The crassness of a public abortion

Today, I spotted a link to Mary Ann Sorrentino's Blog on Salon.com. Sorrentino reports about a woman who decided to Twitter her RU486 abortion in real-time.

27-year-old Angie Jackson decided to use Twitter as a public stage for her private decision to terminate a pregnancy using RU486, the miscarriage-inducing drug legally available in the US for a decade. Jackson, who has a 4-year-old son with special needs, says that that difficult pregnancy and outcome made her decide long ago not to have another child. She was committed to aborting future pregnancies that might occur.
Sorrentino strongly disapproves of Jackson's public display of abortion. She considers it "self-serving, exhibitionistic, and selfish: at best, it has "Bad Judgment" written all over it." I agree with Sorrentino's characterization of Jackson's craving for the limelight. Before going further, however, I should make clear that I fully support a woman's right to abort a pregnancy in the early months of the pregnancy. Although I consider an early term embryo/fetus to to be both human and alive, I don't consider a human organism lacking a reasonably-developed brain to be entitled to the legal rights of personhood. As the pregnancy gets to be further along, the argument gets correspondingly stronger (in my mind) that the fetus is a person--I thus consider the idea of an elective abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 or 9 months (e.g., for sex selection) to be the ghastly equivalent of murder. Here's more on my analysis of abortion and my rejection of the religious concept of the "soul," an ancient concept that inspires many people who are anti-abortion. As I read Sorrentino's post, I thought about a question posed to me by a good friend who is anti-abortion. I mentioned to him that I believe in a woman's right to abort for any reason in the early months of pregnancy. As we discussed the issue further, I indicated that it was too bad that some women had multiple abortions--too bad there isn't fool-proof birth control--shouldn't the invention of 100% reliable birth control be a priority for our government, so that there would be fewer accidental pregnancies, and hence, abortions? My friend stopped me and asked me why I would care about large numbers of early term abortions, given my position that an early term abortion is not tantamount to murder. He asked, "If it's not murder, why do you care that a woman uses abortion repeatedly - - 10 or 12 times in her life, to end pregnancies? You're claiming that an early term abortion is only as morally significant as trapping a mouse in a mousetrap, right? . . ." [More . . . ]

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Dumpster diving adventure

A few weeks ago, my daughters (aged 9 and 11) convinced me to go dumpster diving out in the alley behind our house in the City of St. Louis. We've gone dumpster diving a few times over the years. Based on the prior expeditions, my daughters fully expect that if they look through a few dozen dumpsters, they'll find something valuable. You see, this is America, where people through away perfectly usable toys and games, as well as furniture, appliances and clothing. And even when you don't find usable merchandise, you'll see literally tons of single-use paper and plastic being thrown out. When you see the incredible piles of discarded usable things with your own eyes, it is all-the-more astounding. Even more surprising, if you're looking the highest ratio of usable stuff, look in the dumpsters behind apartment-dwellers rather than the dumpsters behind expensive single-family homes. Perhaps it sounds disgusting to go dumpster diving. If so, get over it, because it can be far more than an anthropological field trip--it can be like winning a mini-lottery. My kids and I have found several extremely nice coats, for instance (we washed them and gave them away to friends). We once found a working DVD player. We've taken home shelves and other items of furniture. We've found dozens of toys, which merely need to be cleaned up to become usable. As I'm finding these sorts of things, I keep thinking "Why wouldn't someone take the time to donate this to Good Will of Salvation Army?" When people throw a valuable thing into the landfill, it's gone forever--what were they thinking?yard-waste Here's what we found on our recent expedition. First of all, I must digress. The City of St. Louis provides special separate dumpsters for Yard Waste Only and other dumpsters for general rubbish. On our recent expedition, I looked into 20 of of those yard-waste-only dumpsters. About half of them contained non-yard waste. This astounds me too. Why would someone screw up this incredibly sensible system for recycling vegetation by throwing plastic, food and paper into a yard waste dumpster? And here's a typical example of what you often find in a yard-waste-only dumpster: [caption id="attachment_11660" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Contents found in a yard-waste only dumpster"]Contents found in a yard-waste only dumpster[/caption] As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, people throw away massive amounts of single-use paper and plastic. Probably the biggest single category is cardboard pizza boxes. In our one-hour expedition, I probably saw 500 used pizza boxes. pizza-boxesBut we also saw huge amounts of clearly recyclable goods that were not being recycled. Hundreds of glass jars, metal cans and plastics and immense amounts of paper, all of it headed for the landfill. We also saw hundreds of pounds of colorfully-inked food packaging. All of it carefully designed to catch your eye at the store, and then you toss it into the landfill. But, it's not like you really toss it in--instead, a huge fleet of city trucks carts this packaging far away from the city in order to dump it into the landfill. It makes me wonder how many toxic chemicals were released into the environment in order to produce all of this food packaging. recycle-materialWe found several toys and many items of clothing that had been saturated in pasta sauce, meat grease or who-knows what kind of fluid. We decided to keep looking. What my girls ended up taking home for a quick clean-up was a little toy dog that they found inside of a woman's big purse. You'll see his photo below. My girls named him "Oscar" (after Sesame Street's Oscar), and he now lives with us . [caption id="attachment_11661" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Oscar"]Oscar[/caption]

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The biggest failing of the American news media

At Huffpo, social scientist Steven Bryant points out what the media needs to do if it wants to become respectable. The key is that "journalism needs to become journalism again":

The news media - and not the opinion side, but the reporting side - must start reporting which side's argument is correct... and stop reporting only the argument between the two sides itself. The inability of the media to act as "the umpire" - the referee - between the two sides of our political "reality fight" is as astoundingly detrimental a development in our civic culture as the freedom corporations now have to spend as much as they want to influence policy development and election results . . . Imagine a future America in which - no matter how artfully one side used language to lie about the other side's position - our journalists didn't just interview those making such fanciful claims but called them out for being liars! Imagine how you would feel if that was what you saw on the news! To those journalists who say "I can't call people liars when I report on them," I say "It's called fact-checking. Try it. You'll like it." Imagine if the evening news didn't just report the debates going on in Congress - (as if the debates were news just for being debates... news because "people not getting along" has become newsworthy in unto itself)- but reported that "In today's debate on (fill in the subject of your choice), Senator XXX lied about what would happen if this bill was enacted."
Of course, to do this, the media would need to hire experienced and intelligent (i.e., relatively expensive) reporters, providing them with fact-checking crews. And viewers would need to invest more energy watching, because the stories are going to often be longer and more contentious, at least at first. Perhaps reporters will be required to warn their guests to get honest or get back on topic. Perhaps some guests won't, and reporters will need to give them the hook, perhaps right in the middle of broadcasts. But after awhile,wouldn't there be a big payoff? Wouldn't the talking heads and political con artists eventually know that they will be exposed, and therefore more often show up ready to discuss what to do about real problems facing the country? I agree entirely with Bryant, but I suspect that the media know that there is currently no financial incentives for distilling and providing useful information rather than the infotainment and the "conflict pornography" that currently pass as news.

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