Pink Mizunos Part II: When Short Facebook Responses Go Bad...

So, a friend who shared my previous post about Senate Bill 5 got this civil and honest response:

Agree with what he says about the process, etc. No one wants to win by circumventing the proper procedures. Most of what he said makes a lot of sense. Not sure if I agree that this particular issue will ever be one that people can debate without taking extreme positions. I mean, this is LITERALLY a life and death issue.

I understand that most pro-choice people do not believe a fetus is meaningless and akin to a wart until it hits the air." However, in my opinion his whole "Yes, abortion is bad but people should be able to make their own choice" argument is intellectually dishonest. For instance, the parent that loves their child but supports the right for other women to choose an abortion. How can those two ideals exist in the same soul? Abortion is the ultimate act of arrogance. It says, "My life is so important that the mere fact that your existence will cause me inconvenience gives me the right to end your life." All parents know that parenting is about sacrificing yourself for your children and abortion is the antithesis of that. 

Still, I appreciate the guy's point of view and hope that when the legislature reconvenes that the theatrics are past.

I sidestepped the fundamental issue of abortion itself in my post, because I believed that the focus needed to remain on the issues most immediately at hand: the bill's scorched-earth scope and disingenuous stated purpose, and the abuse of power used to do an end-run around the normal legislative process.

Points, lines, and running in circles

I do agree that abortion is a life-or-death matter. As much as I want women in particular to have complete autonomy and sovereignty over the affairs of their own bodies and lives, and as much as it is cosmically unfair that women, who continue to be the subjects of institutionalized inequality, are the only ones who stand to lose that control, I do believe that there is some point at which a society has to recognize, protect - and participate in the care for - a life.

But, aside from the inevitable, and I believe, small percentage of callous or thoughtless people, those who support choice agree that a life is at stake, but believe that the mother must be the one to make the choice of where that crucial point is.

So, believing in choice is not necessarily intellectually dishonest at all, because logically, scientifically, that point is unknowable. We aren't omniscient, we can't see a soul. No equation can really solve for it, no proof can be demonstrated, because it will always have to be founded on premises that are themselves arbitrary and unknowable, at least in this life.

We're left, then, having to define a point, a line of demarcation on which we can come closest to agreeing. The essential and necessary foundation of any proper argument on abortion, is the question of when life that requires a new moral, medical, and legal status, occurs. Shall we go with conception? Sperm meets egg? Certainly, some people have some good faith belief that that's the case. Is that a life immediately deserving full legal rights? Or is it when the baby is birthed and cut loose?

The governing law of the land in the United States, is, of course, Roe v. Wade. Its second-trimester (24-week) limit is based on viability - when a fetus can survive outside the womb - which, in turn, hinges on when the lungs can operate in the atmosphere. At the time, the Supreme Court found that to be 24 weeks - when air sacs theoretically developed in the lungs.

Hospitals through the 70's and 80's drew the line of viability at 28 weeks, because that's when the lungs start to produce a surfactant, which keeps the lungs from collapsing and sticking together. (there's a great Radiolab episode that addresses this, in the context of a great story that raises many of these questions about life).

But about a decade after Roe, an artificial surfactant began being used that could provide enough lubrication in the lungs for them to operate normally. That moved the line back to, depending on the hospital and doctor, 22-25 weeks.

So, clearly, the Roe v. Wade line is based on available knowledge, intellectually applied, but again, on the basis of a point at which a child can survive outside the mother, a line that technology will presumably be able to continue to move back to some extent. A law embodying some uneasy compromise was needed, and Roe tried to provide that.

But clearly, most pro-lifers were not happy with the outcome, wanting either zero legality for abortion, or at least believing that 24 weeks into a pregnancy is too far down the path.

Now, a few states are passing laws based on pain perception, which is now thought to occur at around 20 weeks. They are unconstitutional, but obviously done to try to continue to move back those limits and test Roe.

What are we really talking about?

If we're all concerned about how far out to draw this line, maybe we need to look at the numbers - is there a great mass of abortions pushing up on these points, having 24th, or even 20th-week abortions?

The CDC has studied legally-performed abortions since 1969 (under the kinda creepy name, "abortion surveillance"). The most recent report, covering statistics through 2009, found that:

• 64% of abortions are performed at 8 or less weeks of gestation (73.5% in Texas). At eight weeks, the fetus is 13mm in length. Eyes and ear-shells start to appear. Fingers begin to form. The heart is beating. A week ago, the brain had developed into 5 parts, and cranial nerves became visible.
• 91.7% are performed before 13 weeks (95% in Texas). At that point, it's been officially described as a fetus for two weeks. From 11 to 14 weeks, limbs are lengthening, genitals appear differentiated, etc.
• 96.9% are performed at or before 21 weeks. (It's 99.4% in Texas).
• Abortions are shifting dramatically to earlier points of gestation: "From 2000 to 2009, the percentage of all abortions performed at ≤8 weeks' gestation increased 12%, whereas the percentage performed at >13 weeks' decreased 12%. Moreover, among abortions performed at ≤13 weeks' gestation, the distribution shifted toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage of these abortions performed at ≤6 weeks' gestation increasing 47%."

(Info on embryonic/fetal development from the Mayo Clinic.)

Abortion rates and ratios have been generally declining since 1990, but let's take the number of sheets of copy paper that the GOP presented as a stunt to distract from Wendy Davis' filibuster, representing the number of abortions in Texas in 2011: 84,601 (I have not verified their count, but let's just assume they didn't lowball it). And, despite the noted trend towards earlier abortions, let's still use 2009 percentages. And, out of fairness, let's put this in terms of how many abortions are still performed past those points, so that they yield numbers that have more impact for pro-life arguments. We come up with:

• About 22,419 abortions performed at 8 weeks or later;
• About 4,230 performed at 13 weeks or later; and
• About 508 performed at 21 weeks or later.

Performing surgery (and politics) with a chainsaw

So. Is this worth Senate Bill 5's nuclear solution, if we look beyond what David Dewhurst claimed his motivation was - the elimination of almost all abortion clinics - and examine what the bill claims to address: patient safety?

According to that CDC report, 12 women in the United States were claimed to have died from complications from legally-performed abortions in 2008. From 2004 to 2008, the mortality rate was .64 deaths per 100,000 legally performed abortions.

Yet, of those 47 clinics that Dewhurst was gunning to shut down with SB5, a number do more than simply perform abortions. Some Planned Parenthood clinics, many of which, were already decimated by the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which Rick Perry openly said was a way to eliminate as much abortion as possible, are included.

According to their 2012 annual report for just the Planned Parenthood Trust of South Texas, 95% of their patients in 2011 came for preventative healthcare - breast cancer screenings, pap tests, STI/STD screenings and treatments, and general healthcare, for women, men, and children. That's 34,160 patients for non-abortion care in south Texas alone. How many lives are saved and definitely improved by these clinics, against how many abortion-related mortalities (which may, for Texas, have been zero)?

The numbers don't even remotely support the alleged reason for this bill. That's why the bill was opposed by the Texas chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, as well as the Texas Medical Association, and the Texas Hospital Association.

Perhaps more importantly for people who want to reduce the number of abortions: how many unplanned pregnancies were completely avoided? There are no numbers for this, but most rational people would have to believe that more abortion-bound pregnancies were avoided thanks to Planned Parenthood in south Texas alone, than were aborted at any time past the transition from embryo to fetus, across Texas.

And... back to language

Finally I have to say, I understand where the response to my post was coming from in terms of parenting being all about sacrifice, and I don't even have kids. But it is also arrogant and presumptuous to assume that abortion itself, and therefore all abortions, are "the ultimate act of arrogance," chosen because of "inconvenience".

By including abortions across the board, he was also saying that pregnancies from rape or incest, or that pose a real threat to the health of the mother, are also just "inconveniences" that don't merit the option of abortion. In case those seems like rare circumstances, a pair of mid-90's studies estimated that there were 25,000-32,000 pregnancies a year resulting from rapes in the US during those years. One of those studies calculated a pregnancy rate of 5% per rape. I would have to assume that incest numbers would be included in that.

It is difficult to find statistics for the number of abortions performed for the health of the mother, but in response to a claim by Joe Walsh (Representative from Illinois, not Eagles guitarist), the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reported that about 600 women a year die from complications from pregnancy and childbirth, and that "many more" would have died had it not been for access to abortions. And, clearly, if that danger presents itself before viability... no living mom=no living embryo, fetus, or child.

Again, this is what I mean when I say that our language is important in issues like this one, unless you do, in fact, mean that rape victims and mothers faced with a grave danger to their own health are arrogant and merely inconvenienced.

I do believe that past some point of development, that abortion should not be an easy or careless choice. It is most certainly not birth control, and I don't appreciate it being talked about casually, or as just another right to be exercised without a need for responsibility. Personally, because we are human, and we believe that there must be solutions to what may be "misfortunes" in our lives, I'm sure that sometimes, it could probably be resorted to too easily. But in the light of what stages the vast majority of embryos and fetuses are being aborted, where flawed or even careless choices are being made, I do not believe that most of the resulting abortions are crossing that line of life that must be protected.

And, I know plenty of people who had abortions that regret them, and teen mothers like Wendy Davis who kept their kids and don't regret that. But neither the presence of regret in one case, nor the lack of regret in the other, mean that abortion is necessarily the wrong or selfish choice to make, in that time, and in that place. Rick Perry says "the ideal world is one without abortion," and there, he's right. But we're not in an ideal world, just as we're not in an ideal world where people don't feel the need to have a gun to protect themselves (and no, I'm not anti-gun).

So... how does it end?

The response above was not the only one I received. In the foolishly continuing hope that there is some reason in him that I can appeal to, I sent it to my stepfather, and while the response was short and un-detailed, it was clearly not well-received, and like so many requests for explanation from David Dewhurst, no response was forthcoming. A couple of pro-choice friends didn't really seem to get the point, either, sticking to the language that limits the motivation of all pro-lifers to the desire to control her body.

Most of the time, it seems that the only thing the two sides have in common, as in so many debates, is the need to take the easy path of demonizing the other side; the fear that acknowledging good faith in the opponent is weakness; the security of righteous anger; and, of course, ego. I find that sadder than any law that could ever be passed.

But there were also nods of agreement, from both sides. But, I honestly don't know... I can't see through the smoke of battle to see how many soldiers there might be on either side that are willing to come out of the trenches, disregard their flags, realize this doesn't have to be a war of good vs. evil, accept that there are things they can't know, and start to find a line that they can debate, but that doesn't have to divide them.