Get this…
Alyssa Izatt and Kimberley Brownlee wrote in the paper titled “Justice for Girls: On the Provision of Abortion as Adequate Care” that abortions should be forced on young women—legal minors— even if it requires “sedation or physical restraint.” This in a journal recently published by the University of Chicago Press.
The adults responsible for an underage girl’s care “should never pressure or compel her to continue a pregnancy,” they opined. “Nor should they confront her with the three ‘options’ of abortion, adoption, or mothering, as medical professionals are currently advised to do. Instead, her adult caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it.”
They recommend sedation or restraint if necessary. Forced abortions. Not to save the mothers’ lives, but to eliminate the human lives that pro abortion activists believe are mere obstacles that need removal in the best interests of the mothers.
My opinion as an ethics expert: HOLY CATS! This is the reverse of “The Handmaiden’s Tale”!
But write about whatever you feel is ethically urgent.
Ethics Alarms 
I mean, that position kind of makes sense if you squint a little.
Remember that the people who would say things like that are extremists. They do not think like us. If you take the position that the unborn are not people, do not have value, and the termination of pregnancy is morally akin to an appendectomy, then yes… This makes sense.
Assume that there’s a condition that’s effecting your daughter that in the short term will make her physically unwell and will eventually lead to another situation with serious, life altering ramifications. Heck: Assume this is an appendix – She’s been diagnosed with appendicitis, and there is a 100% chance that within nine months her appendix will burst, threatening her life and possibly leading to long-term health complications, but she’s afraid of the surgery.
Of course you’re going to push her to get the surgery. And she might not have a choice. Parents make decisions like this every day. I doubt very seriously that there is ever a day in America where there isn’t a child under anesthesia for a surgery that they don’t understand the details of because their parents have signed off on it.
The position to take in hearing the new scenario is to accept the outcomes as being the natural, rational conclusion of their worldview, and then highlight the newest example of how bankrupt that worldview is for the people who aren’t hopelessly and radically partisan. Something this extreme might even shake moderately entrenched partisans. If you believe that the unborn are valueless clusters of cells, then what argument could you make against this? And if you can’t argue against this, but it still makes you uncomfortable, then maybe your premise is wrong.
Methinks you are being overly generous.
An appendix does not have independent agency separate and apart from a person’s belly. A child does. The authors merely blow past that and want to treat the entire issue as if it were a wart or a skin ailment. As extremists, their positions do not make any sense whatsoever. In fact, that is the thinking behind a certain empire wannabe treating particular groups of people as subhuman subject to a simple, “final” solution to the problem.
jvb
I think you need to actually grapple with what I’ve said. Again: These people do not believe the same things you do. They believe that the unborn have just as many rights and moral baggages as your appendix.
I’m not saying that they’re right, I’m not saying it makes sense – I’m saying they believe it. People out there believe all sorts of incorrect things that don’t make sense, assume that this is just like that.
And once you take that first logical step and accept that the people we’re talking about don’t treat the unborn as having any more or less value than an appendix, then the subsequent actions actually do make sense from their worldview: Parents give consent for kids surgeries on a daily basis in America.
You aren’t going to talk them out of that. They aren’t susceptible to argument or logic. So the question becomes what you’re going to do. And I think the right thing to do here isn’t to waste the bandwidth talking to the extremists, but to talk to the audience.
I think they believe it the way slave holders convinced themselves that Africans weren’t human. The arguments supporting abortion are transparently bootstrapping…conclusions arrived at to support a position that requires the conclusion. How else can one explain the respect given to a mother who refers lovingly and respectfully to her developing fetus as a baby or child, and the credibility the same people bestow on a mother who decides it’s a “clump of cells.” It is one or the other, and the evidence of one characterization is overwhelming. Abortion fans believe it isn’t a living human being because they can’t justify abortion if it is.
Nailed it.
The autonomy of the human person, for one.
The entire house of cards that is the pro-abortion movements rests on “choice”; here the “choice” is removed entirely and the deck crumbles.
I’m sorry, but the first half of that sentence exists.
If you believe that the unborn are valueless clusters of cells, then you believe that they don’t have autonomy. This is the logic they use to wrap themselves up in the slogan of choice. Again… Not saying that I agree, but I recognize the reality that they think that way.
If I squint a little I look like Cary Grant in the mirror.
OK, It looks like the reply function works for me. Are other readers having trouble post comments?
I think it’s working fine for me. If you can see this, it’s working fine.
I only reply from one desktop machine that seems to remember my login info. I never reply from any other location, or from my phone.
charles w abbott
Once saw a meme claiming abortion was equivalent to the human sacrifices of babies to Baal.
I thought that was a ridiculous comparison, reducto ad absurdum. Wouldn’t you know it, my very next exposure to the topic was liberal women saying abortion was essential for ensuring long term health and economic prosperity not only for women, but the whole economy.
It’s essential for rain. Ensures a good harvest. Keeps the volcano from erupting and destroying the village. Reduces climate change carbon footprint.
Future civilizations will look back at our remnants and teach their children of the glyphs of our writings–discussing the brutal gods of Ab-bur-tion and Roe-v-Wade and the lengths pregnant women went to to have their vulnerable innocent children volunteered for purported economic gain. The younger and more innocent the termination, the more acceptable the sacrifice.
I mean…. I think the discussion is serious enough that we should probably approach it seriously. Unlike sacrificing vigrins for good harvest, the economic impacts of abortion are obvious: Because women are productive members of the workforce, removing them for motherhood lowers the economic output of their household, and cumulatively with every other mother, has a material impact on the GDP of the United States.
But just because that’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s, y’know…. Good. We as a species should probably have an interest in not going extinct, and I’m not sure that negative economic output is really an argument against that.
Indeed.
The economic argument isn’t even true. It’s a cost shift.
Women aren’t the only producers contributing to the GDP, but they are the only producers capable of producing offspring.
Assuming a generous five year complete exclusion of producing GDP per child, contrast that with each child’s ability to produce 40 years of GDP over their lifetime. Each abortion selfishly steals a lifetime of GDP from the future for a minimal fraction of one in the present.
The position to take in hearing the new scenario is to accept the outcomes as being the natural, rational conclusion of their worldview, and then highlight the newest example of how bankrupt that worldview is for the people who aren’t hopelessly and radically partisan. Something this extreme might even shake moderately entrenched partisans. If you believe that the unborn are valueless clusters of cells, then what argument could you make against this? And if you can’t argue against this, but it still makes you uncomfortable, then maybe your premise is wrong.
The interesting things here is that when you begin to consider all that are now outcomes and conclusions of ‘worldviews’ that operate in our present, and when you make a listing of those that you (I mean “one”) see as ‘bankrupt’, you are engaging in philosophical, spiritual, religious, and metaphysical thought (and for example I refer to Catholic doctrine on matters of sexuality, on labor and the abuse of labor, on conceptions of what is sacramental, on war-making, and on much else). And once that undertaking is begun, what will be your criteria? Where will you start and where will you end?
What are the premises then? And what are the metaphysical premises? We have to face the fact that in this modernity, and specifically in America’s present modernity, that all values, and all metaphysical values, are rendered RIDICULOUS by the exigencies of culture, or market, or politics. On that there is hardly more to be said. It is all a mess, it is all turn upside-down, and there is no clarification possible.
Because if you are going to propose that the bunch of cells is something more or anything more than its biological definition, right there in the realm of metaphysics, either with a sound knowledge-base or in pure speculation or imagination.
What about those who make selections of what values they will subscribe to and abide by when it is convenient to them? Take as one example the concept, which used to be largely universal, of the sanctity (sacredness) of the marriage union between a man and a woman. It requires a metaphysical entity outside and beyond the creation to even have such a definition of a bond that cannot, or should not, be broken. But this no longer hardly exist. You can marry almost you pet these days. And where did this begin? When it was imagined that a ‘marriage’ could be conducted between any two persons (hint hint).
The worlds we live in, and as I have been suggesting lately, the world of late Americanism, is a confused conglomeration of unclear ideas, some simply acutely physicalist and then every once in a while with a slight infusion of some sense of higher, metaphysical valuation.
Today, in addition to channeling Joyce I have introduced some specs of a Himalayan yogic saint and una pizca de Padre Denis Fahey. It will all go over many heads but that is not my fault!
I no longer think that you’re an LLM, because chatGPT officially writes better than you do.
These are the kinds of things that I could explain to you, but can’t understand for you. Mostly because you aren’t interested in understanding. You put on this faux academic persona and use an ungodly amount of superfluous syllables to avoid saying clearly what you mean, I think because you’re too cowardly to say it in a way that’s easily digestible.
Because there’s really not a lot there.
I believe that you think that by expressing a view on values I’m engaging in “philosophical, spiritual, religious, and metaphysical thought”, which…. sure. You then expressed a desire to know what my thought process is. But I don’t think you really care. I think you just assumed that I don’t have one.
Because there’s a subtext here that my thought process, or frankly the process of anyone that doesn’t hold a similarly regimented and rigid thought process to your professed Catholic beliefs, is a race to the bottom. That America’s present situation has rendered values obsolete via the realities of “culture, or market, or politics”, and most people without those rigid belief structures will eventually succumb to convenience.
As an example of that, you alluded to Gay marriage having taken the sanctity out of marriage, and without the guiding principles of scripture, you can basically marry your pet.
Except… That’s not actually true.
You can’t marry your pet. Not in any state in America. And no one is pushing for it. In fact, since Obergefell, there has been no expansion of the institution of marriage. Period. Pedophilia: Still illegal. Bigamy: Still illegal. Heck… There are Catholic arguments for pedophilia and polygamy, but we still generally agree that they are immoral to the point where we’ve deemed them illegal. All these things we were told were inevitable next steps failed to materialize. In reality the slippery slope which was your entire argument never had a single inch of slip.
And that’s actually important. You should ask why not. Because theoretically, you’re right: If we’re all people of loose morals, driven by base desires and slaves to convenience… Why not recognize polygamy? The argument that polycules exist isn’t an argument, there have always been polycules, just like there have always been pedophiles, zoophiles and gay people. But only one of those groups was formally and legally accepted.
Somehow, despite not engaging in your quasi-objective belief structures, people were and are able to generally agree on the vast majority of subjective morality issues, with most of the arguments being a matter of scale. Abortion is such a hot button issue because it’s one of the few things that there’s actually a large and inverse division of opinion on.
And that’s a feature, not a bug… We have a very pluralistic society. We need mechanisms to figure out ways to get along, to compromise, and that mechanism has generally been the political conversations that we have on the daily, the constructive (in theory) persuasive (hopefully) dialogue.
It’s not that we’re in some kind of moral freefall, it’s that you’re an extremist, and when we force a reconciliation between belief structures, particularly when there’s a negotiated reconciliation, we’re going to err towards permission unless there’s a reason not to, and your baseline morality was very irrationally impermissive.
Because there’s a subtext here that my thought process, or frankly the process of anyone that doesn’t hold a similarly regimented and rigid thought process to your professed Catholic beliefs, is a race to the bottom. That America’s present situation has rendered values obsolete via the realities of “culture, or market, or politics”, and most people without those rigid belief structures will eventually succumb to convenience.
First, Catholic doctrine, and social doctrine and teaching, is for me now a point of reference but not my essential religious or spiritual or moral reference-point. It’s importance is that it is a wide-ranging and defined system, backed up by solid reasoning, if of a Thomist sort. More relevant is what such a System alludes to, which is the topic of metaphysics in the abstract.
The advent of the normalization of homosexuality is part of a larger and general deviation. I have no desire to be improperly or impolitely mean to you, or condemning, but I must respect “higher metaphysical principles”. Please don’t take it personally. It is not easy, but I feel that my task is to (try to) understand how “things fall apart” (in the Keats sense). And as an example, if you examine that poem, it describes, and laments, that the “center” cannot hold together. And my focus is on the concrete, manifest fact that things are indeed falling apart. Again, my concerns are larger than you (seem to) understand.
I think that you well understand that the “clump of cells” is actually a sacred entity. You likely cannot express it quite as forcefully as that, but the intimation is there, is sensed.
But the metaphysical horror of squirting the seed of life into the anal cavity of your companion is (I gather?) harder for you to sense, to condemn, or to feel remorse for.
My point is that when we do “fall down” from strict definitions, and strictly understood metaphysical principles (understood intellectually) that this descent can go, and does go, in many undesirable directions.
I simply draw a comparison between the spiritual laxity that allows insensitivity to the murderous act of abortion … and a whole range of sexual sins. I am sorry if you or anyone does not share these basic definitions or revels against their existence. But they do exist. And the clearer they become, the more demanding they are.
As an example of that, you alluded to Gay marriage having taken the sanctity out of marriage, and without the guiding principles of scripture, you can basically marry your pet.
Well, certainly that is so. That is if you accept the notion of marriage as a sacrament. And yes, that specifically Catholic notion (or really Christian) does depend on the notion of the function of the male and female in union. And yes, if that function is no longer seen as sacred, just as the clump of cells has been made to seem, then of course: two men or two women may “marry”. And yet they shouldn’t. They should know that they shouldn’t. And sone other legal mechanism to define their union should be accepted.
You have to degrade the proper and traditional concept in order to see homosexual marriage as equatable. These are, I admit, metaphysical issues bristling with difficulties and controversies.
“I have no desire to be improperly or impolitely mean to you, or condemning, but I must respect “higher metaphysical principles”.”
You really don’t have to. I mean, really… You already don’t. I would bet unthinkable sums of money that you couldn’t even articulate every Catholic requirement if given an infinite amount of time and a bible, nevermind actually live by them. You may have worn fabrics with more than one color. You’ve probably eaten something you aren’t allowed to. And I doubt very much that once a month you hang out on a corner of your roof in a sack, then douse yourself in ash and burn the sack when your monthly is done.
All these choices that Catholics writ large have made, all these compromises, all these concessions against doctrine have one thing in common: They were convenient. Ya’ll don’t have the principles of the Amish, you haven’t carried difficult practices into modernity. Your faithful barely make holy the sabbath. So what? You eat a couple of wafers, say some “and also with yous”, and then go home, plug in online and partake in the time honored tradition of judging people for not adhering to a morality they don’t recognize.
It’s easy to do that. Isn’t it?
I would bet unthinkable sums of money that you couldn’t even articulate every Catholic requirement if given an infinite amount of time and a bible, nevermind actually live by them. You may have worn fabrics with more than one color. You’ve probably eaten something you aren’t allowed to.
Catholic ethics were not defined in the Bible, but rather over the course of time, by consideration, meditation and debate. As far as I know there are no color restrictions (!) but ‘fish on Friday’ got Catholics the label ‘fisheaters’.
You may have missed the part (above) where I made it clear that I do not adhere to Catholicism, at least not in the recognized ways. I realized (I will not bore you long!) that Catholicism contained many extremely important metaphysical concepts but (in my case) I found that the Vedas are far more complete. But that is neither here nor there. Every point I made to you stands.
But as you your challenge (about knowing Catholic doctrine) I read very carefully, more than once, the Catechism of Trent and the Baltimore Catechism (said to be the most thorough, as well as demanding), and many other books on Catholic social theory. My sister’s husband was raised Catholic and in their house he has a 10,000 volume library (on everything) that I have been able to access.
It is no longer pseudo-intellectuality, mi hijito, I have graduated to a bona fide level! People actually tip their hats when I stroll in our conjunto!
Game recognizes game, I guess.
This may or may not surprise you, but I’m not even slightly curious as to what you believe. I might be interested in why you believe what you believe, but only in a very morbid sense.
You aren’t engaging with what I’m saying… Which isn’t surprising, you never do. What you do is play pigeon chess… You strut onto the scene, knock all the pieces over, take a shit on the board and pretend that you’ve won.
But even “winning” in this sense is very shallow. You take the opportunity to espouse all these lofty ideas and drop the names of people or places or things without ever actually committing to a thought or idea. Because again…. It’s easy to do that. You never have to defend an ideology because you never claim an ideology, even if you name drop it.
Is the point to stroke your own ego with how many books you can say you have access to, how many schools of thought you know the name of, or how well liked you are by people we’ll never meet? Say it clearly…. What are you doing here?
This may or may not surprise you, but I’m not even slightly curious as to what you believe. I might be interested in why you believe what you believe, but only in a very morbid sense.
But that is a good starting-point. “Why we believe the things that we believe”. That was, in fact, the main question I asked myself years ago when I started to undertake “serious research”.
You aren’t engaging with what I’m saying…
I am, in fact.
Mr Humble Talent, you need to realize here that my view of homosexuality, and your personal predicament, and sexual deviancy generally, and sexual immorality specifically (defined by metaphysical and philosophical outlooks) will never ever be acceptable to you. And you will always (if you remember some of our last exchanges) come along and throw a cake in my face. The view I hold is (in your eyes) utterly abhorrent.
And I am really really sorry! But there are more consequential QUESTIONS and issues that operate in all of this. Simply put: Homosexuality (and sexual deviance generally) exists and will always exist. It must not be encouraged, nor normalized, nor encouraged. There you have it. And all healthy and sane people should see it this way.
You take the opportunity to espouse all these lofty ideas and drop the names of people or places or things without ever actually committing to a thought or idea.
Here you are wrong. But why would you seek more information when 1) you do not care what I believe? and 2) regard the ideas that support my (relatively reasonable views) as ‘morbid’.
You simply must realize: You have no desire to understand what informs my views. You only want to see them discredited.
But I thought the pigeon chess visualization was rather clever. 🌞
I can’t put this bluntly enough… regardless of whether you CAPITALIZE, italicize, or embolden something or EVEN IF YOU DO ALL THREE, it doesn’t actually make you right. You have a horrible habit of gesturing vaguely at something like the outcome should be obvious for all, but it never is, and that’s all the more insane when you consider that no one have ever affirmed their ability to follow your cat lady logic to your conclusions. You should be able to articulate an argument, not just make statements. Heck, you don’t even do that… You make allusions to statements that you abandon the moment anyone calls you on them.
With as many words as you use, you should be able to write whole chapters that explain your points. But you don’t. And that’s is why I don’t take you seriously. You can call that throwing cake in your face if it makes you feel better, but there are all kinds of people here able to articulate a position against gay marriage that I’ll gladly interact with. Some that I even respect.
You deceive yourself. No matter how I express it, or might express it, it is all abhorrent and you would react the same.
FYI: Marriage is a Christian institution and the notion of it, the reason for it, the idea behind it, is as sacrament. So no, and for this reason, gay marriage should be disallowed.
However, some other type of union, given the circumstances of today, is likely required.
The issue of “sexual morality” stands over and above all of this. I know that you, and maybe most, don’t regard the topic as necessary (or assessments it makes as having relevance and authority) but that is your own issue.
You need more information about the ideas
Yeats not Keats! I know, it is too often referenced:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
I no longer think that you’re an LLM, because chatGPT officially writes better than you do.
Well hallelujah! That’s a step forward!
You will however regret the day when computer intelligence takes over all communication! On that day you will cry out that you dissed Alizia! 😭
Re: Alyssa Izatt and Kimberley Brownlee.
I wonder if this is a Jonathan Swiftian “modest proposal” argument. I read about one-third of it and had to claw my eyes out due to the lack of logical clarity. If that is an actual, scholarly piece by these authors, then academia has failed us. Miserably. Can you take this article seriously when it throws around words like “resultingly” and inetesectionality along with this sentence – “First, girls’ concerns are too often subsumed under the broader heading of ‘women’s issues.’”? It only gets worse from there.
I guess we should round up all underage girls, kill them and sell them for food.
jvb
Oh for the love of Heaven! If there is anything that can fairly and truly be said to have been commodified to extreme degrees, it is the notion of a girl, the girl’s body, and what that girl will serve. And there is no other place but America, over the last 100 years, that have created and broadcast the perversion of femininity, please direct me!
Every country on Earth. They don’t have to advertise, they just treat women as commodities as a matter of course. Any country with a significant Muslim presence, any county in Africa or Asia. All the countries south of the Rio Grande. Australia is a maybe, I suppose, but there is a reason women there like Americans.
I would suggest that normal, and traditional societies, do a great deal to protect their girls, and women, from that commodification that is the norm in American advertising. It’s when the business class, the PR class, decides by pressure of greed that the sanctity of a child (i.e. girl and young woman) is better put to use as a sort of whore.
The Levantine religions Judaism Islam and Christianity proposed and upheld quite strict regulations precisely to protects girls from the commodification I refer to.
The liberalization of European culture and granting more rights and opportunities to girls and women is a different tendency, and with different motives (deriving from Christian culture) than is perverting youth and womanhood for market purposes.
However, if you still wish to fight over an issue that you will lose ignobly (:::checks phone :::) I have time today at 4:25 (20-25 minutes) or tomorrow in the morning (wide open).
As if many people didn’t already have a dislike for attorneys (except certain ethicists) and the ABA, a new resolution to repeal the PLCAA was recently approved – link.
Whether this is just institutional dislike for guns, like the NEA and AFT, or a method of opening further revenue sources (or both), I don’t know but the author clearly has an anti-gun agenda and has to really warp current laws to try to justify allowing “gun violence victims” to sue the gun manufacturers, as Mexico tried and failed accomplish.
Yeah, big pools of clients if cases can be brought against manufacturers for criminal misuse of their products (not even sold directly to end users). Firearms manufacturers are easy targets if this corrupt practice is allowed. There’s no shortage of victims with no real financial recourse against the criminal who harmed them, but who will gladly jump at the chance to go after deeper pockets. This is especially true if the target is ultimately the Second Amendment. Such cases would be laughed out of court if attempted against producers of other items. That’s why the PLCAA was necessary in the first place, especially as it became obvious that suits were being used not to make victims whole but to destroy firearms producers.
Only read the first few pages, but it looks like the ABA manifest is essentially spouting the same old anti-firearm rhetoric and illogic in trying to revive this dead horse of an issue.
Just posted on this, Rob. Thanks for the tip!
Jimmy Kimmel is being called out for his disdain for the working class:
And of course I need to embed a link to X.
Jimmy Kimmel used to present a show with Adam Carolla back in the days called “The Man Show”, with guys chugging beer and girls in bikini on trampolines. He has become very smug and elitist, and apparently he thinks that he is better and smarter than all those rubes who earn a living by working in the trades. As humility is an ethical value for everyone, including the cultural elite, I am calling it out here.
There’s a lawyer in Oklahoma who had a meltdown in front of a judge and then blamed the judge for being transphobic. He was pretty brazen and ended up arrested. Reminded me of the California oath you wrote about recently.
Terrible ethics story from Spain regarding the euthanasia of a young Spanish woman who was gangraped by North African immigrants, and became suicidal.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/03/28/noelia-castillo-ramos-spain-n2673583
Here is the timeline of events in one of the tweets referred to in the article:
But it gets worse. Noelia’s attorney says Noelia wasn’t allowed to cancel the euthanasia because her organs had been promised to others.
Ha’Aretz reporting that Jewish antisemites protesting Israel’s war of liberation for the Iran’s 🇮🇷 oppressed went on a rampage today and had to be cleaned off the streets by police. This antisemitism has just got to stop/be stopped!
Good Alizia: Alizia, honest question: Do you ever feel you are not making progress here and no one understands you or gets your “jokes”?!
Bad Bad Alizia: What are you talking about?! Are you insane?! I am having stunning success! Engagement is up 66.5% Don’t be so darned pessimistic! Carpe diem, onward and upwards!