s some biblical thing about (as the KJV translates it) spilling the seed on the ground. BIG no-no.
Omar @ 3 – I think cognitive scientists would tell you that’s not a real memory but one you constructed from being told about the incident. I think I’ve read that brains just can’t form memories that early. Not until about 3 years.
Every Sperm is Sacred.
https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk
Mike:
Arguably yes, and conferred on it by its haploid number (N) of chromosomes. Normal body cells are diploid (2N). But human eggs come only with a single X chrmosome each. The sex-determing chromosome for maleness is only found in sperm cells; but there are billions more of them produced in a father’s lifetime than there are eggs produced in a mother’s.
Catholic dogma holds, as far as I am aware, that gametes do not have souls; nor even half-souls. Which is probably just as well, as otherwise Limbo would be chockers full of half-souled male spirits: probably outnumbering the half-souled female spirits by about 100 million to one. Which IMHO* would make for some pretty uninteresting parties of a Saturday night in Limbo**.
But please do not take this as gospel from me. I am a lapsed never-evangelical Anglican and my time in it was pretty light on complex theology. But I liked the hymn-singing, and the church organist made up for that theological deficiency with his musicianship, which was first-rate.
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*IMHO = In My Heterosexual Opinion.
** I think I read somewhere that the Pope has recently abolished Limbo, so all those half-souls must have been chucked out, and they would be pretty pissed off, and likely could get up to no good. Could have been a bad Papal mistake, which would have put a bad dent in his infallibility. Time will tell, I guess.
From back in my militant atheist days I seem to remember some fundie defending capital punishment with reference to the alleged immortality of the soul and basically arguing that to Christians “death is no big deal”. So, even if we concede that life begins at conception (or earlier), I guess the question is why does death suddenly become such a big deal when it comes to the unborn? Let me guess: because it lets the aborted souls off the hook too easy, right?
OB:
Well, I could lie on the far extremity of some cognitive scientist’s bell-curve, but for me it was a vivid eureka moment, like the first just as very vividly remembered time I managed to stay on a 2-wheeler bike while it was in motion; although that occurred when I was about 5. (Much of the rest of my past is just a blur.) My mother was not present at the time I took my first steps, and I was alone in the room. She only told me later that I was walking at 8 months.
Otherwise, my life has not featured much in the way of physical prowess. I was only average in sports (sniffle, sob.) We all just have to make the best of what we are born with, I guess.
My understanding is that some people retain some very young memories, usually related to trauma. I remember falling down the stairs at my grandmother’s house when I was less than two. But normal memories from that age are scarce.
I think I’m on the other end of the bell curve from Omar. I don’t have any memories before I started school at age six (well, technically, I lacked one and a half months of being six). It’s like my life didn’t start until I started school.
I have, I think, two memories from age 3, but they’re terribly hazy. They’re like very blurry snapshots of a place at a moment and my position in the place – no more real content than that.
Me too, a few hazy memories from early childhood, probably traumatic, and I really have to think about them to remember. I wonder how accurate they are after me recreating them again and again. I think my solid memories started about 8 or 10. It’s been so long since then, that they aren’t even three dimensional. What did it smell like? What noises did I hear? What colors were things? More like an old silent movie in black and white.
Before they outlawed supersonic flight over populated areas, I occasionally heard sonic booms. They were very visceral. I haven’t heard one since I was young, and my descriptions would pale compared to the experience of them. Memory is an odd thing indeed.
There is something very circular about insisting that a memory must be accurate because you remember so clearly, isn’t there. It’s basically saying “I know my memory is accurate because my memory itself tells me so”.
Bjarte:
Except that your objection would apply to ALL memories, recent and long past. And if you do not like that formulation, perhaps a way out for you is to contend that the more recent them memory, the better recalled.
For my part, I remember vivdly walking into my study 5 minutes ago and checking my emails and this site. But I do not think that memory of that will stay with me for more than 2 or 3 days. Yet one or two early childood experiences will be with me, on present indications, until I shuffle off this mortal alfoil.
I don’t know why memories would have to be entirely accurate in order to represent legitimate early childhood memories. Some details may be enhanced or added over time. I have memories of incidents that I know took place before I was five because they were from a place I left at the age of four. Not many such memories, not long (a few seconds here and there), perhaps embellished, but present, and fixed in time.
Omar #16
It does apply to all memories. I’m definitely not claiming to be an expert, but I did read quite a bit about the strengths and weaknesses of memory* back in my movement skeptic days, and as I understand it, time is indeed one important factor when it comes to assessing the reliability of a memory (i.e. memories become less reliable over time, I have not read any reputable experts who disputed this), but far from the only one. Other important factors include things like number of repetition. Humans are especially good at remembering repeating patterns (e.g. taking the bus to school every day). What we then remember is a kind of abstraction of what usually happened. Our recollections of specific instances (e.g. one particular bus-trip to school) is far less reliable.
Another hugely important factor is the emotional intensity of the experience. E.g. victims of/eyewitnesses to a violent crime don’t easily forget an experience like that**. Even here the memory of specific details is far less reliable, though, and this is a serious problem when it comes to, say, identifying the perpetrator. Too often the witness confidently identifies any face that happens to look familiar (from photographs of the suspect in the media, other people who happened to be present, or even from a totally unrelated context) even if that person couldn’t possibly have committed the crime. Extreme stress is very good for remembering that something terrible happened, not so good for remembering the specifics (who? what? how?).
None of this is particularly shocking or surprising to me since my own memory is notoriously shitty, and I am entirely dependent on technology (digital calendars, alarm clocks etc.) as well as a certain self-imposed “OCD” (checking my pockets to make sure I Have my keys, my phone, and my wallet before leaving my apartment etc.) to manage even the simplest tasks. And even then it’s not always enough. I have also can’t count the number of times I have gone back and watched a video recording of an event I took part in (from skydiving to job meetings on Microsoft Teams) only to discover that the way things really happened was significantly different from they way I remembered. I have similar experiences with re-watching an old movie, re-reading a book etc.
Or at least I think I do ;)
* From authors like Elizabeth Lofthus and Svein Magnussen, a Norwegian psychologist specializing in “witness psychology”.
** Contrary to the Freudian idea of repressed memories, the problem with traumatic memories is that the victim tends to remember the traumatic experience too well: The memory keeps forcing itself back into consciousness leaving the victim unable to put the traumatic experience behind her and get on with her life.
Example of notoriously shitty memory: Forgetting to include the footnotes…
What Bjarte said. Memory really is a very fallible thing, and it’s tricky because we assume it isn’t.
OB: What you apper to me to be saying is that there is a fine line between memory and delusion, and moreover, we cannot know when we have crossed it. Which means, does it not, that modernity becomes impossible.? An airline pilot may think that he/she can navigatre the plane to a smooth landing based on past experience, but if only a small part of that is delusional, the airlines etc of the world are in serious trouble, as are their passengers.
Except experience and reality both say otherwise.
No, that’s not what I’m saying, and I think it’s obvious why not.