I can’t wrap my mind and ethics around this in any manner that doesn’t end up with Applegate being irredeemable. A fick, in Ethics Alarms-eese, is someone who know what he or she is doing or has done is wrong but shows no recognition that there is anything to regret or be ashamed of. I believe that the arguments in favor of abortion are rationalizations and deliberate boot-strapping constructs without integrity. But I don’t know how to define the act of someone who describes an abortion as murder and then goes ahead and has the abortion anyway as anything but…murder. There is intent, there is affirmative action to carry out that intent. Murder. What else could it be?
Applegate’s nauseating Hello-Goodbye (“I don’t know why you say hello, I say good-bye..” Good point, John!) is infuriating. “It’s not your time.” It’s not the child’s time because its mother decided to kill it: how dare the actress use that cowardly phrasing. How much can you love a human being you kill for your own convenience?
That reminds me of another song…
“You will live on…through another”? Nice one. Meaningless, compete bullshit, but nice. As long as it makes you feel better, Christina. I wonder if the Boston Strangler used that one?
Applegate is a woman who admits that she killed an unborn child she believed was a human being with a right to live, and regarded the act at the time as murder.
I don’t want to see, hear about or read about this hopelessly unethical person ever again, and I hope I never encounter anyone like her.
But I bet I already have….
Ethics Alarms 
I’m sure you have, Jack. We went through a lot of this when the supreme Court decided it was going to take the Dobbs case, because you and I both knew where it was headed. It reopened the door that was closed on Roe, and which I won’t say half the population but a good chunk of the female population came to see as the most important right that anyone in this nation had or could have.
A lot of the reasons they gave were garbage. It really boils down to women wanted the right to carry on like a cheap New Orleans whore on a busy weekend without consequences. We can dress it up with worship of the self that became prevalent after the 1960s, but let’s not kid ourselves, in the end it’s really about doing whatever with whoever and being able to flip off the world.
Falling pregnant is an absurd statement. She opened her legs for someone and let him father a child that she later decided was inconvenient for her. She doesn’t try to make any excuse that she was pressured or anything like that, it’s just something that happened that was inconvenient to her.
For a while “shout your abortion” was a thing. Unfortunately it failed to catch on and also could be used other ways like gun owners yelling “shout your Second!”
i honestly don’t know who’s worse, this admitted murderess or that woman back about a decade who compared voting to sex and wrote in her biography how she molested her little sister. More than a few of us did do some things maybe we’re not too proud of now, I know I did, but the world doesn’t need to know them.
At least when Johnny Cash wrote about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, it wasn’t in an actual memoir.
I do not feel as harshly towards Christina Applegate. I feel sad, it doesn’t make me happy, but I feel that she is at least being honest. Yesterday, I posted about the Milgram experiment. I feel that this is another phenomenon explained by that experiment. Milgram found that at least 65% of people were willing to kill someone because an ‘authority’ figure (in that case, a ‘professor’ in a white lab coat) told them to do so. They all knew it was killing an innocent test subject, but they were willing to do it anyway. Almost everyone is willing to murder if they are pressured to by society and I am sure that Christian Applegate was being pressured by her society pretty hard. Most people will try to make excuses for the behavior (it isn’t a baby, my body my choice), few are willing to go against the grain enough to state what is really going on. Almost all the women who get an abortion know it is murder, they just hide behind the euphemisms and the lies to protect their reputation. That is why they scream ‘it isn’t a baby!’ or whatever when people confront them over it. If they truly believed it, they could have a discussion about it and explain why it isn’t a baby. When pushed, however, they have to scream because they know the truth, but to admit the truth is to bring shame on them and they got the abortion mainly to avoid the societal shame of having a child when society says you shouldn’t.
This isn’t new, women gave up their children for sacrifice when told that it was needed to bring rain or prosperity to the community and they were happy to be honored for their work. Abortion is no different, it is needed to satisfy the feminist society and, as the Indiana court ruling stated, a religious ritual.
https://www.aclu-in.org/news/what-indianas-latest-abortion-ruling-means-and-how-we-got-here/
Basically, it sounds to me like she knew abortion was murder, she felt pressured by society to have one, and gave in to society’s pressure. We know that most people would. Most don’t even have the moral fiber to see a problem with it. It sounds like Applegate had a problem with it, just not enough to not go along with it. It sounds like she resented having an abortion, but not enough that she was willing to give up fame and fortune for it. I suspect that she put this in the memoir so people would show sympathy because the knowledge that her fame an fortune came at the cost of her child has eaten away at her ever since.
Michael, there’s a lot here that I agree with. Many women end up having an abortion because the challenges of having the baby are significant, but that is also coupled with the myriad voices in society who say that abortion is okay, that abortion is self-empowering, that abortion is liberating. If you listen to the various groups who minister to post-abortive women, you’ll hear all kinds of horror stories about the pressure to abort (Choice? Really? Many feel they have no choice but to abort because parents/boyfriends/bosses are driving the abortion.), the wounds that abortion caused, the psychological trauma that doesn’t go away, and so on. Some of the most touching events are when these women are guided into a healing path where they name their aborted babies, pray for them, and ask them for their forgiveness.
To some degree, there’s never any coming back from the wrong we do. It lies there in the past, unchanging and unchangeable. Even after we’ve picked up the pieces and put them back together the best we can, there are still cracks and fragile spots and tiny shards missing that mean we can never be whole the way we were before. Once a woman has killed her baby, that baby is not coming back. Post-abortive women, by and large, do not walk away from an abortion unscathed. (Most studies that follow post-abortive women and report a high satisfaction rate only follow those women for 5 years or so. But 10, 20, even 30 years down the road, there’s a much different story.) Their options are to either find the voices that reaffirm that what they did was right, or they find the voices that help them confess the wrong and work to heal from that wrong. I believe you are right in identifying that Christina Applegate is seeking the former option.
Many many liberal women are like this, but this kind of thinking is also fairly common among liberals period.
Her rhetoric doesn’t surprise me at all, but it made me sick to read she had no remorse. The only way to defend abortion is to make a philosophical argument that personhood doesn’t exist until a certain level of biological sophistication. That’s the only route.
If someone says it’s a baby and then says I’m killing it without some kind of threat to the mother’s life, that is vile.
Correct me if I am wrong, but those quoted passages are her words from 1991, right?
“I want to turn away from what happened, but it’s all recorded in my diary. There are moments in my life that are too painful to force into narrative or meaning, so I’ll let my voice from back then speak.”
Those quotes were from her rationalizations at the time, no?
In that sense, I don’t judge her too harshly now, as it is unclear what she thinks about it in the present day. Yes, she did something horrible and she knew it was horrible at the time. But, one can hope that, in the intervening decades, she has gained wisdom with maturity.
And, part of wisdom and maturity is the ability to accept the painfulness of the errors of our youth and address them honestly. It appears to me that she is expressing shame, regret, pain and an inability to successfully put her feelings into words. It does not look like she is bragging. And, I would hope that she is circumspect enough to realize that her younger self sounds like she is full of crap. She threw together a bunch of nice sounding words to rationalize her own bad act, words with which she may no longer agree.
My verdict: Not a Fick.
-Jut
But she quoted her own fickish sentiments without rejecting them, withdrawing them, criticizing them or expressing regret. Not only that, but she’s exploiting them for book sales. Thought experiment: apply the same circumstances to another murder. scenario.
I don’t have enough context. It seems from what is there that she is not agreeing with her earlier fickish statements, even if she is not explicitly rejecting them. If being a fick means showing no shame or regret about conduct one knows to be unethical, it seems she does see that her actions were more problematic than she used to.
And, to say she is exploiting them for book sales is questionable. Is this a 5-page excerpt of a 50-page book? Or a 2-page excerpt of a 500 page book.
You could say that anything in a memoir is there to sell books. She is telling her story. This must be a significant enough event in her life to be included. She explained the event the way she thought about it at the time. She quoted her exact sentiments at the time. That seems to be a fair method to tell a story or recount history, especially because she explains that she cannot form the events into a narrative or meaning. I am not entirely convinced that an autobiographer is required to pass judgment on one’s life decisions. It’s certainly permissible, but, it sounds like she has not come to terms with her decision at this point.
I saw the Shawshank Redemption last night and Red’s final speech to the parole board comes to mind:
“There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.”
Christina seems like she is not quite there, but is getting closer.
-Jut
You could say that anything in a memoir is there to sell books.
Indeed I do.
By her own standards, she committed murder. How she feels about it now doesn’t change that, and her response to the fact, by her own admission, that she not only murdered somebody, but an innocent, who was her own child, for her own selfish interests, is not only inadequate, but signature significance.