Month: August 2014

“How Miscarriage Deepened My Thoughts On Abortion”

A reader opens up:

Once I became pregnant, and even more after I miscarried at six weeks, my pro-choice position deepened that much further. If there’s one message I have, it’s this:

The capriciousness of miscarriage lays bare the tenuousness of life at that stage of development. It’s extremely hard to express just how dehumanizing it is to ban the loss of a pregnancy only if the person actually going through the pregnancy has any say in the process.

Something like 10-20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage (so says the Mayo Clinic), and possibly 50% of undiagnosed pregnancies (according to the March of Dimes). The body rejects an embryo early if something is wrong. Why, when it’s so easy for the body to reject a zygote or embryo, should women be forbidden from jump-starting a process that the body so often does simply as a matter of course?

Why should it be strictly up to the vagaries of chemistry and biology to decide that an embryo, or the environment it would come into, is unfit? Nature’s capable enough to make this decision, but a human being isn’t?

A miscarriage, AKA spontaneous abortion, is both the most natural thing and an incredible betrayal from your own body, in large part because you have no control over it. If you could ban bodies from terminating pregnancies, banning doctors from terminating them might make a tiny bit more sense, at least intellectually. But you can’t, and it doesn’t.

I saw the embryo after it passed. And at that stage, it does not even look like a proto-person. Saying my miscarriage “ended human life” is a big stretch – and I’m the one it unwillingly happened to! I was sad, obviously. But having seen what an embryo looks like at that stage, and how fragile and non-human it is at six weeks, the thought of anyone valuing a reticulated clump of tissue over the experience of an actual living, breathing person infuriates me. At my miscarriage, it was only two steps past ovulation. Some pregnancies are lost so early that a miscarriage is mistaken for a period. People don’t mourn over a lost egg. Mourning the loss of something one or two steps past that so intently that you want to ban anything that induces it is just ludicrous.

After I came back to work after being in the hospital, I told my boss I was doing okay, and that it’s such a common thing – a fact known almost exclusively to only two groups of people: doctors, and people who have had miscarriages. And she said, “No. It’s a big deal.” And I’m like, who the hell are you to tell me whether it’s a big deal or not? I feel the exact way about people who want to ban abortions.

Many more reader experiences in our long-running thread, “The Misery Of Miscarriage“.

What’s Your Favorite Place To Read? Ctd

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A reader answers the question with the above photo:

The beach. The sound of the waves, an umbrella so I’m not baking in the sun and a good drink.  It doesn’t happen enough but that is by far my favorite place to read.

Another:

The sauna. Sounds weird but it’s no contest for me: A good book and a good roast is heaven. It’s perfect for reading poetry, too: in a half-hour you can read three to six poems, take a break to cool off and think about them, then read a couple more.

The only problem is people who come in and decide to have a conversation. Not cool.

And another:

Might I suggest VFYFPTR: View From Your Favorite Place to Read?

Book Club: Was Montaigne A New Atheist?

A reader welcomes him into the fold:

You ask if Montaigne was an atheist or Christian. Montaigne was most certainly atheist, and his atheism, though concealed for obvious concern about the consequences of opposing the opinions of those “stronger in number.” Montaigne’s atheism shines through in his Apology for Raymond Sebond, written in the wake the French Wars of Religion in which thousands were slaughtered in a sectarian conflict.

montaigneIn his Apology, Montaigne, by placing words in the mouths of others, openly ridicules the promise of heaven and knowledge of divine beings. One example: “The philosopher Antisthenes, as he was being initiated in the mysteries of Orpheus, the priest telling him, ‘That those who professed themselves of that religion were certain to receive perfect and eternal felicity after death,’—’If thou believest that,’ answered he, ‘why dost thou not die thyself?'”

Two more examples from the Apology: “‘Tis Socrates’s opinion, and mine too, that the best judging of heaven is not to judge of it at all.” And: “Nothing is made of nothing, God therefore could not make the world without matter. What! has God put into our hands the keys and most secret springs of his power? Is he obliged not to exceed the limits of our knowledge?”

Montaigne is, of course, cautious, with numerous references to the trial and execution of Socrates for disbelief in the gods, all expressed in a way that undermines any divine authority:

“For that which our reason advises us to, as the most likely, is generally for every one to obey the laws of his country, as was the advice of Socrates, inspired, as he says, by a divine counsel; and by that, what would it say, but that our duty has no other rule but what is accidental?”

Were Montaigne living today and free from the threat of persecution for his beliefs, his detractors would call him a “New” atheist.

Well, since this is a book club, we can now bring on Marshall MacLuhan the author Sarah Bakewell, to address the question. Here’s her response to the email:

Thank you for raising this fascinating topic! It’s one that I puzzled over constantly while writing the book, and I still feel that the answer is open to interpretation. To some extent (as with other areas) it depends partly on what one wants to read into Montaigne, because he is quite capable of pointing us in several different directions at once.

I am an atheist myself and therefore quite inclined to look for an atheist Montaigne. On the other hand, I came to feel that this would be an over-simplification.

By temperament and general world-view, Montaigne was extremely skeptical, and this inclined him towards atheism. But he was skeptical about all claims to a single truth about the world – both religious claims and what we might now call scientific ones. (The modern notion of “science”, let alone “scientific method”, did not exist in his day, which I think is relevant to this debate; it’s dangerously easy to impose our own categories on the sixteenth century).

montaigne.jpgBut “the New Atheism”, as I understand it, is a movement that calls not for the suspension or withholding of belief, but for active opposition to religious world-views. It calls particularly for opposing religion through rational and scientific arguments. This, I think, would have turned Montaigne off, because he was skeptical about the capacity of human reason to give us any certainty about anything at all.

The main thrust of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” leads in that direction. He sets out to defend Sebond against attacks based on reason, by demonstrating the limitations of reason in general (never mind the fact that Sebond himself was a proponent of “rational” theology). Montaigne emerges in this essay as very much the Pyrrhonian Skeptic – a form of skepticism which casts doubt on the possibility of being certain of anything, even one’s own lack of certainty.

(Also, it seems weird to us, but this kind of Skepticism was quite acceptable to the Church authorities of Montaigne’s time, because it helped to shore them up against Reformists who put more emphasis on rational or privately derived beliefs.)

Having said all this, I always had the impression when reading Montaigne that he was FAR more interested in what went on in this world than anything that might happen in the beyond. He was fascinated by the natural world, by history, by the quirks of human behavior, by social variety – particularly by the beliefs of other cultures, which he seemed to find neither more nor less convincing than those of his own.

I think I’d sum up my impression of Montaigne by saying that he was not necessarily an atheist (still less a New one) – but that he was profoundly, enthusiastically, gloriously secular.

Read the whole Book Club discussion here.

The Makings Of A Third Intifada?

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David Kenner takes the pulse of the West Bank, where the Gaza bombings have inspired a wave of recent demonstrations, raising fears of a general uprising:

A massive protest last week seemed to momentarily challenge the conventional wisdom that the West Bank was not ready for another uprising. In the largest West Bank demonstration in decades, thousands of Palestinians marched to the Qalandiya checkpoint, where they clashed with Israeli security forces — at least two Palestinians were killed in the violence, and the shops nearby were gutted by fire. The demonstration showed the undeniable Palestinian anger at the war in Gaza, which has so far claimed over 1,400 Palestinian lives. The dynamics of how it was organized, however, suggest that it may prove difficult to replicate. …

There are still demonstrations in the West Bank, but in the absence of active support by the upper echelons of the political leadership, they have remained relatively small and easy for Israeli forces to disperse. Around midafternoon on Aug. 1, dozens of protesters gathered at Ofer Prison, which holds roughly 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and is a common flashpoint for protests. No Fatah flags were in evidence, though many people who dotted the demonstrations carried Hamas’s green flag.

But eventually, David Shulman imagines, the protest movement may become too big for Israel to manage:

Qalandia was one dramatic event, quickly followed by others in Bethlehem, Beit Umar (where three Palestinians were killed), Husan (two killed), and elsewhere. Even if the army somehow manages to suppress the protests now, the Qalandia march shows us what may happen sometime soon. Those of us who are familiar with the situation in the territories have known for years that the thin veil of stability could be torn away at any moment, revealing the volatile reality underneath; and we have also known, as do the grassroots leaders in the villages and towns, that the Occupation will perhaps end when some form of mostly nonviolent resistance achieves large numbers. Tens of thousands of Palestinians may someday be able to wash over the army’s barricades, no doubt at considerable cost in lives; Israel has no viable answer to such a process. No one should, however, assume that when this happens—a third Intifada—it will be entirely Gandhian in tone. And what begins as peaceful civil resistance can swiftly change its color. It could begin tomorrow, or in a year or two, or five.

(Photo: A Palestinian protester holds an Islamic flag walking towards Israeli forces during clashes in the West Bank town of Hebron on August 1, 2014 following a demonstration against Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip and in support of Gaza’s people. By Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images)

Who Counts As Female?

Michelle Goldberg observes how radical feminists and transgender activists are quarreling over that question:

Trans women say that they are women because they feel female – that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman – and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position – the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have.

Sonny Bunch criticizes trans activists’ harassment of “TERFs,” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” at conferences and online:

As an interested observer with no real horse in the fight – I am neither a radfem nor a trans activist, believe it or not – I do wonder whether or not it’s self-defeating for the transfolk and their allies to behave in such a way. Bullying to gain acceptance, rather than persuading those who do not understand who you are or what you have gone through, is a tactic that could easily backfire on a community that comprises roughly one thousandth of one percent of the population. Then again, perhaps the transfolk have an understanding of how outré their cause appears to the rest of us and believe that persuasion is impossible.

But Mari Brighe slams Goldberg’s piece as “a disturbingly one-sided view of the situation that relies on heavily anecdotal evidence … and ignores the extended campaign of harassment and attack that the the trans community has endured at the hands of radical feminists”:

Let’s start with the numbers. In the piece, Goldberg mentions the names of 14 radical feminist activists (frequently providing physical descriptions), and provides quotes from nine of them — including two from books penned by radfems. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position. The problem isn’t necessarily that Goldberg appears to side with the radical feminist viewpoint; that’s perfectly within her rights, and perfectly within The New Yorker’s right to print it. The real issue is that Ms Goldberg gives the impression that she’s covering the conflict between the trans rights movement and radical feminism – after all, the piece is subtitled “The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”– but gives only passing lip service to the transgender community’s side of this situation.

The problem, as Brighe sees it:

Beyond their work to influence policy in a manner that harms the trans community, trans-exclusionary radical feminists have engaged (and still do) in numerous campaigns of personal harassment against trans women, particularly vocal trans activists. The previously mentioned Cathy Brennan is thought to be connected to some of the ugliest of the harassment, including revealing personal information about trans women (a practice often known as doxxing), as well as contacting doctors, employers, and parents of any individual who dares challenge her or disagree with her. The blog Gender Identity Watch, which Brennan is rumored to be connected with, engages in extensive harassment of trans woman, including posting their “dead-name” (pre-transition name) and pre-transition photos. They also engage in systematic harassment of trans women and trans allies on twitter, most by repeating their same tired rhetoric: “trans women are men” and “penis is male”. They also engaged in an extended harassment campaign targeting Against Me! singer and trans woman Laura Jane Grace. Earlier this year, Tina Vasquez penned a lengthy piece on for Bitch Magazine running down dozens of examples of harassment perpetrated by radical feminists against both trans activists and trans allies, including herself.

Julia Serano adds:

When Goldberg interviewed me for the piece, I talked extensively about TERF attacks on trans people: About the hateful speech I (and other trans women) regularly receive from TERFs on my Twitter feed, blog comments, etc., and how much of it is of a sexualizing nature. I talked at great length about Cathy Brennan, who is notorious for her personal attacks and outing of trans people, her various websites where she engages in smear campaigns against trans women (once again, usually of a sexualizing nature). I mentioned how, after my appearance at a SF Dyke March forum on age diversity and gender fluidity – which was designed to build bridges between trans-positive queer women and those (often of older generations) who are trans unaware, and which resulted in respectful and constructive dialogue on all sides – several TERFs crashed the Facebook page and spewed so much hateful speech that they had to shut the whole thread down.

None of this made it into the story, which will likely lead uninformed readers to presume that trans people are simply mean and out of control, rather than reacting to the transphobia/trans-misogyny/sexualizing comments we constantly face from TERFs.

Meanwhile, Mona Chalabi tries to nail down how many trans Americans there are in the first place:

[C]ounting the transgender population nationally remains a steep challenge. The US Census Bureau doesn’t ask who is transgender, nor do the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But even if they did, the responses might not be reliable because some people are afraid to answer, while others disagree on what “transgender” even means. If you see someone cite a statistic about transgender people in the United States, you’re seeing a rough estimate at best.

Gary Gates is an LGBT demographer at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute, which studies sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. He is responsible for one of the most frequently cited estimates of the transgender population – 700,000, about 0.3 percent of U.S. adults. That figure is based on data from two surveys. One, conducted in Massachusetts in 2007 and 2009, found that 0.5 percent of respondents ages 18 to 64 identified as transgender. The other, done in California in 2003 to look at trends in LGBT tobacco use, found that 0.1 percent of adults in California identified as transgender. Using the surveys to get to the 0.3 percent estimate “takes a lot of statistical gymnastics,” Gates said.

The Dish’s long thread on transgender identity is here.

Putting A Price On Your Pet’s Life, Ctd

Readers lend their perspectives to this post:

There is another lens through which to view expensive and invasive veterinary procedures: 2013-05-199514_33_15__perfectlyclear_0002quality of life. If vets counseled their clients about the chances of treatment’s success and the potential impact on the pet’s remaining life, it may make the wrenching choice to forego treatment easier.  Your dog has cancer?  Sure, Vets ‘R Us can offer chemo and radiation for $10,000, but Fido will be very sick for eight weeks with no understanding of why you are subjecting him to this torturous process and there is only a 30% chance of your beloved pet surviving six months.

But we aren’t even having these discussions about treatment for ourselves, so I hold out little hope it will happen for our pets.

Another is on the same page:

Chemo is awful. It’s painful, draining and generally unpleasant. But as humans, we go into it with an appreciation of our own mortality – yes, this is really going to suck, but it will be worth it if I can get an extra 2, 3 or 10 years out of it to spend with my family. But our dogs and cats have no such knowledge of their mortality. To them, they’re essentially being tortured for no apparent reason. Our lovable, sassy, fat cat has a family history of cancer, and to my wife and I, the only humane option if she falls victim is to put her down gently so she doesn’t suffer.

A few more readers:

Last week I almost sent the Dish an email hoping you would present my difficulty coming to a decision about having an operation on a growth next to my dog’s nose.

It emerged rather quickly in June. So I took her to the vet to see what it was. I didn’t get her usual vet at the two-person clinic; I got the one with whom I have a disconnect. Because the animal can’t verbalize what’s going on, communication with their health professional and you is important.

After a scrape of the skin cells, the vet came to me and indicated that she saw round cells, and with the growth’s “aggressiveness” she recommended excision. Since my dog would be out for this procedure, we should do a dental cleaning and perhaps extraction. She had an estimate in hand, which put the range at $700 to $1000. I left thinking I would move quickly and have this done, but I soon began questioning whether I wanted to put a 14-year-seven-month-old dog through this.

Days later I was able to talk to her regular vet, who framed the situation more realistically: “Do I want to put her through this and gain X amount of time? Or do I see this as the beginning of the end?” I brought my dog back to the vet for x-rays of her lungs (the most likely place for a primary cancer), and there was nothing to indicate something else was going on that would bring her down. My stress over whether to act ratcheted up. If what was on her face was cancer, did I want a tumor to keep growing on her face? Would it enter the bone?

As a freelance writer, I wasn’t able to focus on work. Finally last week, a black piece of skin came off her crusty nose, and I returned to the vet, after a discussion of biopsy … could it be a fungal infection? The vet looked at my dog and said that the original growth had healed nicely and she was no longer concerned. Perhaps it had even been a bee or wasp sting. I was delighted but also an emotional puddle.

In reading David Grimm’s piece, I acknowledge that his topic is one that speaks to a lot of people, but I would like to add another element to the discussion: even if one can afford the cost, is the treatment always something that we want to put our beloved pets through? I had always told myself that I wouldn’t take extreme measures – that I wouldn’t initiate chemotherapy treatments, for example – but this was something that fell short of that and yet could be the first sign of her decline and death. How was I to make the right decision based on her quality of life?

Another considers another calculus:

I understand that there is a sentimental component to the decision to forego a $5,000 operation for your pet, but from a moral standpoint I have no hesitation. Given that there is an oversupply of dogs and cats, putting one down simply means you can drive to the humane society and save another from being euthanized. Sure, it may be more painful for you, but from a broader perspective of the worldwide dog or cat population, and even from a personal karma perspective, you come out even to slightly ahead.

(Photo of a reader’s dying dog from one of our most popular threads last year, “The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets“)

What’s Next For Uganda’s Gays?

Last week, a Ugandan court struck down the country’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act. Melina Platas Izama gives credit to “the vital role played by concerned citizens and the legal community in Uganda”:

Ten individuals and organizations — including a journalist, professor, doctor, activists and current and former legislators — petitioned the court to repeal the law on the grounds that it was passed illegally, having contravened parliamentary rules of procedure requiring quorum, and that it violated constitutional rights. Their efforts, combined with those of a robust legal team, were integral to the law’s repeal. Their victory demonstrates the power of domestic actors and the courts in promoting social and legal change.

But Uganda might get worse for gays before it gets better:

If we look at attitudes toward homosexuality over time using opinion polls, we find that it can take decades for attitudes to shift. Further, negative attitudes toward homosexuality sometimes increase before they decrease.

In South Korea, for example, one of the countries with the longest record of opinion polling on the topic, opposition to homosexuality, again, as measured by the percentage of respondents who say homosexuality is never justifiable, jumped from 60 percent in 1982 to 90 percent in 1990 before declining again. It’s worth noting that levels of anti-homosexuality sentiment in South Korea in 1990 are nearly the same as those in Uganda today. In South Africa too, anti-homosexual sentiment increased before declining. Meanwhile, in the U.S., opposition has fallen only gradually over time and has yet to dip below 20 percent.

Jay Michaelson fears an anti-gay backlash:

In the case of Uganda, records kept by Sexual Minorities Uganda show that violence against LGBT people has increased tenfold since the passage of the AHA. Add in fiery preaching by anti-gay zealots, often funded by American organizations, and you have a volatile brew ready to explode. Activists worry that this court decision could provide the spark. If the law won’t protect Uganda from Satan, people will have to take up arms themselves.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. There are supportive African (and African-American) clergy calling for coexistence rather than violence. Maybe the Obama administration, instead of merely backpedaling reactively, could support these voices pro-actively as well. Maybe Museveni could call for a period of national reflection. Or maybe, things will continue to get worse.

Previous Dish on the predicament of Uganda’s gays here.

Blogging About Books

Rohan Maitzen revels in it:

Blogging allows for a wonderfully open-ended kind of criticism: there’s no pressure to account for or include everything, no need to position yourself theoretically or as part of a bookclub-beagle-trpre-existing critical argument. You can do any kind or degree of contextualizing or theorizing that you want, of course (it’s useless to generalize about blogging as a form, since there are no rules or norms), but you can also just look directly at the book in front of you and say what you think about it, show what you observe in it. Everything else you know—all your habits of reading and thinking—will affect what you think and see, of course, but for me there has been something very liberating about writing a post knowing that I’m just writing as myself, for other interested readers, not trying to establish anything definitive but rather to offer what I can to the broad conversation about books that the internet enables.

Maitzen goes on to discusses how her academic training in Victorian literature connects with writing for a broad, public audience:

Just as I was starting to blog in 2007, for instance, Cynthia Ozick wrote a piece in Harper’s on the current state of criticism in which she said:

Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.

Even though I was restless with the pressure I felt to produce increasingly specialized kinds of criticism, comments like these struck me as depressingly (and insultingly!) mistaken. I began to hope that I could use my blog to show that academic expertise is valuable, and that it can be worn lightly and used to further good conversations about literature, which is really what I see as the fundamental purpose of all criticism. Because negative stereotypes about “politically correct idiots” overrunning “lit departments” are pretty widespread, I also wanted to counteract them in my own small way by showing what really happens in at least one person’s classroom: I blog regularly about my teaching, and I’d be surprised if anyone could conclude from these posts that I have “forgotten the text.”

For more, check Novel Readings, Maitzen’s blog about literature.

Hamas Against The World

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This table, drawn up by Adam Taylor, illustrates Hamas’ current relationships with other countries and actors in the Middle East. As you can see, the militant group has few close friends left, and its isolation is a major factor in how the latest Gaza war began and how it might end. In a substantial essay on the origins of the present crisis, Nathan Thrall attributes Hamas’ desperation in large part to the enmity of Egypt’s new leader:

As it became clear that unrest in Egypt wouldn’t lead to Sisi being ousted or to the return of the Brotherhood, Hamas saw only four possible exits. The first was rapprochement with Iran at the unacceptable price of betraying the Brotherhood in Syria and weakening support for Hamas among Palestinians and the majority of Sunni Muslims everywhere. The second was to levy new taxes in Gaza, but these couldn’t make up for the loss in revenue from the tunnels, and would risk stirring up opposition to Hamas rule.

The third was to launch rockets at Israel in the hope of obtaining a new ceasefire that would bring an improvement in conditions in Gaza. … The final option, which Hamas eventually chose, was to hand over responsibility for governing Gaza to appointees of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, despite having defeated it in the 2006 elections.

Recently, Hamas has been urging Hezbollah to open a second front in Israel’s north, but Robert Beckhusen explains why they shouldn’t get their hopes up:

Not only are Hezbollah’s troops better equipped and have significantly larger rocket stockpiles than Hamas, the Iran-backed militia has all of southern Lebanon to fight from. This gives it space to maneuver, retreat and lay ambushes against advancing Israeli armor. Its rockets also are numerous and deadly enough to force the evacuations of northern Israeli towns, as happened during the 2006 war with Israel.

But Israel could be reckoning that Hezbollah won’t be in any hurry to come to Hamas’s aid. There’s no way Hezbollah can afford to do that as long as it’s fighting in Syria. Right now, Hezbollah is bogged down in fierce warfare against the Al Qaida-affiliated Nusrah Front in the mountainous borderlands of Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah currently is starving out rebels in the Syrian province of Qalamoun, and launched a new offensive with the Lebanese army this week towards the town of Arsal inside Lebanon.