Hollywood agrees. For example, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there’s a really good scene where Lieutenant Dax, who is considering killing someone, asks Major Kira about what it’s like. It runs like this:

DAX: How many people did you kill?
KIRA: What?
DAX: While you were in the underground.
KIRA: Too many.
DAX: Were they all faceless Cardassians or did you know who you were killing?
KIRA: Why are we talking about this?
DAX: If it bothers you, we can stop.
KIRA: It bothers me.
DAX: I’m sorry.
KIRA: Why, are you thinking about killing somebody?
DAX: Me?
(Kira realizes)
[…] 
KIRA: Jadzia. Your questions about my experience with killing. If you’re wondering what it’s like. When you take someone’s life, you lose a part of your own as well.

You’ve probably never seen this one scene from a particularly obscure episode of Star Trek, but you’ve probably seen a hundred others like it. This exchange is everywhere in our media, from MacGyver‘s speeches to Harry Potter’s Horcruxes. There’s a deep, deep belief in our culture that most of us are incapable of committing murder, because we would just feel too guilty about it. Murder is supposed to feel different from other crimes. We are therefore shocked when we see unrepentant murderers in courtrooms, and we have never, as a culture, been able to come to grips with the way murderous governments can rise to power and enlist their own citizens in committing atrocities. “How could anyone do such a thing?!” we ask.

But, actually (with rare exceptions, like Major Kira) there’s nothing very special about murder, from the murderer’s point of view. It’s the same old story as any other act of cruelty: I want something, I have to do something wrong to get it, and so I’m going to convince myself it’s not really wrong. Human beings are incredible rationalizers. Murder isn’t different; it’s just a little bigger.

Murder is easy.

With all this in mind, I call your attention to new footage released today by the anti-abortion investigative outfit Center for Medical Progress. The footage is of an interview between CMP investigators (undercover as fetal tissue buyers) and an abortionist named Dr. DeShawn Taylor, currently in independent practice but, until recently, medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona.

I didn’t watch the edited “highlights reel” CMP put together. I watched the full, unedited, 27-minute conversation–so you don’t have to!–and then I wrote a transcript.

In this passage, which begins at 14min 46sec in the video below, Dr. Taylor obliquely refers to the killing of babies. I don’t mean fetuses here. I mean 100% born babies. See, every once in a while, a fetus survives an abortion, and is delivered while still showing “signs of life.” According to Arizona law, since it is unquestionably a baby at that point, doctors must take all possible measures to save the baby, including transporting the baby to the hospital.

Instead, Dr. Taylor talks about doing “maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise,” and how one gets away with that. She strongly implies (though never outright admits), that she has done this. If her conscience is troubled in any way about it, she makes no sign of it.

Again, these are born babies, which even the Supreme Court agrees have a right to live.

Murder is easy.

As a note before you watch/read, both people in the conversation refer several times to “didge” or “didging.” This refers to the use of digoxin poisoning to kill a fetus. (Digoxin is a poison fatal to all humans.) Digoxin is often injected prior to the start of a late-term abortion to ensure that the child dies in the womb. It is a more humane method of killing than dismemberment, and also (as we see here) can help avoid failed abortions and/or violating murder laws.

Here is my transcript of the relevant portion:

Center for Medical Progress [CMP]: Do you didge?
Dr. DeShawn Taylor [DT]: Yeah.
CMP: Starting when?
DT: Ah, 20 weeks.
CMP: Starting at 20 weeks.
DT: Mm-hm.
CMP: Okay.
DT: Yeah.
CMP: ‘cause that’s the other thing, ‘cause, y’know, didge kinda rules out–
CMP2: It ruins the integrity of the specimen.
DT: Oh, yeah.
CMP: And it kills the stem cells. (chuckles)
DT: I mean, so the thing is, it’s really–it’s really tricky, ‘cause in Arizona, if the fetus is—if it comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it to the hospital.
CMP: Uh-huh. At any gestational age?
DT: Annnny gestational age. Yeah, yeah.
CMP: Mm-hm. Is there any standard procedure for verifying signs of life?
DT: Well, the thing is…
CMP: That doesn’t go on a chart!
DT: I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise. So, so, it’s really tricky, um…
CMP2: Yeah, sounds like it’s real hard to navigate that bad boy.
DT: Yeah, it’s really tricky so we do— most of the time we do didge, and it usually works. And then we don’t have to worry about that, because Arizona state law says if any, if there’s signs of life, then we’re supposed to transport them to the hospital.
CMP: Yeah.
DT: (chuckles) Yeah, it’s a mess. It’s a mess.

Now, to be clear, you can’t prosecute this. It’s not, legally, an admission of murder… even though it really obviously is an admission of murder. She killed some babies, but she’s wink-winking about it, so Arizona law can’t reach her. It’s like when O.J. Simpson authored a book called If I Did It. Yeah, he did it, but we can’t prove it in court, even as he winks at us about it. Dr. Taylor will (like O.J.) get away with murder, because that’s how our justice system works–and it’s good that our system requires hard proof for a murder conviction.

Also, I’d be remiss not to mention that CMP has faced both legal and moral problems of its own in the way it obtained these videos, which relied on deception and recording conversations without consent. Further, many have alleged that CMP’s edited videos remove vital context. That is why I watched the raw, unedited footage. If you do keep watching to make sure I didn’t miss any context (feel free to add anything relevant you think I missed!), you’ll be treated–a couple minutes after this exchange–to a rather horrifying discussion of how much easier it is to complete an abortion when the fetus is already dead… and thus, apparently, not able to fight for her life.

But what context in the world could change this?

“I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise.”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?… the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers… to try to cause demise”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?”

Jesus Christ.

As Dr. Taylor shows, it’s easy to commit murder. It’s even easier to rationalize your terrible deeds. Perhaps easiest of all is surrounding yourself with like-minded people who agree with you, many of whom do the same awful things.

This is the same defense mechanism that allows Wall Street bankers to defraud the nation without shame, the same trick sex-abusing priests use to assure themselves that they haven’t done anything wrong–that they’ve actually done something good! It’s natural, and it works. Murder is easy.

There’s a lesson here for all of us: don’t count on your feelings preventing you from becoming a bad person, don’t trust them to alert you once you have, and especially don’t tell yourself that it can’t have been so bad because you feel fine about it. Most bad people feel fine.

(Credit to the indispensable Chrissie’s Transcripts Site for the DS9 excerpt.)

If you represent a pro-life organization*, I want to help you.

My schedule makes it difficult for me to volunteer for pro-life service in the conventional way.  Nearly all of my free hours are after 10 PM, and most pro-life organizations need volunteers during the day.

However, by day, I am a web developer. I create and maintain websites for my employer, and I also create the occasional website in my spare time. (For a recent example of my work, see here.) I’m no genius, nor have I ever freelanced before, but I’ve been doing Web design for a few years. I know HTML5, I can build responsive websites, and I can tell you which Internet buzzwords you need to worry about (“mobile experience”) and which ones you probably don’t (“mobile app”).

I would be grateful for the opportunity to build, update, maintain, or otherwise help out with your pro-life organization’s website. I will work with you to define your vision for the website, I will implement your vision as best I can, and I will leave you with the tools you need to keep things running smoothly afterward. I will do this free of charge, working for a few hours a week, on what I expect will be a first-come first-serve basis.

So, if you represent a pro-life organization with an outdated website, write to me at james.j.heaney@gmail.com.  If you know a pro-life organization that could benefit from this, mention this to them.  I just want to help in the best way that I can.

* By “pro-life organizations,” I mean organizations that are expressly, primarily dedicated to creating legal protections for unborn humans, or to assisting needy mothers and their children (born and unborn) so that both moms and kids are able to live the happy lives they deserve. There are plenty of worthy causes out there that fall under the broader umbrella of the “consistent ethic of life,” but abortion is the particular area where I feel compelled to help out right now.

As a child, I was a religious fan of Bill Nye The Science Guy’s PBS show.  I watched every episode, and, as a result, I didn’t actually need to pay attention in science class until about the middle of 6^th grade.  On a few occasions, I even corrected my teachers with information gleaned from his program!  I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, and that was largely thanks to The Science Guy.  (I did end up a computer scientist, technically, but, with a mere B.A., I’m really a tradesman.)  Nor are Bill Nye’s talents limited to explaining science to children: his episode of Stargate: Atlantis was one of the best things that ever happened to that franchise.  My faith in Bill Nye was not extinguished by growing up.  When I saw that Nye had come out in favor of anthropogenic climate change, that was (more or less) when I stopped seriously arguing the point.  As the old saying goes, “Nye locuta est; causa clausa est.”

I’m reconsidering that decision.

Bill Nye put out a video last week arguing for abortion rights.  I’ll let you watch it.

You watched it?  Good.  Then you noticed that the entire video only includes one scientific claim, at the very start of the video.  And that claim is clearly, indisputably false.  Nye says:

Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans. Eggs get fertilized, and by that I mean sperm get accepted by ova — a lot.  But that’s not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine wall, the inside of a womb, a woman’s womb.

Wrong.  Once an egg has been fertilized by a sperm, it ceases to be an egg or a sperm.  (Both egg and sperm are destroyed by the process of fertilization, which includes the first mitotic cell division.)  What is left behind is a human organism – specifically a very young human organism called a zygote.

How do we know a zygote is an organism?  Because it fulfills the six criteria of life.  You all know these because they (or some close variation) are in the first chapter of every ninth-grade biology book printed during your lifetime, but, if you want a refresher, you can find them here:

1. Response to the environment: Zygotes immediately begin interacting with their environment.  Like any single microorganism, their interactions don’t have a big impact at the human scale, but they immediately begin absorbing and expelling chemicals in their environment.
2. Growth and development: Zygotes grow and develop.  They start at one cell, then multiply to two cells, then four, and so on indefinitely, passing through other stages of the human lifecycle.
3. Reproduction: Zygotes reproduce.  We’ll come back to this.
4. Homeostasis: Zygotes maintain stable internal conditions.
5. Complex chemisty: Zygotes are highly organized, coordinated structures with an unimaginably complex unified metabolism… like any multicellular organism.
6. Cell-based. Zygotes are composed of one or more cells.

Great.  So we know zygotes are organisms.  But how do we know they’re homo sapiens?  What distinguishes a human zygote from a grown duck?  Or a duck zygote?  Or a bacterial colony?  Or a human toenail?

For the first three, biology supplies an easy answer: human zygotes have the DNA of homo sapiens, while the others do not.  But the fourth is harder.  What actually distinguishes a human zygote (or, for that matter, a human eight-year-old) from a human toenail?  Or even a human cancer?  All appear to be alive, and all have human DNA.   Let’s point to two key differences: growth and reproduction.

Toenails grow.  So do eight-year olds.  But what do they grow into?  If properly nourished, eight-year-olds will grow, of their own accord, into adults of the species homo sapiens.  Toenails, if properly nourished, will grow, of their own accord, into… longer toenails.  This is a strong indication that eight-year-olds are homo sapiens, while toenails are not: you cannot grow into an adult homo sapiens unless you are already a child belonging to homo sapiens.  Is everyone okay with this claim?  Good.

Cancers grow.  So do zygotes.  But what do they grow into?  If properly nourished, zygotes will grow, of their own accord, into adults of the species homo sapiens.  Cancers, if properly nourished, will grow, of their own accord, into… more cancer.  This is a strong indication that zygotes are homo sapiens, while cancers are not: you cannot grow into an adult homo sapiens unless you are already a child belonging to homo sapiens.

Not even individual sperm and egg cells will grow, on their own, into adult humans; they will merely undergo meiosis.  Only by combining the two, destroying them in the creation of the new zygote organism, will you get an entity that is destined to become an adult human.

Let’s now consider reproduction.

Do toenails and cancers reproduce?  No.  (Cancers metastasize, but that’s not the same thing as reproduction.)  This means that neither toenails nor cancers are actually alive, much less living human beings.  (Individual toenail and cancer cells are alive, sure, but, all together, they do not form a living organism… because actually living things, by definition, can reproduce themselves.)

Do eight-year-old human children reproduce?  No, not yet. However, they are developing the capacity to reproduce, a capacity written into their genetic code.  When they eventually hit puberty, finish growing up, and get married, most eight-year-olds will reproduce.  And to what will they give birth?  Tiny members of homo sapiens, of course.  A good rule of thumb in biology: if your babies are horses, you’re probably a horse.  If your babies are human beings, you’re probably a human being.  Today’s eight-year-old kids will give birth to tomorrow’s human beings.  This implies that the eight-year-olds themselves are human beings.

Do zygotes reproduce?  No, not yet.  However, they are developing the capacity to reproduce, a capacity written into their genetic code.  When they eventually hit puberty, finish growing up, and get married, most zygotes will reproduce.  And to what will they give birth?  Not horses.  Not toenails.  Not gametes.  Babies.  Today’s zygotes will give birth to tomorrow’s human beings.  This implies that human zygotes are themselves human beings.

Of course, many zygotes die before they become adults.  However, many eight-year-olds also die before they become adults.  This does not make them less human.  It just makes them less fortunate.

So we see that, as a simple matter of fact, any egg that has been fertilized by a sperm has become a human organism.  Biologically speaking, you and I both began to exist at our respective conceptions.  But don’t take my word for it!  Take Science’s:

“Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an oocyte and a sperm, is the beginning of a new human being.  The expression fertilized ovum refers to a secondary oocyte that has been impregnanted by a sperm; when fertilization is complete, the oocyte becomes a zygote.” —Moore and Persaud, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects, 7^th Edition. Philadelphia: Saunders, 2008. p.2.

“In that fraction of a second when the chromosomes form pairs, the sex of the new child will be determined, hereditary characteristics received from each parent will be set, and a new life will have begun.” —Kaluger and Kaluger, Human Development: The Span of Life. St. Lous: C.V. Mosby, 1974. p.28-29

“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.”  —O’Rahilly and Müller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3^rd Edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 2001. p.8.

But don’t take Science’s word for it! Take abortionists’!:

“We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life of a sort.  But the point really is not when does human life begin, but when does it really begin to matter?” –Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS, the largest abortion provider in the United Kingdom, Abortion: A Civilized Debate, 5:48-6:10

“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” –Faye Wattleton, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 1978-1992, in “Speaking Frankly,” Ms. Magazine, May / June 1997, Volume VII, Number 6, 67. 

That last one was by far the hardest quote for me to confirm. I had to actually go the library and look it up on microfiche.  While over there, I found that the article contained a few other gems:

“It makes sense to do this in the most humanitarian way possible, but there’s nothing especially humanitarian about death.  If we shrink from that, then I think we really lose.” –Adrienne Ashe, former NARAL board member, ibid.

“The way in which the arguments for legal abortion have been made include this inability to publicly deal with the fact that abortion takes a life.  There are real reasons for that, because if you say, ‘abortion takes a life,’ large numbers of people interpret this as ‘abortion takes the life of a person who is the moral and legal equivalent of the woman.'” –Frances Kissling, Founder, Catholics for a Free Choice, ibid.

“The purpose of abortion is to terminate the life of the fetus.“ –Catherine Albisa, “human rights lawyer” formerly with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, ibid.

The very first sentence of Bill Nye’s science video about abortion, which happens to also be the only scientific claim Bill Nye makes in the entire science video, is demonstrably false.  Authorities across the ideological spectrum concur that it is false.  The facts permit no wiggle room, no shades of gray, no space for objections.  What Bill Nye said is indisputably false.

In truth, all eggs that complete the process of fertilization are human.  Every single last one of them.  By the very fact of having completed fertilization, they are human.  (Whether they are rights-bearing persons is, as Francis Kissling points out, a separate question.)

Having butchered science, Nye goes on to make a very brief argument – not a scientific argument, but an ethical one – about why killing a human zygote through abortion is not wrong:

If you’re going to say when an egg is fertilized, it therefore has the same rights as an individual, then whom are you going to sue, whom are you going to imprison, every woman who has had a fertilized egg pass through her? Every guy whose sperm has fertilized an egg and then it didn’t become a human, have all these people failed you?

Mollie Hemingway refuted this argument in the space of a single tweet:

If you think there’s no difference between Grandma dying in sleep and shooting her in the head, you might be Bill Nye

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 29, 2015

Yes, Bill, zygotes die.  In fact, every zygote dies, because every human being dies, and zygotes are human beings.  It’s just a question of when: humans can die an hour after conception or a century after conception, or anywhere in between.  The difference is intent.

We don’t charge mom with murder if Grandma dies in her sleep; that would be insane.  We do charge Mom with murder if Grandma dies because Mom stuck a shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.  If an embryo can’t quite implant and fails to survive, we’re not going to go down to Planned Parenthood and clamp their staff in irons for failing to somehow magically save this very young human being; that would be insane.  But if a member of Planned Parenthood’s staff reaches into the uterus and kills that human being by tearing her apart, limb from limb, yes, of course that staffer is responsible for that child’s death, and of course he can be held accountable for his actions!

Let’s recap: in the only matter of empirical, scientific fact in Bill Nye’s science video, Nye is wrong.  During the process of fertilization, a human life is created.  “Pregnancy” may not technically begin until implantation, but you cannot change the fact that human life begins at human conception without throwing out a century of embryology and the very words “organism” and “species.” Those are the facts.  And Science has nothing further to say on the subject.

Which is not to say that the conversation is over.  There is still a philosophical and ethical argument to be had about whether or not a human child, immediately after conception, is (metaphysically speaking) a human person, bearing human rights, and subject to legal protections.  But that argument is not a scientific one, and so, as soon as Nye tries to make it, he falls flat on his face.

The balance of Bill Nye’s video is an old man ranting about how stupid everyone is who disagrees with his demonstrably wrong science and poorly-formed ethics.

He accuses his opponents of scientific ignorance.  Except, on the only scientific matter in the video, his opponents are indisputably correct.

He accuses his opponents of being mostly men of European descent.  Now, I can’t help noticing that Bill Nye is himself a man of European descent.  And I can’t help noticing that the majority of the pro-life movement is female.  Pro-choicers always try to cast the issue in terms of women’s rights, but let’s remember that, as Andrea Dworkin pointed out, male abortion-rights advocates are not exactly white knights standing up for women:

It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority issue for men in the 1960s – not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.  The decriminalization of abortion – for that was the political goal – was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free.”  The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand.  If it were not, fucking would not be available to men on demand.  Getting laid was at stake.  Not just getting laid, but getting laid the way great numbers of boys and men had always wanted – lots of girls who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it away. (Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, 95)

He accuses his opponents of trying to impose the text of a “5,000-year old book” (the Epic of Gilgamesh? He can’t mean the Bible, which is at most 3500 years old) on everyone, despite modern “scientific knowledge.”  Except, of course, the Bible does not make a particularly strong argument against abortion (nor does Gilgamesh), and a great many pro-lifers are secular.  One does not need to be religious to oppose murdering innocent human beings.  Aren’t agnostics always telling me it’s possible to be moral without religion?  Being an Aristotelian, I’ve always thought so, but “opposing the murder of innocent children” is a pretty good test of whether that’s actually the case, and way too many agnostics like Bill Nye fail it.**

He accuses his opponents of taking away time, attention, and resources from “more important issues.”  (He doesn’t name any.)

He points out that we wouldn’t have knowledge or images of the conception and pregnancy process without scientists “who are actual medical professionals.”  Um… okay.  True.  And?  “And so then to claim to know the next step when you obviously don’t… you have to respect the facts.”  Yes.  Yes, you do have to respect the facts, Bill.

He opposes abstinence-only education, stating that the evidence doesn’t support it.  That’s… fine, I guess, and may even be true, but has nothing to do with whether or not abortion is ethical.  All this suggests is that Andrea Dworkin was on to something.

He asks his opponents to look at the facts, and to embrace a “fact-based” position on abortion.

I have.  When will Bill Nye?

This is a shameful four minutes.  It is at the Todd Akin level of scientific illiteracy.  For any person claiming to be a public intellectual for the promotion of science, this video ought to be a career-ender, just as it was for Akin.  After thorough excoriation by his peers, Bill Nye should be forced to spend a few years out of the public eye, maybe doing some actual research for a while, as penance for his sins.

But this will not happen.  Bill Nye knew it would not happen.  That’s why he felt empowered to be so careless and ignorant and pompous. A great many modern scientists (more than enough to form the scientific establishment) have decided that their skill in science makes them qualified philosophers, too.  They are not.

Scientists are experts in gathering empirical data in their respective fields of expertise, analyzing that data, and drawing inductive conclusions from that data.  Typically those conclusions pertain to the efficient or material causes of a substance (or class of substances), and, while always subject to revision (as is the nature of inductive reasoning), science as a whole has done an incredible job explaining the efficient and material causes of practically everything that is immediately accessible to human senses (and quite a bit besides).  The data and reasoning that support (for example) the theories of gravity and evolution are as solid as anything mankind has ever built.  Three cheers for science!

But science is not philosophy.  It does not come equipped with the tools to do philosophy.  It never could, because science is grounded in certain philosophical claims.  Scientists dissect the world on the basis of sense-data; they are in no position to question (for example) whether, in what sense, and by what mechanism the sense-data is true.

I can hear a physicist reading along asking, “What do you mean, a mechanism in virtue of which certain data is true?  Data simply is true or false.  How could such a mechanism even possibly be conceived?”  This is exactly my point: the scientist’s entire analytical toolbox is so dependent on certain pre-existing philosophical conclusions (these days, often some flavor of logical positivism) that it is incapable of doing even fairly primitive materialist metaphysics.  That is fine.  It is not their field.

One might then expect scientists to adopt the maxim of one of their positivist forebears, Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”  Scientists: keep analyzing being as chemical (chemistry), being as motion (physics), being as light (optics), and so forth, and let your poorly-funded, poorly-paid colleagues in the other building work on the analysis of being as being (ontology), and the difficult questions that flow from it (metaphysics, and ultimately ethics).  Everyone is happy.*

The argument over abortion and unborn rights is a factual argument: ethical and metaphysical facts are not empirical facts, but they are still (putatively) facts.  However, Bill Nye is about as qualified to make grand pronouncements on ethical facts as I am qualified to make grand pronouncements on the validity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  I don’t want Copenhagen to be factually true, just as Bill Nye might not want it to be the case that unborn humans are, factually, rights-bearing entities, but I’m in no position to say it isn’t, and neither is he.

It would be one thing if Bill Nye were simply offering his two cents on a subject where he knew he was no expert; we all do that all the time in politics.  (We have to make a lot of snap judgments in a democracy.  It’s one of the weaknesses of the system.)  Indeed, there are some fairly respectable, sophisticated ethical arguments in support of abortion rights.  A humble attempt on Bill Nye’s part to articulate those arguments, without claiming the mantle of an argument from authority, would have been personally disappointing to me but basically inoffensive.

But Nye doesn’t do that at all: he wraps his utterly unscientific opinion, which is just poor ethical reasoning built on a foundation of a single, provably false scientific claim, in the robes of scientific authority and claims everyone else should listen to him because he is an Expert (while everyone who doesn’t is an ignoramus).  I’m not angry because Nye uses his authority as a scientist to disenfranchise (and dismember) the unborn; I’m angry because his actions would be a gross abuse of scientific authority even if he were on my side!  Ethicists can pretty much just point and laugh at this travesty of an ethical argument, then go back to the adult conversation they were having before Bill Nye made an ass of himself; Nye’s foolishness is no skin off their nose.  But scientists should censure Bill Nye for making claims far beyond his competence and claiming scientific authority for them, because stunts like this don’t just degrade Bill Nye; they degrade the entire scientific project, dragging it into disrepute.

But that won’t happen, because Bill Nye is far from alone.  Richard Dawkins should have been laughed out of every university in England following his absurdly poor chapter in The God Delusion covering philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God.  Dawkins got them all wrong, both the arguments for and the arguments against.  The man could not handle even the first page of Aquinas without melting down into a puddle of misunderstandings and non sequiturs!  But Dawkins came through not just unscathed, but bigger than ever.  So why would Nye expect otherwise?  Scientists as a whole have not only forgotten what they don’t know, but are loudly declaiming about what they don’t know they don’t know (or at the very least silently allowing their colleagues to do so).  For philosophers, that’s very irritating.  For scientists, however, left unchecked, it is fatal, both to public support for science and the very possibility of doing good science.

For the moment, I think I’m going back to climate agnosticism.  Maybe 97% of climatologists are right about anthropocentric climate change.  Or maybe they’re motivated hacks who have built an academic structure of institutional oppression to suppress dissent and ignore inconvenient evidence on behalf of an unscientific ideology.  Bill Nye was a trustworthy lodestar I could rely upon to sort out the scientists from the hacks… but now I know the man who fostered my appreciation for science is just a motivated hack himself.  And the scientific establishment has given me no reason to believe that science is in any way “self-correcting” once politics are in the mix.

*Note that that three-word sentence, “Everyone is happy,” is perfectly inexplicable in scientific terms.  You may be able to point to a brain-state upon which the experience of “happiness” is correspondent, or even supervenient – sup, Minsky? – but mere supervenience is hardly sufficient explanation of the subjective and immaterial phenomenon of happiness.  Direct analysis of experiential data as such (as opposed to sense data) is simply a black box for science, and thank God we have philosophers to work on the problem instead.  Meanwhile, he subject of the sentence, “everyone,” at least appears to imply the intelligibility of a real universal (persons), which immediately presents problems of composition.  And that “is” – oh, man, let’s not even get into what the meaning of “is” is.  Ask a scientist to provide a definition sometime, and don’t let him refer to the concepts of “being” or “existence” without providing definitions for them as well.  Fun times!  What we have here is a sentence that every scientist understands, but which which he is entirely unqualified to analyze.

**For the record, insofar as the Bible defends abortion, the Bible is in error.

It is no surprise, of course, that Planned Parenthood brutally dismembers living human children.  And the casual inhumanity with which their doctors commit and profit from murder can only be mildly surprising.  After all, we have all read (or, perhaps, pretended to read) Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jeruslaem.  Yet the citizen journalist videos recently released by the Center for Medical Progress (watch them if you don’t know what I’m talking about) have thrown the sheer shocking evil of the abortion industry into sharp relief.  I didn’t live in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time, but I have always imagined the moral awakening that followed Uncle Tom’s Cabin felt something like what we’re feeling now.

The first, immediate, obvious, necessary, and urgent step to be taken, in light of the videos, is to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s federal funding.  The need for this is obvious to any remotely ethical human being, but, sadly, we live in a world where people generally think of themselves as much more ethical than they are.  So there are objections.  And objections to the replies to the objections.

These are, for the most part, morally monstrous objections in the first place: we do not cooperate with profound moral crimes that violate inalienable human rights, not even if we hope to reduce the rate or evil of those crimes by our cooperation. Imagine if we’d waited for society — for the “alternatives to be reasonable” while we made certain that “the culture is ready” — for the end of chattel slavery.  We’d still be waiting today.  Year after year, generation after bloody generation, tens of millions of families destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people involved in supporting the institution, billions of dollars invested in it, uncountable suffering.  What a terrible fate we’d be condemning the slaves to: we’d promise to free them, one day, or maybe their children, or their children’s children — but each day they would have to get up before dawn, underfed, under guard, and start picking cotton, or plowing streets, or whatever their owners wanted them to do.  The promise of some future relief for some future individual would serve only to taunt the victim of today.  A government that cooperates with an outfit like the Royal Africa Company or Planned Parenthood is no better than a government that funds child pornographers.  It’s just not an ethical option, even if it were for the sake of some greater good.

But people get very utilitarian about dead babies they don’t have to look at, whose deaths aren’t mentioned on the evening news, and so they raise all sorts of utilitarian objections to defunding Planned Parenthood, and it is politically important for us to refute those objections.  Fortunately, that’s pretty easy: the objections are uniformly terrible.  Let’s take a look:

Objection 1: Defunding Planned Parenthood will reduce the availability of contraceptives and pap smears to women.

No, it will not.  The Defund Planned Parenthood bill, which you can read here, explicitly redirects Planned Parenthood’s funding to other eligible health centers.

Objection 2: Women who rely on the Planned Parenthoods in their communities will be stranded far from contraceptive access.  If they do not have the ability to drive, they will be entirely deprived.

No.  In reality, other government-funded contraception providers outnumber Planned Parenthood by vast margins.  Let’s look at just one such option, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs for short).  There are 700 Planned Parenthoods in the United States, serving 2.8 million patients annually.  By contrast, there are 9,170 FQHCs in the United States, serving 21.1 million patients annually (source).

In other words, FQHCs outnumber Planned Parenthood a dozen to one.

And, with rare exceptions, they serve the same communities.  Take Louisiana. Somebody last night asked me to look up the impact of all the Planned Parenthoods in Louisiana closing down, so I did some research.  Turns out, Planned Parenthood only has two centers in Louisiana, in the urban centers of Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  Then I went to the federal government’s FQHC locator tool (which you can use for yourself here).  Within 5 miles of the Baton Rouge address, there are 8 FQHC’s.  Within 5 miles of the New Orleans address, there are 22.

Today, I ran a few similar searches up here in the Midwest, where Planned Parenthood has more of a rural presence.  Fargo has a Planned Parenthood… and 7 FQHCs.  Moorhead has a Planned Parenthood… and 7 more FQHCs.  The Twin Cities are bursting with Planned Parenthood’s (8 of them, which fits Planned Parenthood’s urban strategy)… but they’re still vastly outnumbered by 58 FQHCs.

The country is crawling with FQHCs.  Look at this map.  Very, very few Planned Parenthoods exist in areas without an FQHC.  Indeed: very, very few people live in areas without an FQHC.

There are a few cases, all in deep rural areas, where closing a Planned Parenthood inconveniences some of its clients.  For example, if the Planned Parenthood in Alexandria, MN closed down, a low-income resident of Fergus Falls, MN would have to drive 55 minutes to Moorhead to reach the nearest FQHC.  Of course, she already would have had to drive 50 minutes to get to Alexandria (“Alec,” as we call it), so the closure of Planned Parenthood would add 5 minutes to her drive.

Of course, a Fergus Falls resident could also walk to the nearby Mahube-Otwa Center, located in gorgeous downtown Fergus Falls.  It’s not an FQHC, but it does provide birth control regardless of ability to pay, and it’s a lot closer than Alec’s Planned Parenthood.  (It has locations in four neighboring counties, as well.)  You wouldn’t know it from the Google Search Results, because Planned Parenthood dominates the search results, but Fergus Falls residents have several nearby birth control clinics.  Why does Planned Parenthood do so much better than these local clinics?  Because a good chunk of that federal money we give Planned Parenthood goes back into or offsets their enormous marketing budget.  The point is: even outside the FQHC network, which is pretty amazing to begin with, there are a huge number of other ways for low-income people to get birth control.

There would be even more ways if we took that money away from Planned Parenthood and redirected it to actual doctors — which is what the Republicans are proposing to do.

Objection 3: But Planned Parenthood serves people regardless of their ability to pay.  These other clinics with federal funding don’t.

No, that’s not true.  FQHCs are required, by law, to serve all clients in their area, regardless of their ability to pay. (42 U.S. Code § 254b)

The very reason the FQHC program exists, actually, is to serve “a population that is medically underserved, or a special medically underserved population comprised of migratory and seasonal agricultural workers, the homeless, and residents of public housing” (though they are open to others as well).  So, just like Planned Parenthood, FQHCs use a sliding fee scale to ensure that all their clients are served.

Objection 4: But not all of these FQHCs provide contraceptives.

Actually, they do.  Again, they are required by law to do this. All FQHCs are required, as a condition of receiving their FQHC grant, to provide “basic health services,” including “preventative health services,” including “voluntary family planning services,” to their patients, regardless of their ability to pay. (42 U.S. Code § 254b(b)(1)(A)(i)(III)(gg))

Objection 5: But some FQHCs are religious, and use exemptions to avoid giving out contraceptives.

Not true.  There is no religious exemption in the law.

No exemption is required by the First Amendment (even as interpreted by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act), because no one has a right to federal grant money if they aren’t willing to carry out the services for which the grant is given.

If you are a religious organization that refuses to provide contraceptives, that’s great, and you can open up a health clinic if you like, but it is not an FQHC, and will not receive FQHC funding.

There is one exemption in the law, but it has nothing to do with religion: clinics whose sole purpose is to serve migrant farm workers may have some of their care requirements waived, on a case-by-case basis, by the Department of Health and Human Services, at HHS’s discretion.

Objection 6: Well, these FQHCs sound great, but I’ll bet some of them provide abortions, so redirecting money to them from Planned Parenthood doesn’t really get you anything but a token victory.

Nope!  FactCheck points out (in the course of criticizing a pro-life talking point) that FQHCs “do not provide abortions to any of their patients,” and have never done so.

Objection 7: It’s not fair to destroy Planned Parenthood when abortion is only 3% of what they do.

There are so many conclusive rebuttals to this.  Let’s try three:

(1) Was it fair to destroy Bill Cosby even though rape was less than 3% of what he did?  I sure thought so.

(2) As I’ve shown before, it’s more like 20% of what Planned Parenthood does.  50% if you exclude “taking donations and government money” and just focus on what their money does in the clinics.

(3) The 3% line is premised on some really, really silly accounting that counts “spending five seconds giving someone a $10 box of pregnancy tests” as a service exactly equal to “spending five hours performing invasive surgery.”  Rich Lowry points out how cynical this is, and he does it better than I ever have.

Fun fact: when you slice the data another (more honest) way, abortion makes up 94% of the services Planned Parenthood provides to pregnant women.  Their abortion-to-adoption-referral ratio?  149:1.

Objection 8: Reducing funding for contraceptives will only increase the number of abortions.

Well… everything we’ve been discussing up to now shows that defunding Planned Parenthood would not reduce contraception access or funding.  So this objection doesn’t even apply here.

But, for what it’s worth, it isn’t true.

Objection 9: Planned Parenthood is already barred (by the Hyde Amendment) from using federal funds for abortion, so this doesn’t help anyone.

This is a cheesy, almost meaningless accounting trick.  Money given to Planned Parenthood that is not spent on abortions must by definition offset the money they do spend on abortions. Progressives recognize this (when it’s applied to religious schools they loath rather than the abortion clinics they love), and U.S. case law reflects it.

Planned Parenthood knows it, too.  When Ronald Reagan tried to tighten regulations separating Planned Parenthood’s “family planning” business from its “abortion” business, they went to war, suing all the way to the Supreme Court (they lost) and tying up the law in litigation until Bill Clinton won the presidency and undid it.

Heck, if Planned Parenthood’s abortion business were so incidental and such a tiny part of what they do, why don’t they just stop doing abortions?  That would instantly get them out from under all this political pressure.

It’s because abortion isn’t an afterthought for Planned Parenthood.  It’s the center of a highly successful business model, which draws in customers with loss-leader contraceptives, which lead to a certain percentage of those customers coming back for abortions (all contraceptives fail sometimes), which provide raw material for Planned Parenthood’s side business in the dead-baby body-parts biz.

***

Long story short, the only possible reason you could have for wanting to maintain federal funding of abortion is if you want to protect and promote the practice of abortion.  Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of the evidence, hasn’t thought it through yet, or lying.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I didn’t have as much time as usual to check this for typos or links, so please note any mistakes in the comments.  Thanks!

At the extreme ends of the spectrum, there’s a certain truth to the trope: the Christian Churches that generally make up the backbone of the anti-abortion movement also make up the backbone of the anti-marriage-redefinition movement. And the Supreme Court justices who claim that abortion — at any time, for any reason — is a constitutional right are exactly the same justices who claim the same for same-sex civil marriage.  And so on, throughout the extreme bases of both movements.  Pundits spend most of their time talking to extremists, because extremists are the people who get engaged, get involved, and get important.  It would not be unreasonable to argue that every single person who lives on the inside of Interstate 495 is, compared to the average American voter, a radical extremist.  And so extremists set all political narratives, including this one.

But elections aren’t decided by extremists.  They’re decided by the average voter.  And the average voter is a strange duck.  A new set of thorough, state-level polling data jointly released last month by YouGov, CBS News, and the New York Times makes this clear in a way that most pundits haven’t come to appreciate yet. (Here is the corresponding national data.)

First: it’s not too soon to proclaim that same-sex civil marriage has won over America. The average voter supports it.  And that’s not just because huge, highly polarized populations concentrated in Seattle and NYC support it, as some marriage conservatives have argued.  Support for same-sex civil marriage is geographically widespread.  Indeed, if a presidential election were held today, and the only issue anyone cared about were same-sex marriage, the marriage liberal (Democrat) would defeat the marriage conservative (Republican)… and it would be a landslide.  Excluding voters who polled as “don’t know / not sure” (who reliably break for marriage redefinition anyway), here’s what that electoral map would look like:

Given the rapid pace at which this issue is marching away from conservatives, this map is only going to get more favorable to same-sex civil marriage, not less. While, ten years ago, marriage naturalists could reliably count on a majority in nearly every state in the Union — gay civil marriage was overwhelmingly opposed, even ridiculed — that consensus has completely evaporated in world-record time.  Indeed, even if the pace of opinion change slows dramatically, in a few years, there will still be enough national support for gay marriage to propose and ratify a constitutional amendment guaranteeing it.  This issue is, from a strictly political standpoint, dead as a doornail.  (And, from a strictly personal standpoint, meh.  Good riddance, even.  Look for my upcoming blog post, which has been in the works for over a year now: “Civil Marriage Is Dead, And It Deserved To Die.”)

So, the average American voter supports same-sex civil marriage.  This support is strong, it is geographically and demographically broad, and it is getting bigger every day.  Nothing is likely to reverse it until and unless serious problems with single-sex parenting are proved — which, given the scarcity of longitudinal data, plus the witch-hunt atmosphere currently prevailing in academic sociology on this point, isn’t likely to happen for decades.

The average American voter also supports extreme abortion restrictions.

“James, how can a restriction be ‘extreme’ if most Americans support it?”  I use the word “extreme” advisedly here.  The media regularly informs me that practically any regulation of abortion in these United States is “extreme.”  These “extreme” restrictions are overwhelmingly popular, but that’s the lexicon the media has given us.  Go figure.

The thing is, the average American voter doesn’t just overwhelmingly support “moderately extreme” abortion proposals, like requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.  According to YouGov, the average American would make all abortions illegal, except in limited special circumstances (such as the baby being the result of rape or incest, or the pregnancy threatening the health of the mother).

This was not a poll where ambivalent or moderate voters lacked other options, either: the only more restrictive option was “abortion should always be illegal,” while the less restrictive options were, “abortion should always be legal,” “abortion should be legal until the fetus can live outside the womb” (the “viability” standard supposedly endorsed by Roe v. Wade), and “abortion should be legal until the end of the first trimester” (a typical “moderate” fallback position for pro-choicers who are uncomfortable defending late-term abortion).

Given these options — including the “first trimester” option, which is already so restrictive the Supreme Court considers it unconstitutional — the average voter nevertheless chose to support banning all abortions except in very limited circumstances.

In other words, the average American supports abortion restrictions so strong they would outlaw approximately 88% of U.S. abortions.  The average American supports abortion restrictions so far beyond the pale of what the Supreme Court allows that no legislation has even flirted with coming close to what Americans actually want on abortion in the two decades since Planned Parenthood v. Casey (besides the very occasional, very unsuccessful forays of the Personhood movement).  The Supreme Court would have a conniption.  Planned Parenthood would financially implode.

And yet, if we had a presidential election tomorrow, where the Democrat wanted to keep abortion completely legal only until the end of the first trimester, while the Republican wanted to ban all abortions, except when the baby is the product of rape or when the pregnancy threatens the health of the mother, if no other issues mattered, then the Republican would win.  Here’s the electoral map:

You may recognize this map as something Republican presidential candidates have not witnessed in over 22 years — something which seems increasingly out of reach in the modern political climate.  You may recognize this as a Republican electoral landslide.

If the terms of the election were slightly different — if the Republican candidate simply supported banning all abortions after the first trimester, while the Democrat supported keeping abortion legal up until viability — then the Republican would win every single state in the union… except Vermont, which would be deadlocked 50-50:

Note that Democrats do not, in fact, support banning abortion after viability.  Democrats believe abortion must always be legal, at any point in pregnancy, for any reason, and should ideally be directly subsidized by the government.  (Here’s their most recent national party platform: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports… a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”)  Official Democratic doctrine on abortion is so extreme, even Vermont wouldn’t support it.  (D.C. might.  See my comment at the top about how everyone inside the Beltway is an extremist.)

So, if you are running for presidential office, and you are Frank Underwood and don’t care about how you win as long as you do win, then you should support gay marriage and support tight restrictions on abortion — restrictions so tight that today’s Supreme Court will strike them down twenty minutes after you pass them into law.

The extreme camps on either side — the so-called “feminists” and the institutional Christians — will call you an irrational, inconsistent hypocrite.

But the average American voter will give you his vote, and, if you’re Frank Underwood, that’s all you care about.

Postscript. Here are some more detailed maps showing the strength of geographic support for same-sex marriage / “extreme” abortion restrictions.  I decided to dispense with the traditional red/blue color scheme, because the electoral fault lines are not quite the same as the traditional Republican/Democrat fault lines — the West and Midwest in particular contain some surprising results for conventional wisdom.  For the purposes of the electoral college maps above, of course, I resolved tossups in favor of the majority, however narrow that majority may have been:

UPDATE 14 December 2021: Link rot changed the URLs to the polling data on which this post is based, so I updated the links. Thanks, Wayback Machine!

Next year, North Dakota will vote on a state constitutional amendment that defines the beginning of human life as the beginning of human rights.  This is also known as a Personhood amendment.  I have written about Personhood before, but, in case you missed it, let me remind you that Personhood has three major effects:

1. Personhood recognizes the human rights of all human beings, from the time of conception to the time of natural death — whether that’s seven minutes or seven decades after conception,
2. if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, the equal rights Personhood extends to the unborn would make it effectively impossible to perform abortions in North Dakota (unless the mother’s life is imperiled; see below), and
3. it would result in lawsuits.

This is a fairly significant legal change, and many people who are sympathetic to the idea of protecting the unborn are concerned about possible unintended legal side effects.

In my opinion, the official Personhood campaign is doing a terrible job addressing those concerns, because they are much more interested in talking about Jesus and babies They seem to think Christianity is a necessary prerequisite to basic constitutional rights and human decency.  I think that is why Personhood initiatives have built up a short but perfect losing streak.

Several months ago, in conversation with Personhood skeptics at Jezebel.com, I tried to answer some of their questions and clear up certain confusions about the Personhood amendment.  I hope you’ll find it helpful, especially if you are a North Dakota voter.

Q: Under Personhood, what would happen when a mother has a clinical spontaneous abortion?

A: Absolutely nothing.

The amendment reads (in full), “The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.”  If it becomes law, this means that any person who deliberately kills any human being at any stage of development would be guilty of murder.  But spontaneous abortion is death by natural causes.  No one is at fault.  The Amendment criminalizes murder, not unavoidable tragedies.

Q: So, would women be held accountable for their bodies if the pregnancy failed?

A: No. Supporters of the amendment do not desire this, and there is no basis in law for this. If you are an organ donor and the organ you donate fails, killing the recipient, you are not responsible, nor are you held accountable. Similarly, if your body fails to support a developing human, resulting in the death of that zygote, embryo, or fetus, you are not responsible, nor would you be held accountable — even under the most stringent Personhood laws. (And, of course, that’s very important, because death by natural causes is extremely common at the earliest stages of pregnancy, accounting for up to 50% of all pregnancies.) Allowing nature to take its course does not violate the “inalienable right to life.”

Q: What if a fetus miscarries, but it does not expel itself from the uterus? Would doctors not be allowed to remove it? Should the mother’s life be put in danger?

A: If a dead fetus fails to expel itself from the uterus, it can be removed. Removing a dead fetus from the womb does not violate its “inalienable right to life.” It is, after all, already dead!  This is one of several forms of abortion that would remain legal under Personhood.

Q: What about women who are unaware of their pregnancy, and inadvertently cause the death of the developing fetus? Would Personhood mean that we have to throw them into jail for manslaughter?  Do Personhood supporters want that?  I heard Personhood supporters don’t really care about the unborn; they just want to control and enslave women.

A: No, Personhood would not criminalize accidental fetal death.  Personhood supporters do not want that, and the Personhood amendment does not provide any legal basis for it.

The North Dakota criminal code defines “manslaughter” as “recklessly causing the death of another human being” (ND Code 12.1.16.02). It is paired with “negligent homicide”, which is “negligently causing the death of another human being” (ND Code 12.1.16.03).  A mother who is unaware that she is carrying a human life within her cannot be guilty of recklessness nor negligence toward that life.  Indeed, even if some devious prosecutor managed to construe otherwise, and attempted to build a case against some mom who unknowingly caused a miscarriage, the legal bars for “negligence” and “recklessness” are far too high for him to succeed in this scenario.  For example, imagine a mother has a two-year-old son, who has a deathly allergy to peanuts — but she has no idea. She makes him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. After entering anaphylactic shock, he is rushed to the hosptial and dies. Is this mother guilty of negligent homicide or manslaughter? Of course not; she is the victim of a tragedy.  Only a truly deranged legal system would even investigate such a sad but innocent occurrence without extremely good reason.

Now, if this same mother had watched her son go into shock, clearly in medical distress, but, instead of calling the ambulance, decided to go take a bath and wait for him to die, it *is* possible that she would be investigated for manslaughter — and, if she clearly acted out of depraved disdain for her sons life, she could even be prosecuted and convicted. Similarly, it is possible that the passage of this amendment could lead to some prosecutions of mothers whose fetuses die, if (and only if) the death was caused by a clear and intentional act chosen freely by the mother that was highly likely to kill the fetus. For example, a pregnant woman who repeatedly throws herself down a flight of stairs, killing her unborn child in the process, could face charges (depending on a number of factors, such as mental competence). If Personhood is passed, an unborn child has equal rights with any other human child, so mothers who try to kill their children through recklessness before they are born would be treated the same as mothers today who abandon their children by throwing them in dumpsters.

But some people seem to believe that Personhood would make it a crime for women to ride a roller coaster or drink wine if there’s any chance of her becoming pregnant.  Personhood does not provide any legal basis for such claims.  It is not true.

Q: Does Personhood give human rights to sperm and eggs?  Aren’t they just as human as fertilized eggs just after conception?  Under Personhood, wouldn’t male masturbation or female menstruation be murder?

A: No, Personhood does not give human rights to human sperm or eggs.

Yes, it is true that they are human cells, and they are alive, so, in a vague sense, sperm and eggs are “human life”… but so are the skin cells that flake off your skin every hour of every day.  They are not human beings — complete, independent human organisms with their own genes and their own destiny.  For many centuries, we did not know how human sex cells turned into human beings.  Many people thought that it happened very gradually, over the course of several months.

However, during the 20th century, with the help of modern science, we learned that the life of each human being actually begins very early.  All human beings begin about a day after intercourse, at the time of conception, when the sperm and egg cells merge and die in order to create a completely new organism.  The process takes less than a second, not a few months as 12th-century scientists believed.  (An excellent explanation by a scientist for non-scientists can be found here.)  Unfortunately, it has taken some time for our laws to catch up with the revelations of science — but catch up they have, with many fetal rights now being recognized from the moment of conception in a majority of states as well as at the national level.

Under Personhood male masturbation and female menstruation would continue to be legal and widespread, exactly as they are today.  And, yes, that is a very strange sentence to write.  The fact that I have to write it just goes to show how much confusion and misinformation about Personhood is floating around out there.

Q: What about in vitro fertilization?  I heard that Personhood would make IVF illegal.  How would women with fertility problems have children?

A: This is probably the most common misconception about Personhood.  I think that some of its opponents are deliberately spreading it, because it sounds so ridiculous.  It makes Personhood supporters sound like they don’t just want to protect human life, but want to control women’s fertility.

As I explained in the last question, Personhood would not give any rights to sperm or eggs, and it would not change any laws about the use of your sperm or eggs.  You would continue to have the legal right to use your sex cells in any way you want — for sex, for masturbation, for science, for art, whatever.  Therefore, it would still be perfectly legal to put a sperm and an egg to make a new baby.  It wouldn’t matter if you did the assembly in a lab.  IVF would remain legal.

What Personhood would restrict is the dark side of IVF.  In order to accelerate the process while keeping expenses down, modern IVF clinics don’t create just one baby in the lab.  They typically create nine.  The two or three children who are considered the most “fit” to survive are implanted in the mother, grow up, and get born, going on to live normal lives.  The others are legally considered to be property, not persons.  Typically, they are either killed or indefinitely frozen.

Personhood would require everyone to treat those “surplus embryos” as persons, not property.   Parents and IVF centers would become responsible for the well-being of these very young children.  Safeguards would have to be put in place.  It is possible that embryo freezing would become a thing of the past, with IVF clinics focusing on maximizing the viability of one or two babies, instead of creating half a dozen babies and disposing of the ones that aren’t wanted.  All this would be significantly more expensive than the current mass-production/mass-disposal model.  It would take a number of years for IVF specialists to figure out the new model and bring those costs back down.

So IVF would remain legal, but it would have to treat the human beings it creates as persons, not property.  This would cost money.

Personally, I think that’s a very worthwhile trade-off.  The safety regulations and anti-child-labor laws of the Progressive Era forced factory owners to make more humane workplaces, and that cost money, too.  But, in time, they adapted, and consumers became accustomed to paying a little more money for the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that they weren’t supporting the exploitation or killing of children.  You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that applies at any level to IVF.

Q: Would women have to claim the fetus on their taxes as a dependent for the months it has been growing?

A: This sounds silly, at first — sillier than the roller-coasters question above — but, actually, this is one of the few things that passing Personhood actually could change.  According to federal law (26 U.S.C. 152(c)), you may claim all your children as dependents on your federal tax return.  If Personhood passed, North Dakota would officially consider your unborn children to be full human individuals with equal rights — fully and completely your children for all legal purposes.  

I am not an expert on tax law and how the various jurisdictions interact, but, especially in the wake of Windsor v. United States (aka “the DOMA case”) and its loud affirmation of state primacy in making decisions about important life events, I suspect that, in the end, the IRS would have to allow pregnant North Dakota residents to claim their unborn children as dependents.  Unborn children also qualify for the child tax credit and several other benefits.  (The IRS would have to revise its dependent-verification process, which has relied on a Social Security number since 1998.)  Certainly for the purposes of North Dakota taxes, residents would be able to claim their unborn children. No one ever has to claim anyone as a dependent, but, if they can, they probably will!

Even though they could be claimed for deductions on income tax forms, unborn children would not be considered citizens, even if Personhood were passed.  Citizenship is automatically granted at birth, according to Amendment XIV.  Congress could choose to grant citizenship earlier if it chose (Article I, Section 8), but it has not done so.  They would share the same legal status as resident aliens (26 U.S.C. 7701).  Since only citizens can receive Social Security numbers, unborn children would not be enrolled in Social Security until birth, just like today.

Q: What about the 14 year old girl who is raped and impregnated by a family member? Or any victim of rape, for that matter?

A: It would not be legal for the victims of rape to kill their unborn children, except indirectly in the course of a necessary medical procedure. For example, just like today, a rape victim could have her fallopian tube removed if her pregnancy became ectopic, even though this would ultimately cause the highly likely death of the child. Fourteen-year-old rape victims face a wide variety of medical risks from pregnancy at such a young age, and there are a variety of foreseeable circumstances where an indirect abortion would be medically indicated and legally allowed. However, just as a rape victim who gives birth to her child is not legally allowed to strangle that child to death with shoelaces, a rape victim would not, under Personhood, be allowed to kill her unborn child for anything other than quite serious medical need.

This raises several important related points, both legal and social.  First and foremost, it is imperative that states strip rapists of parental rights.  Right now, fully 31 states leave the basic parental rights of rapists intact.  I do not know how this is possible, given that both pro-lifers and pro-choicers find the idea horrifying beyond words.

Relatedly, it is imperative that our society do a better job supporting the victims of rape, particularly as regards their choices.  Fifty years ago, if you were raped, you had pretty much just one option: adoption.  If you didn’t give that baby up for adoption, you were pretty much on your own.  Today, you still have one option: abortion.  If you don’t kill that baby, you’re pretty much on your own. Planned Parenthood last year performed over 300,000 abortions, but provided fewer than 2,500 adoption referrals.

We have to do better at providing a full range of humane options and support for the victims of rape, including counseling and substantial financial support.  I would even argue that, because of the unique way in which responsibility for a child has been thrust upon them against their will, rape victims who choose not to give their children up for adoption should receive additional benefits over and above what is normally available to single parents.  And if this costs the taxpayers a little extra money, so be it.  We have a sacred responsibility to the victims of rape, and it is one of the few things our government does that’s truly worth going into debt for.  Plus, it’s not like it’d be hard to find the money — cutting two F-35’s would pay for ten years of the program, even after Personhood.

Our society’s shortcomings with respect to rape would not be exacerbated by passing Personhood, but it would make fixing our problems much more urgent.

Q: What about the woman who has a fetus with anencephaly, or any other number of cephalic disorders? Would she be forced to give birth and care for it, most likely in a hospital, just to wait for it to die?

A: Under Personhood, parents and doctors would have exactly the same duties for a severely disabled unborn child as they currently do for a born child with equally severe disabilities.  This means that both parents would have a duty to care for that child, even if that child is likely to live a much shorter life than the rest of us.  It would not be legal to deliberately kill the child, before or after birth.

However, Personhood would not require doctors to take any extraordinary measures to prolong life.  The amendment only extends equal rights to unborn children; it does not give them greater rights than anyone else.  Just like today, nature would be permitted to take its course, if parents and doctors agreed that that was the best possible course of action for the baby.

Do you have more questions about Personhood or any other aspects of abortion law?  Ask them in the comments, and they may be featured in a future edition of Fetal Legal Eagle! 

(Probably will be, too.  Nobody Reads This Blog, so you don’t have a lot of competition.)

For those who haven’t heard the good news out of El Salvador this week: despite a coordinated and determined campaign by the international abortion industry, featuring a level of dishonesty not seen since the Savita Halappanavar incident in Ireland last year, the nation (unlike Ireland), stood strong in insisting that, no, potential maternal health risks do not justify actually murdering a child.  El Salvadorean doctors then went ahead and did what the law — and basic human decency — demanded of them: they medically treated the maternal patient (known to the world only as “Beatriz,” because of El Salvador’s laws protecting her identity) and medically treated her anencephalic baby daughter (known to the world only as “Rachel,” the name usually given to anonymous female targets of abortion) in order to give both Beatriz and Rachel the best possible chance of survival.  By 26 weeks, the danger to Beatriz was increasing dramatically, while Rachel was developed enough that delivering her would not be a death sentence.  Beatriz requested, and doctors readily agreed to, a C-section.  Rachel was born on June 3, 2013.

Like most anencephalic babies, though, Rachel had a steep uphill battle to fight.  Even if she weren’t premature, the odds were stacked dramatically against her.  Unfortunately, Rachel didn’t win that battle.  Though placed in an incubator and given fluids, she died on either June 3rd or June 4th, five hours after being born.

Beatriz is currently recovering from her C-section; no complications have been reported.

So here we finally have a golden example of a pro-life legal and medical system in action.  Beatriz and Rachel were both treated like the human beings they both are.  A few humane options presented themselves, chiefly: carrying Rachel to term, at extreme risk to Beatriz; or taking the earliest possible C-section, at increased risk to Rachel.  Beatriz, a wife and mother of another child, knew that Rachel suffered from a condition that made her unlikely to survive in any event, and also recognized her own responsibilities to her family, so she decided to take the C-section.  Beatriz came through it okay.  Rachel experienced a brief but inviolate life outside her mother’s womb, and doctors did everything in their power to save her, despite the odds.  The only losers here were the taxpayers who have to pay the sizable medical bills — but I think we can all agree that we shouldn’t kill people just because giving them a fighting chance at life is expensive.

Pro-lifers have never demanded that the lives of unborn children be privileged over the lives of their mothers: all we have demanded is equality before the law.  No one is obliged to become — and not everyone should be — Gianna Molla.  Nor have we demanded that pregnant mothers be deprived of the power to choose their own destinies: all we have demanded is that no pregnant mother be encouraged, coerced, or permitted to directly and deliberately kill her own child as one of those “choices.”  The balancing of risks and responsibilities is a great burden and a great responsibility, which belongs only to the mother (and, at least to some extent, her husband, if she is married).  Equality before the law plus strong maternal decision-making is what we saw in this case, and so something happened that rarely occurs in the modern abortion wars (and never in the so-called “developed” countries): a tragic, but ultimately happy, ending.  It’s a model I hope one day to see implemented everywhere.

So, now that you’re all caught up on the Happenings in El Salvador, what of these misrepresentations I was telling you about?  The article that caught my attention was called “An Abortion By Any Other Name.”  By Jodi Jacobson (the editor-in-chief!), the article makes the ludicrous argument that Beatriz’s C-section was actually a form of abortion called a “hysterotomy,” and she’s able to find two abortionists willing to give her quotes to this effect.  The argument is pretty dumb, obviously, since an abortion is an attempt to bring a dead baby into the world, while an attempt to bring a live baby into the world (like this one) is called a delivery.

The mangled vocabulary is amusing, of course — a “hysterotomy” is simply an incision into the uterus, just as a “laporotomy” is an incision into the abdomen, and opening the womb is obviously a necessary component a C-section — and it serves to underline that abortionists are now trying to change the definitions of words even when it does not even make any sense or seem to gain them anything particular.  They just muddy the waters because the more confused they make the public, the less the public will realize that abortionists murder children.  Ms. Jacobsen seems to recognize this, and does not bother making much of an argument on this point; after making the insane but sufficiently vague suggestion that the El Salvadorean government was being somehow hypocritical in its decision, she spends the balance of the piece calling pro-lifers misogynistic for defending Rachel’s life (Ms. Jacobsen is apparently unaware that Rachel was a girl) and (her real agenda) insisting that the modestly increased risk to Beatriz from having a C-section rather than a D&E abortion justified the immediate killing and dismemberment of poor Rachel.  Personally, I am grateful that I am not Ms. Jacobsen’s conjoined twin, because I would always have to watch my back, but the article as a whole was the mostly-harmless reality-distorting nonsense RH Reality Check puts out every day.

But then Ms. Jacobsen started talking about Rachel, and she crossed a line from nonsense into dishonesty.  And it was dishonestly of the very worst sort: dishonesty designed to imply that another human being’s life was worthless.  Here she is:

Beatriz was carrying a fetus with no brain, and therefore it could not survive outside the womb under any circumstance… She was therefore pushed into the third trimester, with her health failing to “save” a fetus that could not be saved… A woman was brought to death’s door for the sake of ideology made only somewhat more grotesque by the fact that the fetus she was carrying could never have survived in the first place.

We’ll leave aside the allegation that Beatriz was brought “to death’s door,” which is a bit of hyperbole unsupported by anything officially known about her pregnancy.  What’s despicable here is the claim that Rachel was absolutely doomed — a totally non-viable fetus who could never become a viable fetus, much less a living baby, under any circumstances.  It is obvious why Rachel’s would-be killers would want that to be true: if the baby can’t survive anyway, people are much less likely to have moral qualms about deliberately killing her a few weeks ahead of schedule, so saying that Rachel “could not be saved” increased support for Beatriz’s abortion petition.

The fact that it is absolutely, verifiably, categorically, and obviously false to anyone not suffering from anencephaly themselves does not seem to have entered Ms. Jacobsen’s consideration.

I do not deny that babies diagnosed with anencephaly have a very, very difficult road ahead of them.  A great many do, in fact, fail to survive outside the womb, with about one-in-four dying within the first hour after birth.  The vast majority do not survive the first week of life ex utero, and even fewer see their first birthdays.  Like sufferers of Tay-Sachs disease and Cystic Fibrosis, even those anencephalics who survive the first year face dramatically shortened lifespans — few survive infancy, and none, to my knowledge, have reached adulthood.

But, aided by a lot of luck and a lot of love, anencephalic babies do survive outside the womb — unless Ms. Jacobsen is arguing that living independently for 20 months or even three years isn’t “surviving”.  Surviving with anencephaly is not an unheard-of miracle; it’s studied and anyone with access to Google can learn about it in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.  Here are a few studies:

McAbee G, Sherman J, Canas JA, Boxer H. Prolonged survival of two anencephalic infants.  American Journal of Perinatololgy. 1993 Mar;10(2):175-7.  Department of Neurology, Nassau County Medical Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Baird PA, Sadovnick AD.  Survival in infants with anencephaly.  Clinical Pediatrics (Phila). 1984 May;23(5):268-71.

Jaquier M, Klein A, Boltshauser E. Spontaneous pregnancy outcome after prenatal diagnosis of anencephaly. BJOG 2006; 113:951–953. (NOTE: Full text at link)

In fact, about one-third of anencephalic babies survive their first day of life, and about 5%, or one-in-twenty, survive the first week.  No one is saying that three or four days after birth is a full life — but it is a life, and a meaningful one.  To pretend that the lives of the anencephalic don’t exist is not just a cheap political lie, not just a transparent attempt to return us to the old “life unworthy of life” insanity that plagued much of the New Deal era (on both sides of the Atlantic), but a cruel denial that those children, and their parents, undergo a profound and important experience during their unfairly shortened lives outside the womb.  For some of those stories, I invite anyone who’d like to spill some tears to spend just a few minutes at Anencephalie-Info.org.

So it’s a lie, and an obvious one, and obviously a lie of convenience.  Rachel’s fate was not written in stone, except in the fantasies of those who wanted to see her dead weeks ago.  But what else do we expect from those who make their livings from the klling of children?

This is not conventional wisdom, and I could tell that there was more than one skeptic at the table when I said what I did.  So I figured I’d better spend a little time today pulling together some data.

First, about the Ron Paul folks: Ron Paul was the most ardently pro-life candidate in the 2012 race.  Rick Santorum had the reputation as the die-hard social conservative, but that was not quite true when it came to abortion. Paul signed the Personhood Pledge, authored Personhood legislation before it was cool, and put together the most innovative and promising federal abortion legislation in years.  That’s why Norma McCorvey (the original “Roe” in Roe v. Wade, now a devoted pro-lifer) supported Ron Paul for President.  Clearly, when it comes to Ron Paul supporters, opposing abortion is not a deal-breaker.

And this matches up neatly with my experience in “the movement.”  Ron Paul supporters fell into three categories on abortion: those who were devotedly pro-life and did not want to support a “pro-life with exceptions” candidate (e.g. Romney), those who were pro-choice but did not consider it a “make-or-break” issue, and those who simply had no strong opinions on abortion.  (DISCLAIMER: I was one of those pro-lifers.  For more on why I backed Ron Paul, read my endorsement from last year, “Why I Support Ron Paul for President.”)  If Republicans want to win Ron Paul supporters, some can be enticed with stronger positions on abortion.  To be fair, though, most of those Paulites already voted for Romney (or Virgil Goode), with only a few exceptions.  The rest of Paul’s supporters considered Paul’s abortion position a neutral or a negative, but those supporters are motivated by other issues, so the Republican outreach to them should begin with those issues, not with abortion.

Indeed, Paul helped awaken a division in movement libertarianism as a whole: there are some libertarians, like Gary Johnson, who see abortion as a matter of women’s liberty, and therefore support legal abortion.  But there are others in the liberty movement, like Ron Paul himself, who see abortion as a matter of fetal liberty (the first, most fundamental liberty being the right not to be killed unjustly), and therefore support treating fetuses like the people they are under state and federal law.  Repositioning Republicans on abortion to appeal to the pro-abortion libertarian caucus would do them few favors with the anti-abortion libertarian caucus, and would alienate traditional social conservatives (i.e. “Santorum conservatives”) to no good end.

So much for abortion and the Ron Paul kiddies.  But the question I was asked was not about us Paulbots.  It was about young people as a whole, and how they view abortion.

Here, we are flooded with conflicting anecdotal evidence.  Certainly, the message that the Left wants you to hear is simple: Republican support for the civil rights of all persons, including the unborn, constitutes a “war on women” — and women are fighting back, with help from the pro-women, pro-equality youth movement.  Republicans, the meme goes, will never win women, especially young unmarried women, until they renounce abolitionism and reduce their abortion position to expanding contraceptive access, embracing “comprehensive sex education” (i.e. putting masturbation, contraception, and deviant sexual practices in the schools), and returning their main policy energies to the economy and the budget.  This is what young women in the Obama campaign say, and they are personally reinforced daily by the angry, bigoted hate machines at Jezebel and RHRealityCheck. It doesn’t hurt that their favorite stars in movies and television are all about abortion, and they make sure that the only voice young American women hear is the voice of the abortion industry.

But then you go to, say, the March for Life, and the pro-lifers couldn’t be more optimistic.  I could give a few links, but the bottom line coming out of this year’s March for Life was, “Jesus Christ, where did we get all these young people?!”  Even as the online youth messaging machine (where Republican ideas are barely represented) pours out the “war on women” meme, the actual youth in pro-life clubs at high schools and colleges around the country seem unfazed.  Based on what I’ve seen, the war-on-women meme is just wrong.

However, I must acknowledge the possibility that my perception of young people as a whole has been skewed by the sort of young people I hang out with, who are more conservative and religious than average.  Similarly, we must acknowledge that young liberal women who say that all young people agree with them on abortion also may have their perceptions skewed by their social graphs.  Indeed, the effect is probably quite a bit more pronounced for young liberals, because they have almost no contact with the conservative culture that exists in parallel with theirs, whereas conservatives are immersed in liberal culture every day.  (I touched on this this just yesterday.)  So, instead of anecdotes, we’re going to have to resort to data.

And, with all due respect to passionate young liberal pro-aborts, the data bears me out.  The meme that Republicans need to give in on abortion and endorse all the Democrats’ policies on sex and sex education is nothing but impressively self-serving propaganda.  (And, man, is it ever self-serving.  Go back and reread the policy menu they want conservatives to adopt on the pretext of “reducing abortions”.  It’s all stuff they’ve wanted for fifty years anyway, and only now has it occurred to them to pretend it would reduce abortions.)  The fact that many on the Left (and even some in the middle and on the Right) sincerely believe this silliness only shows that the Left is much more ignorant about their female and youth supporters than they think.  This, incidentally, presents us with an opportunity.

First, let’s put aside all discussion of the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” labels.  They are vague terms to begin with.  They have become even vaguer, especially now that Planned Parenthood has abandoned the term “pro-choice.”  Yes, pro-lifers celebrated last year when trends continued to show pro-life Voter ID climb, achieving an absolute majority for the first time (50%-41%) after beating out pro-choice voter ID for several years in a row.  But it’s a very soft way of identifying voter behaviour, and, sure enough, this year the polls swung back, with pro-choice leading pro-life 48%-44%.  Michael New took the occasion to remind us at First Things that nothing has really changed on the ground, whether in our direction or in theirs, as Americans’ self-labeling has shifted.

Second, let’s put aside all polls that simply ask whether Americans support Roe v. Wade.  These polls are worse than useless.  Pew recently learned that fully 4 in 10 American adults — and 6 in 10 young people! — have no idea that Roe v. Wade was about abortion.  Even those (rare!) Americans who do know Roe had something to do with abortion rarely know what Roe actually did: it created (imagined) a universal constitutional right to abortion on demand, for any reason, up to the moment of birth.  A number of MSM organizations that should know better regularly poll on Roe but, for reasons not understood by me, either do not mention abortion at all, or quite falsely imply (without stating outright!) that the decision only legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. So most of these Roe polls tell us more about whether young people support school desegregation (I’m not joking!  Read the Pew poll!) than about what abortion policies young people support.

Instead, let’s look past labels and dive into policy.  Polling on abortion policy has been surprisingly consistent since Roe, with measurable but modest gains for pro-lifers since 1992:

About 20% of the public wants to outlaw abortion in all cases, even when the mother’s life is physically threatened.  About 25% of the public wants abortion to be legal in all cases, up to (and including!) the moment of birth.  And about 55% of the public wants abortion to be illegal in some cases.  For some in that huge 55% bloc, that means banning all abortions except those directly necessary to save the mother’s life, as in an ectopic pregnancy.  For others, it means allowing all abortions except those in the third trimester (or about 95% of them).  Women are more polarized on abortion than men, but, contrary to the “war on women” meme, they are not polarized in favor of abortion; they are simply more likely to take an extreme position, and the extreme anti-abortion position is about as likely as the extreme pro-abortion one.

That’s the big picture.  What about young people?

Young people have single-handedly saved the pro-life movement from slipping away into the background.  As the Greatest Generation died off, they left behind a world of Boomers and Gen X’ers, who are far more supportive of abortion rights in general and in particular than their elders were.  This should have caused abortion to become more popular — its opponents were literally dying off!  And, indeed, until 1992, that’s exactly what happened (see above graph).  But, starting in 1992, abortion support peaked and began to decline back toward its baseline.  Although there was some erosion for abortion support across all age groups as the partial-birth abortion debate overtook Congress, it did not seem to account for the entire decline.  Then, starting in the year 2000, the General Social Survey began registering something very interesting: young people aged 18-29 were more anti-abortion than their parents.  I see no reason to repeat Michael New’s findings, so I won’t.

By 2009, Gallup was forced to acknowledge it was seeing the same thing:

This holds true when we go a bit further and subdivide “certain circumstances” and into “most” circumstances and “a few” circumstances.  (Note the inclusion of 29-34 year olds makes this sample of “young people” somewhat more pro-abortion than the last one.)

As we can see, young people are not just leaning toward the “everything-but-partial-birth” end of the spectrum.  To an even greater degree than the middle-aged, those young people who support legal abortion in “some circumstances” lean heavily toward restrictions.

Bottom line: the current generation of young people is the most anti-abortion generation in half a century.

Some might say, “Well, okay, but pro-choice young people, even if they are a minority, are a lot more active, and therefore a lot more useful, than young pro-lifers.” However, the data do not bear out that claim.  On the contrary, anti-abortion voters are significantly more likely to make their decision based on a candidate’s abortion position than are pro-aborts, netting Abolitionist candidates and their allies anywhere from 2 to 7 points in a presidential election year (or a 4 to 14 point swing).  NARAL agrees — and goes farther, finding in its internal polls that young people who oppose abortion are dramatically more likely to consider it an important issue than young people who support it… by a margin of more than 2-to-1!  Alienating those anti-abortion activist voters is dangerous: when a candidate (like Mr. Romney) fails to live up to the pro-life ideals of much of his base, even as an opposing candidate (like Mr. Obama) aggressively panders to the pro-choicers in his, the result is that those intense pro-life voters stay home, while the intense pro-choicers come out.  I argued last November that that was a surprisingly significant factor in our electoral defeat (although I need to take another look at that article, now that all votes have been counted).

In summary, abortion opposition is becoming more politically palatable as young people grow up, not less.  This is the only social issue I can think of where this is true.  The opposite is happening on marriage, and I am not sanguine about its electoral prospects — nor our party’s, as long as we maintain our present course on marriage.  (More on this at a later date.)  We would do ourselves a serious electoral disservice, however, by addressing both issues identically in our policy or our messaging.  Among older voters, it seems like they run together a little bit — “abortion’n’gaymarriage” — and behaviour on one almost perfectly predicts behaviour on the others.  Among young people, that’s not true, and we are increasingly seeing young’uns rise up who are anti-abortion and pro-gay marriage.  Young people are deciding in increasing numbers that you can be both.

How do we exploit their openness to us on abortion?  Well, we keep right on doing what we’ve been doing!  There is overwhelming support for most of the “incrementalist” pro-life measures we’ve been trying to pass since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and we can continue passing such measures indefinitely.  Arkansas just banned abortions after 12 weeks (i.e. the first trimester), which, if this Marist poll or this Polling Company poll or this Gallup poll are any indication, is just about where Americans think the line should be drawn right now.  There’s a lot we can do to get there, too, as long as we’re careful not to present anything that can be ripped away from us an misrepresented in the media as “forced transvaginal ultrasounds” or whatnot.  The popular wind is at our back, policy-wise.  It’s messaging where we seem to fall down.

Meanwhile (speaking of messaging), there is overwhelming opposition to the Democrats’ official platform position that any pregnant mother, of any age, should be able to kill that child at any time, for any reason, without limitation, restriction, or discouragement, on the public dime.  Somehow, we Republicans, who encompass a variety of pro-life positions on abortion (from Bill Glahn’s restrict-but-not-too-much to President Bush’s just-for-rape-and-incest to my own nope-let’s-just-abolish), allowed ourselves to be treated last election cycle as though we were nothing but a gang of ignorant Todd Akins, when our Democratic opponents are far more extreme, far more outside the American mainstream, and far more uniformly doctrinaire on the issue than we are.  We can and should expose that.  The trick is doing so in a positive way that attracts voters.

Finally, in states where it is sustainable, we should continue advancing toward the goal posts.  Midwestern and Southern states appear ready, in some cases, to embrace the new civil rights movement all the way:

…and, sure enough, debates over Personhood amendments are making serious headway in Georgia, Mississippi, and North Dakota.  These are to be encouraged, partly because it is the right thing to do, but partly because, once a state passes Personhood and the sky doesn’t fall (as Planned Parenthood insists it will), the Republican position will become more attractive to everyone in the country.

There are also Personhood efforts underway in several states where they have no chance of passing, such as Washington and Colorado.  These should not be encouraged, since they are a waste of resources if they fail, and they alienate electorates that are not yet ready to support them.  But those same measures also should not be discouraged, except perhaps on the sly, since discouraging them only focuses the attention of our enemies on the finer points of Republican abortion policy, leads to ugly internal fights, as happened in Wisconsin last year, and gives Planned Parenthood an opening to pour good solid lies into the electorate without serious opposition, which helps nobody on the right-wing at all.  (Disclaimer: I made an extensive argument in favor of Wisconsin’s Personhood proposal last year, taking sides in one of those ugly internal fights.  I believed it had a reasonable chance at passing, if adequately defended before the voters.)

But Minnesota is a long way from being capable of that kind of amendment.  I’m not even sure the room I was in last night would have backed Personhood.  For now, I would focus our ire on extremism in the Minnesota abortion lobby.  Doe v. Gomez, a 1995 Minnesota Supreme Court decision, has held for almost twenty years that the Minnesota Constitution requires us to provide free abortions, for any reason, at any stage of pregnancy, through Medicare.  I don’t there’s ever been a poll that supports that, anywhere in the country.  We can fight that, and we can win it.

But now I have digressed considerably from the questions I was asked: Does abortion hurt us among Ron Paul supporters?  Among young people as a whole?  The answer, fairly definitively, is “No” to both questions.  Republican anti-abortion policy does not harm us, and actually helps us (modestly) in both those cohorts.  We should continue with our existing policies, revise our messaging to frame abortion as a “human rights” issue (winner) instead of a “public morality” issue (loser), and we should even find ways to advance our ultimate agenda of abolition in those states the popular will is behind it.

Republican anti-abortion messaging, on the other hand, can and does hurt us.  But that’s another blog post.

For the crime cannot — must not — be observed only in silent prayer, lest it be buried under the euphemisms of this generation, and the forgetfulness of all generations to come. Those children, who now number more than all those killed in all the world by the reign of Adolf Hitler, must not be deprived of the prayers and memoriams owed them by the nation who deprived them of nearly their entire lives. To forget them would be an even greater injustice than killing them in the first place. Some commemoration, however small, is demanded, before the silent prayers may begin.

But every commemoration reads like an accusation. Simply by remembering the dead, by acknowledging what we, the People, took from them, we are accusing our colleagues, our politicians, our friends, our sisters and brothers, our fathers, our mothers, our sons and daughters — and ourselves — of murder and complicity in murder. Even at an innocent request for prayers, they take umbrage.

They have a point: if those children were killed, it was not just those who held the knife who killed them. It was those who went to the operating table and asked a doctor to kill their child. It was those who pressured their friends and loved ones to consider that “choice.” It was those who agreed to “support” their friends no matter what. It was those of us who failed to help — who failed to reach out to mothers and fathers in need and fill those needs, instead allowing fear to coerce them into murder. It was those of us who voted to make it legal, and it was those of us who have allowed it to remain legal, despite the terrible human cost, because incremental compromise is more comfortable than revolt.

If those children were killed, then we are all murderers.

I cannot escape the accusation, and so I must embrace it. You stand accused. Those of you who are not actually murderers (as several of my friends are) are accessories to it, differentiated from one another only by the degree of your complicity.  So am I.

Yesterday was Inauguration Day, and so it seems appropriate to observe that, if God wills that all the wealth piled by the infant’s forty years of unrequited suffering shall be sunk, and that every drop of blood drawn with the curette shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

And let us never forget, not for a moment, that this is who we are. Not a shining city on a hill. Not a bridge to the next century. Not a haven for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We are a gang of callous killers, frittering away our lives in a culture built on a foundation of 55 million unnamed and unnameable skulls.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post has been updated.

Before we say any more about 939.75(2)(b)(1), let’s remind ourselves, for the sake those readers who did not skip directly to the appendix, how 940.04 got struck down, giving us Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s potential Nightmare Scenario.  This is from the white paper, page 12:

4. If adopted, what impact would the proposed state constitutional amendment have on § 940.04?

The Personhood Amendment does not present the same obstacles to renewed enforcement as the 2006 proposal. In the context of the proposed amendment as a whole, however, the reference to all people (including children prior to birth) being “equally” free raises troublesome difficulties in this regard.

The proposed amendment says that the inherent rights of all people include the right to life. Is the right to life part of the freedom that unborn children share equally with everyone else? If so, does the fact that it is shared “equally” mean that the legal protection of that right provided by the criminal law must be the same for unborn children as it is for everyone else? If the answers to these questions are “Yes,” then prescribing a lesser penalty for intentionally and deliberately killing a child three months before birth than for intentionally and deliberately killing a child sixty minutes after birth – which is one of the effects of § 904.04 – would conflict with that prescription. (This argument has been raised repeatedly over the past forty years and, in our judgment, it would be imprudent not to take it seriously. See, e.g., Chemerinsky, “Rationalizing the Abortion Debate: legal Rhetoric and the Abortion Controversy,” 31 Buff. L. Rev. 107, 112-14 & nn. 27, 38 (1982); see also Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 157 n.54 (1973).)

A defendant seeking to assert this position in a criminal prosecution under § 940.04 would face serious standing issues. An abortionist or abortion-seeker pursuing injunctive relief, however, would not face that obstacle. Such a challenger could contend that the dramatic difference in treatment between intentionally killing people before and after birth simply cannot be squared with the amendment’s prescription of equality.

To be sure, that argument would confront a formidable substantive objection. The law routinely treats homicides differently depending on the circumstances under which they are committed. Murder for hire, to take an obvious example, is punished more harshly than murder committed impulsively at the climax of a heated argument. Judges would ask the challengers why the differentiation implicit in § 940.04 is not simply one more example of this commonplace approach.

The challengers’ answer, presumably, would be that the differentiation here is not based on circumstance but on the status of the victim; or to put it another way, on the precise “circumstance” that the amended constitutional language would make expressly ineligible for consideration. That rejoinder might fail – but it might succeed. Its prospects for success are certainly not trivial. And if it did succeed, the results would be literally fatal for thousands of unborn children in Wisconsin.

We have presumed for the sake of discussion that the challengers overcame their standing issues, made the argument suggested here, and that their rejoinder has succeeded.  Under Personhood, 940.04 is ruled unconstitutional and struck down in toto.  We now turn to 939.75(2)(b)(1), which should have been introduced into the deliberations by the defenders of 940.04.  That provision states:

(b) Sections 940.01 (1) (b), 940.02 (1m), 940.05 (2g) and (2h), 940.06 (2), 940.08 (2), 940.09 (1) (c) to (e) and (1g) (c), (cm), and (d), 940.10 (2), 940.195, 940.23 (1) (b) and (2) (b), 940.24 (2) and 940.25 (1) (c) to (e) do not apply to any of the following:

1. An act committed during an induced abortion. This subdivision does not limit the applicability of ss. 940.04, 940.13, 940.15 and 940.16 to an induced abortion…

Our first question: does 939.75(2)(b)(1) establish a “dramatic difference in treatment between intentionally killing people before and after birth” in a manner similar to that of 940.04?  Yes.  Indeed, the difference in treatment is even more dramatic, as I observed in part IV: 940.04 merely reduced a Class A felony (murder) to a Class E or H felony (embezzlement) when the victim is unborn. Once 940.04 is gone, 939.75(2)(b)(1) reduces a class A felony (murder) to not a crime at all when the victim is unborn.  Clearly, our counter-challenge has merit.

Judges would likely ask us the same question they asked Planned Parenthood & Co.: since the law “routinely treats homicides differently depending on the circumstances under which they are committed, why is the differentiation implicit” in 939.75(2)(b)(1) “not simply one more example of this commonplace approach”?

The abortion industry’s answer, with respect to 940.04, was that “the differentiation here is not based on circumstance but on the status of the victim; or to put it another way, on the precise ‘circumstance’ that the amended constitutional language would make expressly ineligible for consideration.” Can we use the same answer to this question that the abortion industry did?

It would seem so.  Based on the language of both 940.04 and 939.75(2)(b)(1) , the act which allegedly encapsulates an “implicit differentiation” is almost identical.  The penalty for “abortion”, in 940.04, is generally applied to “any person who intentionally destroys the life of the unborn child.”  (There is an exception for the mother herself, but this is merely a restatement of 940.13.  It is therefore equally applicable to both statutes.)  In 939.75, “induced abortion” is defined as “the use of any instrument, medicine, drug or other substance or device in a medical procedure with the intent to terminate the pregnancy of a woman and with an intent other than to increase the probability of a live birth, to preserve the life or health of the infant after live birth or to remove a dead fetus.”  While the words are different, both definitions are, in actual fact, nearly identical: the first refers to killing an unborn child; the second to killing an unborn child in a medical procedure.  Therefore, the implicit differentiation – which is to say, the statutes’ specific and prejudicial deprivation of fetal rights – is essentially identical.  If the court agrees, it would have no choice but to make the amended constitutional language equally applicable to 939.75(2)(b)(1) as to 940.04.

However, while that rejoinder might succeed, it might fail.  The court could hold that 939.75(2)(b)(1) does not discriminate based on the status of the victim as an unborn child, but rather based on the circumstance of the killing as part of a medical procedure.  In this case, the next natural course would be to examine 939.75(2)(b)(1) under a rational basis analysis.  Pro-lifers would assert that the abortion exception in 939.75(2)(b)(1) bears no rational relationship to any state purpose other than to provide for the deprivation of the personal right to life by the strong against the weak, and therefore that the law should be struck down.

The laxity of rational basis review permits the opposition to submit several possible replies.  They could argue that, while the Wisconsin Constitution concededly does not guarantee the right of a pregnant woman to establish and maintain a zone of privacy between herself and her doctor (remember, this is post-Roe v. Wade), establishing such a zone is nevertheless within the legitimate interests of the state of Wisconsin.  Opening that physician-patient relationship (not to mention the details of the mother’s personal life) to potential prosecution in a murder investigation every time an unborn child dies, for any reason, would make any zone of confidential medical and emotional consultation impossible.  Moreover, Wisconsin law holds that it is an invasion of privacy to “intrude… in a place that a reasonable person would consider private” (955.50).  Few places more private can be imagined, Planned Parenthood’s lawyers would argue, than the interior of a woman’s own uterus.  Therefore, it is rational for the state to exclude from criminal law all cases which may, if prosecuted, tend to compromise this “zone of personal privacy.”  This exclusion would include all criminal cases alleging induced abortion.

The response to the “zone of privacy” argument would presumably point out that the privilege of physician-patient privacy, which is already defined and defended in the Wisconsin Code at §905.04, is not implicated by any matter before the court.  That statute neither affirms nor implies a class of crimes which the state cannot or should not prosecute; on the contrary, the statute and its judicial history in Wisconsin expressly contemplate the possibility that a physician-patient relationship will from time to time be at the center of a criminal prosecution.  It provides both physician and patient with certain protections and obligations in such a proceeding; it is not injured by permitting such a procedure to occur.  Further, the “right to privacy” – or, as Justice Brandeis put it, “the right to be let alone” – does not apply to actions which do material harm to someone other than the actor or actors.  Such acts are, by definition, not private, and therefore not susceptible to the protection of privacy.  While Wisconsin certainly has a legitimate interest in protecting the privacy of its citizens, the legitimate “zone of personal privacy” has never been understood under Wisconsin law to include a right to commit violent felonies against another person while the criminal justice system turns a blind eye.  Following the challengers’ novel interpretation, the Wisconsin legislature could, in order to further the state’s legitimate interest in the right to bear arms, exclude any murderer from prosecution – provided he committed the murder with a lawfully-owned firearm.  No court would sustain such an absurdity as rational.  The government of Wisconsin lacks the authority to retreat from its constitutional responsibility to “secure these… inherent rights” (Article I, Section 1) on such flimsy rationalizations, which do not even rise to the dignity of pretext.

Alternatively, the challengers could argue that 939.75(2)(b)(1)’s exclusion of certain medical procedures from prosecution under murder statutes is an appropriate and prudent response to the possibility that doctors could otherwise be prosecuted for accidents and other innocent, if tragic, occurrences that take place, from time to time, in the practice of medicine.  In this way, 939.75(2)(b)(1) simply discriminates on the basis of a particular medical practice which just happens to be the deliberate killing of a human being, rather than on the basis of their status as unborn humans per se.  Unfortunately for this argument, the innocent circumstances described are already fully excluded by the much more narrowly-tailored, precise 939.75(2)(b)(2).  Thus, it is hard for me to see this argument going anywhere.

In any case, the pro-lifers attacking 939.75(2)(b)(1) in the alternative would have an ace in the hole.  So far, we’ve discussed the challenge to 939.75(2)(b)(1) on rational basis terms.  However, this is not just any equal protection case.  939.75(2)(b)(1) is not just a minor burden to those who fall victim to it; they aren’t merely denied the right to serve in the military or forced to pay a special tax.  They are deprived of their very lives.  The right to life is one of a precious few which are considered fundamental rights in American law. It is enumerated in Amendment XIV of the U.S. Constitution and applied directly to the states. (Its fundamental status is verified in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) and Johnson v. Zerbst (1938)). When a law places a burden upon a fundamental right, it triggers what is known as strict scrutiny review (NAACP v. Alabama (1958), Massachusetts Bd. of Retirement v. Murgia (1975)).  I am citing federal cases, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court has explicitly tethered its equal protection and strict scrutiny analysis to the parallel federal interpretations (see, e.g., Reginald D. v. State (1995)), so they are no less applicable here.

Strict scrutiny review shifts the burden of proof from a law’s challenger to the party defending the law (normally the government), because the judiciary considers laws that infringe certain core liberties or attack certain minority groups “immediately suspect”, and requires a high standard of proof to save those laws from being struck down as unconstitutional under equal protection clauses.  That standard of proof involves three points: the law must be justified by a “compelling government interest”; it must be “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest; and it must use the “least restrictive means” for achieving that interest.  The court is free to question the motivations behind discriminatory laws under strict scrutiny analysis – and strike them down if the motivation is discrimination itself.  It is not an easy standard for a law to survive; the old saw about strict scrutiny is “strict in theory; fatal in fact.”  As a strict scrutiny precursor, Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), put it [emphasis mine]:

When we consider the nature and the theory of our institutions of government, the principles upon which they are supposed to rest, and review the history of their development, we are constrained to conclude that they do not mean to leave room for the play and action of purely personal and arbitrary power… the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, considered as individual possessions, are secured by those maxims of constitutional law which are the monuments showing the victorious progress of the race in securing to men the blessings of civilization under the reign of just and equal laws, so that, in the famous language of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, the government of the commonwealth “may be a government of laws, and not of men.” For the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life at the mere will of another seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself.

If strict scrutiny is applied, it is difficult to imagine a path to survival for 939.75(2)(b)(1), especially given our presumption that 940.04 has already been struck down on similar grounds.  The challengers’ best shot would be to argue that a statutory limitation on criminal charges does not inherently burden a right, and therefore strict scrutiny should not apply.  In support of this claim, they could offer a variety of existing exceptions to murder statutes: the right to deliberately kill in self-defense, the right to deliberately kill in the course of a just war, the right to deliberately kill in order to prevent a felony, and mitigation of punishment if there was “adequate provocation” for the killing.

However, the rejoinder in this instance is reasonably persuasive: a statutory limitation does burden a right if its effect, in law or in fact, is to deprive of its fundamental rights a “discrete and insular minority” which lacks the agency to make use of “those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities” (U.S. v. Carolene Products (1938)) – such as unborn children, who cannot vote – without reciprocal cause.  For example, one might lose the normal protection of his right to life through his decision to rob a bank; another by fighting for the enemy in a war; yet another by placing someone “in imminent danger of death” (as 940.01 puts it).  No such reciprocal cause is offered, or indeed possible, in the case of an innocent fetus in a normal pregnancy.  Therefore strict scrutiny must be engaged, and 939.75(2)(b)(1) must be struck down.

Since 939.75(2)(b)(1)’s detractors need only succeed on any one of these lines of argument, and since it has, in my opinion, the better of all of them, it seems more likely than not that the effort will succeed.  In the unlikely event that 940.04 is struck down as unconstitutional under Personhood, it is likely, in my opinion, that the Alternative Scenario would follow from any successful challenge to 939.75(2)(b)(1), whether coincident with the decision on 940.04 or pursued at a later date.