abortion

Briefly Noted: Bill Maher’s Ridiculous (and Unethical) Analogy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In a monologue being hailed for its Democratic centrism, opportunistic comic/pundit (you never know when he is being which) Bill Maher argued that the woke position that men should be regarded as women and vice versa accoring to their heartily felt whims of the moment was the irrational equivalent of the conservative belief that human fetuses were as worthy of having a chance to live as newborn babies.

I don’t have any interest in the policy analysis of anyone who regards that as a valid comparison. For one thing, human fetuses that are allowed to live become babies, and after that, fully functioning human beings. Men do not become women no matter how much they want to. I suspect know his analogy is false, but he also knows the majority of his fans lack the intellectual capacity to realize that.

It demonstrates the miserable state of public discourse in America that a cynical lightweight like Bill Maher is considered profound.

The UK’s New Bereavement Policy Makes No Sense Ethically, But Then When Has Abortion Made Any Ethical Sense?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ok, explain this: In the UK abortion is generally permitted up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions for special circumstances. Now the UK has extended its bereavement laws for miscarriages, which currently is two paid weeks off if the unborn child was 24 weeks old, to a week of paid bereavement for an unborn baby who is less than 24 weeks old.

Got that? A mother can kill the gestating embryo if it’s less than 24 weeks because that child is not viewed by the law as a human being worthy of protection, but if a child of the same age dies of other causes, it’s human enough to warrant bereavement benefits. Actually, I’m not sure if a mother who kills her child legally can still claim bereavement benefits. I don’t see why not.

Musician and broadcaster Myleene Klass, an activist who led an awareness movement in Great Britain, has said, “You’re not ill, you’ve lost a child, there’s a death in the family.” Why is it a death in the family when the child dies in a miscarriage, but just a matter of “choice” when the death is engineered by the mother herself?

“It’s a taboo,” she added. “Nobody wants to talk about dead babies – but you have to actually say it as it is. To lose a child is harrowing, it’s traumatic.” Well, it’s harrowing when the child dies of natural causes. When the cause of death is an abortion, it isn’t a child at all. Or something.

If there were any honesty and integrity in the abortion debate, the pro abortion movement would be recognized as not having an ethical leg to stand on.

Picking My Way Through Alex Berenson’s Ethics Minefield

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Alex Berenson is one of the former Axis journalists (Matt Taibbi is another) whose conscience and cerebrum just couldn’t take the lies and craziness of the Left any more and went rogue. He’s done yeoman work for Truth, Justice and the American Way on Twitter/X and on his substack. Berenson’s latest post there gives readers a glimpse into his ethical orientation, and it’s nothing if not thought-provoking.

Berenson makes statements that make me wonder if he’s worth paying attention to at all, however. A prime one is this: “I am pro-choice, though I find abortion personally abhorrent…Those are medical decisions, and they are governed by a principle of near-absolute autonomy.”

Why does he find abortion “abhorent”? Presumably it is because abortion most frequently involves the killing of a nascent human being who would have a shot at a long, exciting, productive and possibly consequential life were it not for another individual, his or her mother, deciding that her life would be easier if this separate individual’s existence were sacrificed.

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Re Abortion: Another “Bias Makes You Stupid” Op-Ed in the NYT

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s kind of funny when headline writers are so clueless and biased that what they think is a “res ipsa loquitur” story proving one thing actually reveals something completely different.

The headline on a Times op-ed ed last week was “A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.” (I’m using my last gift link of the month on this one, so you’d better read it!) The writer was Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School.

The entire piece radiates contempt for the concept of treating the unborn as human lives, which, you know, they are and rather undeniably so. Readers are informed that Adriana Smith is brain dead, and has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days to save the life of her baby. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she died from multiple blood clots in her brain.

“Her fetus’s heart continued to beat,” writes the professor, as if it was an abandoned car with a functioning carburetor. Georgia, she explains, is one of those crazy, fetus-worshiping states where a nascent human being is deemed a human life that can’t be snuffed out on a whim if it has a heartbeat. This, to the op-ed’s author, the headline writer and the New York Times is completely unfathomable.

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“The Ethicist” Faces The Ultimate Ethics Test…and Flunks

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The topic is abortion.

This is discouraging, if not unexpected. After all, “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Appiah, works for the New York Times, Where Ethics Go To Die. Nonetheless, the clueless certitude of his latest column is as offensive as it is indefensible for someone in the ethics field.

An inquirer asked The Ethicist “Does My Spouse Get a Say in Whether to Carry an Unplanned Pregnancy?” That framing alone was foreshadowing for what was to come; notice that the issue is a “pregnancy” and whether it is wanted. and not the snuffing out of a nascent human life, which is where this ethical conflict becomes difficult to resolve.

This time, I’m going to do running commentary on both “Name Withheld’s” query and Prof. Appiah’s answer. First, the question:

“I’m 46, unexpectedly pregnant despite having entered perimenopause, with three children already (the youngest is 4).” COMMENT: And your age and the number of children you have affects the right of an innocent life to continue how?

“My husband calls this a “disaster,” and believes abortion is the clear choice because we didn’t want another child or plan on this pregnancy.” COMMENT: Ending a human life is only a “clear choice” for psychopaths.

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Is It Possible To Have Deader Ethics Alarms Regarding Abortion Than Ohio State Rep. Anita Somani?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I don’t see how.

State Rep. Anita Somani, (D-Dublin)—that’s her on the left above— has authored a bill, so-sponsored by state Rep. Tristan Rader, (D-Lakewood), nicknamed the “Conception Begins at Erection Act.” It would make it a crime for men to ejaculate without intending to have a baby, with special exemptions for anal and oral sex, gay sex generally, masturbation and donating sperm. “You don’t get pregnant on your own,” the smug OBGYN told reporters. “If you’re going to penalize someone for an unwanted pregnancy, why not penalize the person who is also responsible for the pregnancy?” she said.

Brilliant. Don’t they teach analogies and critical thinking in med school? Apparently there are complete idiots practicing medicine. (We already know there are complete idiots elected to state and national legislatures.)

This woman really thinks her stunt—it’s a fake bill, which is an abuse of the legislative process—is some kind of “gotcha!” Even this fool has to know the bill is unconstitutional as well as unenforceable, but she does not seem to recognize how offensive it is. But, see, she’s making a point! Somani thinks she’s being clever when she is really proving that the entire pro-abortion position relies on deliberately ignoring what abortion is. The bill and her comments also reveal that she is blindingly dumb and apparently proud of it, as well as having the ethical literacy of a sea sponge.

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“The Ethicist” Begins 2025 With a De Minimis Ethics Dilemma and an Impossible One

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

2024 was a bad year for the New York Times’s ethics advice columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. “He”The Ethicist” showed unseemly sympathy for the Trump Deranged all year, and not of the “You poor SOB! Get help!” variety, but more frequently of the “You make a good point!” sort, as in “I can see why you might want to cut off your mother for wanting to vote for Trump!” I was interested to see if the inevitability of Trump’s return might swerve Prof Appiah back to more useful commentary on more valid inquiries. So far, the results in 2025 have been mixed.

This week, for example, Appiah thought this silly question was worth considering (It isn’t):

“I am going to tell a brief story about my friend at his funeral. The incident happened 65 years ago. The problem is that I am unsure whether the details of the story, as I remember them, are factual or just in my imagination. No one who was a witness at the time is still living. Should I make this story delightful and not worry about the facts, or make the story short, truthful and perhaps dull?“

Good heavens. This guy is the living embodiment of Casper Milquetoast, the famous invention of legendary cartoonist H.T. Webster. Casper was the original weenie, so terrified of making mistakes, defying authority or breaking rules that he was in a constant case of paralysis. The idea of a story at a memorial service or funeral is to reveal something characteristic, admirable or charming about the departed and, if possible, to move or entertain the assembled. This guy is the only one alive who can recount whatever the anecdote is, so to the extent it exists at all now, he is the only authority and witness. So what if his memory isn’t exactly accurate? What’s he afraid of?

The advice I’d be tempted to give him is, “You sound too silly to be trusted to speak at anyone’s funeral. Why don’t you leave the task to somebody who understands what the purpose of such speeches are?” Or maybe tell him to watch the classic Japanese film “Rashomon,” about the difficulty of establishing objective truth. “The Ethicist,” who shouldn’t have selected such a dumb question in the first place, blathers on about how “everybody does” what the inquirer is so worried about and cites psychological studies about how we edit our memories. Blecchh.

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Comment of the Day: “Is This the Level of Critical Thinking Devoted To Pro-Abortion Advocacy?”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That post was partially triggered by the bombardment of intellectually dishonest or outright false pro-abortion campaign ads I’ve had to endure lately from Maryland and Virginia Democratic candidates. (Did you know that the Republicans will enact a national abortion ban?) In one, a GOP candidate is mocked for saying that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe was legally correct. “Huh?” says a woman or actress whom I guarantee didn’t read the opinion (or Roe) and who couldn’t explain the legal arguments if a gun was pointed at her head. Almost all legal scholars and lawyer admit that Roe v. Wade was incompetent; their major argument for not reversing it is “It’s too late: stare decisus!” Let’s ask that “Huh” lady to define stare decisus.

As he/she/it often does, one of Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s posts, this time an argument for abortion, prompted a sterling response. Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Is This the Level of Critical Thinking Devoted To Pro-Abortion Advocacy?”.….

***

The topic of “nature” is an important one to discuss, because ethics follows nature. Classically, we can ask what something is, and what about that thing makes it what it is. The whole notion of taxonomy relies on defining “what” something is. When we examine things, we notice two main categories of details. One category is essentials, and the other category is accidentals. It is essential to the nature of water to be composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and it is essential to the nature of water to be a solid at some temperature, a liquid at another temperature, and a gas at a third temperature. It is accidental to water to be wet, because ice and super-heated steam are not wet, and it is an accident of water to be white, because snow is white but steam is transparent. Another way to put that is water can lose wetness and still be water, but if water loses its hydrogen atoms, it is no longer water.

There is such a thing as human nature. We can discuss and reason and argue about what details of human existence are essential and which are accidental, but I think we can agree that at some point if enough details are removed, what remains is no longer human. If we take the evolution of species (which Catholics are allowed to believe in), while we notice a gradation of speciation, we nevertheless notice that distinct species have disparate traits that are essential to being that species. Certainly it seems that a very distinct and essential detail of being human is being a rational creature. What Sarah B. brought up about rational kinds notices that a rational nature, while necessary, is not sufficient to identify as human, as there could be rational alien races in the universe, and the Catholic belief in purely spiritual beings that we call angels and demons postulates rational natures that are not human. In a similar way, there are shared details among primates, but there are different details about humans that distinguish them from other primates.

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How Much More Dishonest Can A Campaign Ad Be Than This Abortion of a Pro-Abortion Ad “Approved” By Democrat Tim Kaine in Virginia?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Oh, I know there are some just as bad; indeed, the pro-abortion ads being run in Maryland against Republican Larry Hogan in the U.S. Senate race are at this despicable level. The Kaine spot, however, reminds me of Mary McCarthy epic take-down playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Let’s see…

  • The Supreme Court didn’t “rob” any women of anything. It sent the issue of abortion regulation to the states, where it always belonged.
  • The issue isn’t a “right to choose.” The issue is how far anyone’s right to kill another human being can or should be acknowledged. There is no right to “choose” to kill those who inconvenience us. Using deceptive phrases that deliberately disguise the rights, parties and stakeholders in a political dispute is deceit, a lie.
  • Abortion is legal in every Southern state. That it is not is an outright, indefensible lie.
  • More deceit: “If Republicans take control in Washington and pass a national abortion ban” is like saying, “If Republicans take control in Washington and legalize slavery.” A national abortion ban is not going to happen, can’t happen, and would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional if by some miracle it did. Legal scholar and ethicist William Hodes made that case powerfully in his article published on the Federalist Society website, pointing out that any such federal legislation would be unconstitutional, as it would exceed the scope of congressional power.
  • Of course women would have “options.” Finding solutions to the result of their own actions, or the actions of others, that doesn’t involve killing nascent lives is an excellent, ethical option.
  • “The Republicans won’t stop there” because they’re evil! EVIL! This is shameless demonizing and fear-mongering. They’ll legalize cannibalism! They’ll make everyone wear their underwear on the outside! How can the women in that video look at themselves in the mirror?
  • Contraception is protected under the Constitution. IVF involves complex biological and ethical issues, but there is no indication that there would be sufficient support in the Republican Party to ban the procedure. Yet this ad states as fact that the GOP would do it.

That’s pretty impressive hysteria and dishonesty for a 30 second ad. And this was the guy Hillary Clinton picked to be her Vice-President.

I don’t see how anyone who has any standards for honesty in our elected officials can vote for some who puts out deliberate falsehood like these and “approves” them. I know, I know, it’s “the ends justifies the means,” the unethical fallacy that has swallowed the whole Democratic Party.

Anything to be able to kill unborn human beings at will.

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: ‘Nah, Pro-Abortion Fanatics Haven’t Lost Their Minds’

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I presume I don’t have to explain all of the ethics alarms pinged by this amazing tale from academia….

An event this week at Arizona State University, “Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” held both in person and via Zoom, featured Irish, an English professor at ASU, and Professor Angela Lober, director of the Academy of Lactation Programs [ Wait, WHAT???] at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.

Professor Lober began the one-hour moderated discussion by stating that she “got into this space because the United States hates women and everything the female body does.” Okaaaay—that’s certainly not “misinformation”…or inflammatory. Lober went on to say a “lack of financial incentives in breastfeeding and maternal-child health care” was proof of this hostility and showed that economic interests often override health concerns.

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