From "Leave My Disability Out of Your Anti-Abortion Propaganda" by Kendall Ciesemier (NYT).
July 31, 2022
"By invoking a story about valuing disability, abortion opponents can connect abortion to the dark practice of eugenics, or..."
"... the systematic removal of unsavory traits in a population to achieve genetic supremacy. If they can liken ending a pregnancy for a fetal abnormality to genocide, they can liken their advocacy to protecting disabled lives. They are forgetting, however, that pregnancy can endanger disabled people. Removing abortion access is not protecting our lives; it is putting them in danger.
Growing up in a conservative town, I became familiar with this story line: 'No one should have an abortion, even if there is something wrong with their baby,' my high school friend would say. 'Kendall, you’re a miracle baby. Surely, you are happy you are alive.' I was already firmly pro-choice then, but my disability was used as the evidence in her argument, the gotcha in our debate. What my friend didn’t understand was that disabled fetuses grow up to be disabled people with their own reproductive needs. In some cases, these needs include access to abortion.... What chronically ill and disabled people need is autonomy to make the health care choices right for them. It’s what we all deserve."
From "Leave My Disability Out of Your Anti-Abortion Propaganda" by Kendall Ciesemier (NYT).
From "Leave My Disability Out of Your Anti-Abortion Propaganda" by Kendall Ciesemier (NYT).
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45 comments:
so, what is it that Kendal was trying to say?
We should allow abortion, but only of healthy babies? i'm not getting it.
Is it OK to abort a baby for having gay genes?
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Abortion is always allowed if the life of the mother is at risk. If she doesn't like being used as a poster child for a position she doesn't support, fine. This strawman, though, is unserious.
Logically, there no requirement for people who were not aborted to favor Pro-life. It is however, a good emotional arguement.
why are we getting all these Pro-choice articles from the NYT/WaPo - the vast majority of their readers live in Blue states that have extreme Pro-abortion laws. Let the people in the Red states have their laws, you have yours. Federalism. Why the cultural imperialism?
"What my friend didn’t understand was that disabled fetuses grow up to be disabled people with their own reproductive needs. In some cases, these needs include access to abortion."
This is right up there with "this act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion" level sadism (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/rcna34178). This person is arguing for their own destruction as well as trying to link a biological need to reproduce to some biological need to kill, as if these things were as one in the same as taking a breath of air.
The souls of these people are not healthy, much less their bodies or their minds. To gain some kind of victory they are willing to go down any rabbit hole to justify this freedom from responsibility.
Icelandic Down Syndrome children could not be reached for comment.
A better title to this piece would be "Leave My Disability Out of Your Anti-Abortion Propaganda (But It's OK For Me To Use My Disability To Advocate FOR Abortion In The NYT."
Nobody “values disability”. They value people, who happen to have a disability.
The often intentional misrepresentation of the prolife position is the primary reason why we don’t have fruitful conversations on the topic.
Abortion - what can’t it do to make the world better?
Why is it people can learn to pay their mortgage or rent on time, put gas in their car so they can drive, show up for school on time, find food to prevent starvation, but are incapable of practicing safe sex?
Why is it the left expects people to perfectly remember individually chosen pronouns and hundreds of politically correct taboos, but not how to prevent fertilization of human eggs?
Would not society be a better place with more personal responsibility and not less? For respecting all of life and not just the politically chosen? For meaning it when we say black lives matter?
I don't think you can divorce abortion from the queasiest parts of eugenics. It's just a historical fact. Abortion is more intrinsic to eugenics than slavery is to the Constitution. Schools should teach critical abortion theory......I'm not opposed to first term abortion or abortifacient pills, but we're harnessing dangerous forces. The most common disability that is aborted is not Down's Syndrome but the pre-natal fetus that has failed to develop a penis. In certain parts of the world, millions and millions of females are being aborted simply for being females. That's a fact....I wish feminists would acknowledge that there's a down side to abortion. It's a last resort not a vacation resort.
I'm not 100% sure which argument she is making. That because of her disability she should not get pregnant? Then perhaps a long term birth control option is the safest thing for her.
That being a woman, even a woman with a disability, she can get pregnant like any other woman and wants the option to have an abortion? Then she is just pro-choice and her opinion has nothing to do with her disability.
We all have reasons for the opinions we hold.
Pro-lifers did not connect abortion to eugenics. Margaret Sanger connected abortion to eugenics. Pro-lifers just noticed.
Noticing things is bad! It is bad to notice how much it costs to care for illegal immigrants. It is bad to notice that black men are responsible for a majority of reported metropolitan violent crime. Bad. Bad. Bad.
How many think this article would have been in the NY Times if it advocated a pro-life position and against eugenics?
This is the utter blindness in obstinately using the terms "anti-abortion" or "abortion opponents." Those who do get confused when pro-lifers also care for the disabled and for the sick and elderly and terminally ill.
Now that abortion is regulated by legislation, it's quite right for Mr Chesner to speak out. It's a difficult issue, and we need to find a compromise that 95% of us can live with. That is preferable to simply being told that the answer lies deep within the latent penumbras of a document understandable only by a sacred priesthood.
"In some cases, these needs include access to abortion."
Yeah, there are some people I'd like to kill too.
“Leave My Disability Out of Your Anti-Abortion Propaganda”
No.
"these needs include access to abortion.... What chronically ill and disabled people need is autonomy to make the health care choices right for them"
OK, so suppose "access" is limited in one state. Then everyone still has the "autonomy" to 1. not have sex; 2. use protection on both sides when having sex; 3. procure a morning-after pill just in case; 4. travel to a blue abortion-on-demand state to seek "health care."
Even at this late date, it is gruesome to hear abortion supporters talk about fetus removal and dismemberment as "health care."
If a woman’s disability would threaten her life during pregnancy she should have a tubal ligation. She can’t say “For this fetus I don’t want to risk my life, but for this other one I do” and still retain the high ground in the argument. That makes her just like anyone else not wanting to shoulder the burden of her actions.
I wonder what her disability is?? Perhaps, writing for the New Woke Times??
If someone has an abortion because they don't want to raise a disabled child or thinks it wrong to bring a disabled child into the world, I don't blame them.
If you think that's wrong because its anti-Christian, that's between them and God. we don't force people to obey the Sabbath, love thy neighbor as thy self, not worship other Gods, or not worship Graven images, so why should we enforce the Religious belief that abortion is wrong?
In fact, the Pope has proclaimed that Jews and Muslims get into Heaven too. So, it seems even belief in Jesus Christ is optional.
"Leave my disability out of your anti-abortion propaganda."
Yet another liberal, open-minded attempt to shut down opposition before the other side gets to make its case. Ok, fine. Don't expect us to comply.
Having said what I said, i don't totally disagree with the writer. Disabled people can be victimized, or may behave irresponsibly. There may indeed be cases where abortion is the best, or nearly the best alternative. But those cases are the outliers. Making policy based on the hard cases isn't a great idea.
I think the grand compromise is unrestricted abortion up to the 15-20 weeks-range, rooted in the 9th amendment. After that, it’s restricted to life safety/health or rape/incest of the mother, rooted in the 2nd Amendment’s right to self-defense and the 14th amendment’s extension of the bill of rights to the states.
Congress could pass this law right now. They could have passed this law most of the last 50 years. And I doubt SCOTUS would strike down that compromise. This is what Robert’s was going for but the other conservative justices rejected - not because they disagree with the compromise but because they don’t think SCOTUS should be legislating this decision from the bench.
I agree. We have two people who’s rights are in conflict in an abortion. One is an unborn human child and one is fully born human capable of procreation. SCOTUS shouldn’t decide the line when rights compete like this. Making this decision is the role of the democratic process.
For instance, the 2nd amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear arms and the SCOTUS has interpreted that to imply a right to self-defense. But, self-defense involves competing rights. So, while the SCOTUS has affirmed the right to own and carry firearms (with some restrictions), it leaves to the legislative branches the power to define the rules for self-defense.
We, as a people, need to struggle with the question of “when does equal protection under the law” begin. Does it begin when someone is fully birthed. Does it began when a child is crowning? Or, does it begin at some point before that? My gut tells me it begins at some point before that but not necessarily at the moment of conception. We need to argue that out through the democratic process. I think we eventually arrive at the above compromise and that while there will continue to be vocal dissenters on both sides, most people will accept the compromise and the middle will hold.
Robert Heinlein wrote a novel called "Metheusalas Children" the major character was Lazarus Long.
Basic premise was that the Howard Foundation searched out people whose ancestors had lived particularly long lives. They would then encourage them, with cash, to marry others with long lived ancestors.
The result was a large group of people who would live a couple hundred years. Normal people didn't like them and they were run off the planet.
Most eugenics has always been negatively focused. Abortion, birth control, keeping low iq and disabled from marrying.
Suppose a Musk, or a Soros started a positive eugenics. Find high IQ people and encourage them to marry and procreate with other high iq people in the hopes the children would be high IQ.
I am assuming the genetics work but don't know enough about it.
Would a positive eugenics like this be more acceptable than the traditional negative eugenics?
John LGBTQBNY Henry
"Congress could pass this law right now."
Any idea which section of the Constitution gives them that authority?
Founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret *cough*eugenics fan*cough* Sanger.
Intersectionalism and solidarity would suggest that people who could have been aborted would have more sympathy with the aborted.
"Abortion is more intrinsic to eugenics than slavery is to the Constitution."
While the goals are certainly the same (limiting the reproductive potential of the "wrong" sorts of people), even Margaret Sanger would be shocked that her organization was in the abortion business. Helping those "wrong" sorts of people avoid pregnancy in the first place isn't the same thing as killing their babies in the womb.
So far as eugenics go, I don't think a high IQ enhances survivability. If you were an Irish peasant during the potato famine, a German peasant during the Thirty Years War, a Ukrainian peasant during collectivization process, you were probably better off with no imagination and a dull acceptance of life's misery. Then, when things got better among the lucky survivors, they could pass along the smarter genes in their gene pool to their descendants......It seems to me that in a lot of eras, it's the best and the brightest who perish....War is now an artisanal profession, at least in the west, but there were many wars where the smartest men were the ones most likely to die. The Napoleonic Wars weren't Darwinian struggles. They hastened the early death of the fittest.
Yet another "shut up" argument. A lot of people don't want to admit it, but there is a valid argument to be made that many people chose abortion because they suspect that they won't have a baby free of undesirable defects.
"shut up" is not an argument; it's what people say when they don't really want to debate an issue because they're afraid that they might lose.
One-child delegated as selective-child by virtue of a nominally "secular" sanction under the established Pro-Choice ethical religion. A wicked solution to an ostensibly hard problem: keep women affordable, available, and taxable, and rape... rape-rape of ten year-old girls, the abortion and sequestration of "burdens"... bodies of evidence in darkness, under a quasi-legal cloak of privacy, in order to sustain social progress. Human rites performed for social, redistributive, clinical, political, and fair weather causes, under a religion that denies women and men's dignity and agency, and reduces human life to negotiable commodities.
John henry said...
Robert Heinlein wrote a novel called "Metheusalas Children" the major character was Lazarus Long....
Right idea, but apparently wrong starting point from what I can see. I'm convinced the fruit fly theory is the way to go for longevity. Experiment done a while back. Scientists separated out male and female fruit flies. (I have no idea how to do that) Fruit flies only live 8-15 days, so experiments can be run quickly. They kept them separated until a few hours past when the female would normally mate, then let them get together for the orgy. Rinse, repeat. Only took 5 or 6 generations to double the fruit fly lifespan. Age of fist birth of the mother seems to be the deciding factor.
There's some evidence that's true in humans. Children of college educated women live longer, on average, then children of women who breed right after HS, and those children live longer then children born of women breeding before age 18. Very consistently. Shows up in another way- Black Women, on average, breed before white women, on average, who breed before Asian women, on average. And it shows up in their lifespans.
Shows up in the different branches on my family tree. Except for my paternal grandfather, first births of females for at least 6 generations in my tree was at age 23 or later. And it shows in ever increasing lifespans. My paternal grandfather's mother was just 16 when he was born, he lived to 68, dying at a several years earlier age then my other 3 grandparents, 73, 80, and 91 for his wife. Now I'm speaking of death by what is commonly referred to as "old age", not accident or illness. In other well documented family branches I can see generations of first births at ages 17-20. In those branches my 4th and 5th cousins are dead, the living relatives are 1 and 2 times removed. With the 7th cousins my age who I'm Facebook friends with, the first birth of mother at age 23 or higher for several generations shows up in their trees also.
IMHO- this would make a good thesis subject for an aspiring Ph.D. in statistics or biology. Lots of data freely available with a membership to ancestry.com, with documents usually available to back it up.
John henry said...
Suppose a Musk, or a Soros started a positive eugenics. Find high IQ people and encourage them to marry and procreate with other high iq people in the hopes the children would be high IQ.
Would work, but... assortive mating of that type creates another problem. It seems to be pretty well known, though not often discussed, that the children of two degreed engineers or doctors, or any similar profession, are far more likely to be autistic then the children of two HS graduates, or two teaching school graduates... which may say something about teaching school.
Really high IQ is actually a disadvantage in life.
Up to maybe 100 years ago it was not uncommon for doctors and midwives to euthanize a child born with disabilities. Especially if it was a poor immigrant family with no means to care for the kid.
Abortion is more intrinsic to eugenics than slavery is to the Constitution.
Slavery is only found in the Constitution so far as to mitigate its progress through democratic leverage. The Constitution does not tolerate, let a lone celebrate, slavery, diversity [dogma], redistributive change, political congruence, social justice, the wicked solution (i.e. murder - homicide in darkness, human rites, elective abortion, planned parent/hood), Mengele mandates, etc.
But if disabled fetuses are aborted before they can become disabled adults then there won't be any disabled adults who need to have abortions, right?
Some real big brain stuff going on in the pages of the NYTimes.
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough" said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. I doubt they'd phrase it quite the same but do you think a majority of Times subscribers would agree with the core idea there?
Life (by color, class, etc.) deemed unworthy of life has its social justice roots in left-wing ideology. So, how many people... persons would have been, would qualify as, capitol... capital "burdens" in a witch trial, a warlock judgment, a baby thrown on the barbie, Gosnell's final rites, in Cecile's cannibal court, for a wicked solution prosecuted by the State, an incorporated federation, or one of its licensees under secular religious sanction? One step forward, twos steps backward again, and again, and again.
Isn't the writer saying that abortion should be available bc it may be necessary to save the life of the disabled mother? Not bc the child may be disabled? Whatever, it's been pointed out that disabled women can practice safe sex and have access to both control, Plan B, etc.
And isn't the NYT really just checking off a box on its laundry list of protected groups to support its own abortion-on-demand position? This woman could have been used to write a disabled gun control piece, or a disabled open borders column, or a disabled climate change screed...
"By invoking a story about valuing disability, abortion opponents can connect abortion to the dark practice of eugenics, or the systematic removal of unsavory traits in a population to achieve genetic supremacy..."
Gosh, we wouldn't want to do that, because as we all know, abortion advocates have NEVER supported eugenics in any way at all, ever. It's all just *conservatives pouncing* again. I hate it when they point out reality like that.
"John henry said...
Suppose a Musk, or a Soros started a positive eugenics. Find high IQ people and encourage them to marry and procreate with other high iq people in the hopes the children would be high IQ."
The MENSA Society led by a member of the American Eugenics Society had that idea and so its been tried and led to debate. Historically, as exemplified in the debate, the problem has been this: men want to marry beautiful, tall women, not gender studies professors at Harvard. Then the eugenicists formed the idea that men with high IQ's would use their IQ's to win beautiful tall women in marriage and they would have tall, handsome, intelligent sons thus forming a race of natural aristocrats. "But the chromosomes mix how they please", said the geneticists. "This might equally likely lead to short, stupid daughters, who would give birth to shorter, stupider sons." Gene mixing is what makes it difficult to form any kind of rational plan for positive eugenics.
" 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough' said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr."
It does something to society when the idea becomes "Get rid of the ill." Disabilities are of so many kinds. Some genetic, some due to happenings in the womb like the thalidomide babies or the crack babies. Some due to accidents at birth, some due to sickness, some due to car accidents, falls. If you think "the disabled" should be aborted, you'll end up thinking that "the disabled" in all these other categories are worthless too. That's how the mind works. And then the mind goes on and thinks "And that could be me - any day I might become worthless. So I am in fact worthless right now and so's my neighbor and I'm going to get what I can, while I can." And pretty soon society is a collection of rats fighting in rubble for garbage.
WTH, a huge subset of abortion fanatics believe in sex based abortion. Well, unless the not fully formed human decides it's a tranny! Derogatory term on purpose to highlight the absolute insanity of today's woke agenda!
What my friend didn’t understand was that disabled fetuses grow up to be disabled people with their own reproductive needs. In some cases, these needs include access to abortion.... What chronically ill and disabled people need is autonomy to make the health care choices right for them. It’s what we all deserve."
This is the most messed up argument for abortion rights that I have ever read.
rcocean: we don't force people to obey the Sabbath, love thy neighbor as thy self, not worship other Gods, or not worship Graven images
We sure as shit force people not to rape children or use sabres to hack their limbs off.
Getting it now?
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