Correctly Framing the Argument

On Wednesday night, February 2nd, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart did a wonderful segment on the attempts by Republicans in Congress to further attack abortion rights.  In the bit, one of the Daily Show's comediennes pointed out that the current proposed legislation which would restrict the rights of women to abortions for rape to instances where they were physically injured in resisting came out to fewer than 191 cases a year.  That was 191 cases for abortions due to the allowable rape, and incest, and health and life of the mother reasons.  THE COST INVOLVED TO EACH TAXPAYER WAS TWO TENTHS OF ONE CENT.  This is not about money.  Anyone who believes it is about money OR conscience is wrong.

This is the legislation that is supported by nearly two hundred Republicans and Tea Partiers.  This is the priority over legislation relating to jobs of the political right wing of the United States Congress. 

This is anti-women legislation in the guise of conservative culture wars.  What it really is about is promoting draconian anti-sex laws, even when that includes - as this does - sex without consent, or non-consensual sex as in rape or incest.

Sadly what it does is wrongly frames the argument in a way which is doomed to fail to accomplish the intended goal.

For anyone who really wants to honestly and sincerely claim a patriotic regard for the United States Constitution, you don't do that by trampling on a Constitutional right in this way. For anyone who genuinely wants to stand up for the rights of everyone, including the unborn, you don't do that by trampling on the rights of half of those individuals, born and unborn, who are female.

If you really want to protect life, you protect women's rights. Womens' rights also tend to be good for democracy, good for economies, and good for education in every country, developing or developed, where they are given a priority or emphasis.

If anyone sincerely wishes to stop abortions, the way to do that - the only effective way to do that - is to stop unwanted conceptions.  Abortion is profoundly historic. Every culture, every medical pharmacopoeia in history has included abortifacients.  They have been known and practiced in every culture, in every time in our history, on every location on the surface of this planet, regardless of the religion or lack of it of the people who were alive at that place and time.  The notion that it can be stopped by legislation is as ludicrous as the notion that consumption of alcohol was going to be stopped by prohibition.  The numbers of abortions will remain approximately the same, they will simply go underground and become more dangerous and more painful. But they will not stop - see below (added emphasis mine - DG).

Volume 25, Supplement, January 1999

The Incidence of Abortion Worldwide
By Stanley K. Henshaw, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas

Context: Accurate measurement of induced abortion levels has proven difficult in many parts of the world. Health care workers and policymakers need information on the incidence of both legal and illegal induced abortion to provide the needed services and to reduce the negative impact of unsafe abortion on women's health.

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Methods: Numbers and rates of induced abortions were estimated from four sources: official statistics or other national data on legal abortions in 57 countries; estimates based on population surveys for two countries without official statistics; special studies for 10 countries where abortion is highly restricted; and worldwide and regional estimates of unsafe abortion from the World Health Organization.
Results: Approximately 26 million legal and 20 million illegal abortions were performed worldwide in 1995, resulting in a worldwide abortion rate of 35 per 1,000 women aged 15–44. Among the subregions of the world, Eastern Europe had the highest abortion rate (90 per 1,000) and Western Europe the lowest rate (11 per 1,000). Among countries where abortion is legal without restriction as to reason, the highest abortion rate, 83 per 1,000, was reported for Vietnam and the lowest, seven per 1,000, for Belgium and the Netherlands. Abortion rates are no lower overall in areas where abortion is generally restricted by law (and where many abortions are performed under unsafe conditions) than in areas where abortion is legally permitted.
Conclusions: Both developed and developing countries can have low abortion rates. Most countries, however, have moderate to high abortion rates, reflecting lower prevalence and effectiveness of contraceptive use. Stringent legal restrictions do not guarantee a low abortion rate.

International Family Planning Perspectives, 1999, 25(Supplement):S30–S38

The solution to abortion is not to try to ban sex and not to deny the rights of women to control their bodies.  The answer, the correct answer, the proven answer, it to give men and women more control of their bodies, through education and contraception ONLY.  The answer it to emphasize responsibility, and accurate information, not the false medically inaccurate information that anti-abortionists now have compelled states to provide to women before receiving abortions, not the medically inaccurate information that abstinence only sex education provides to students.

This is the solution.  It works, it is proven, it is incredibly well documented.  It reduces sexually transmitted disease, another killer in the case of certain STDs like AIDS.  It does not result in a public burden of unwanted children being warehoused because there are too few public or private resources to care for them.  It even reduces crime rates, as documented by a particularly brilliant analysis by the brilliant, highly acclaimed authors of Freakenomics.  It is a win win win solution across the board.

And yet instead we have the incredibly offensive legislation proposed by the right which harms women.  We have the greater restriction of contraception as the religious right, particularly the Roman Catholic church, pushes their anti-sexuality agenda, which is a big a failure as prohibition ever was, and as dangerous.

The notion that the way to ensure the rights of the unborn is to deny the rights of the already born is ludicrous.  The argument that they deserve to lose those rights because they are 'sluts' or selfish is profoundly offensive.  The argument that it is ok, when we do not have a consensus is a human being that has rights which are more important than the woman rights who is involved is stupid.  It is wrong.  It is unethical and immoral. If we could not and would not and could not compel someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, a convicted serial killer, sex offender and cannibal, either legally or ethically or morally to make his body available to save anyone - a living person, or an unborn one, then HOW can we blithely do so to women by the millions? Because we could not, not even if it was painless, brief, or merely inconvenient - and pregnancy is more serious on all of those counts for women.

The answer is - we cannot.

To try to justify doing so, the arguments demean women - the slut argument.  They try to portray women as selfish.  They try to diminish the risks and problems of pregnancy in a way which tremendously dishonors and disrespects what is entailed in bringing life into this world.  And of course, there is always, the do as I say or you will go to hell argument, which is the last resort of those who have no better argument.  I find personally offensive the notion that God can forgive someone like Dahmer for sexual assault, murder, and cannibalism, but will not forgive masturbation, contraception, or abortion. The theology for that belief is pathetic, however many people may choose to believe it. Either we believe that there is forgiveness or we do not.  But we should not compel others to act if that is a belief that someone chooses to embrace, we should not compel others to act in a way in which we do not have broad ethical consensus, and we should never ever make one religion dominant over another in our government or public policy.

The answer to stopping abortion is to do a better job of valuing women.  The answer to stopping all of the problems relating to human sexuality is tolerance and education, not repression and ignorance.  The answer to valuing life is to value all life and to promote that value as part of our public health policy and our social policy. It is not accomplished by reducing the rights of any human being to their own body. The solution is not to repress women or to denigrate women or to try to legislate against human sexuality.

It can be done, it can succeed.  But it can only do so by a diametrically opposite approach to penalizing, restricting and demonizing abortion and contraception.

It's All in Your Head, the possible neuroscience of conservativism

"The brain struggling to understand the brain is society trying to explain itself."Colin Blakemore (from Mechanics of the Mind, 1977)

“People who don't Think probably don't have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake.” Winnie the Pooh

"Whatever any man does he first must do in his mind, whose machinery is the brain. The mind can do only what the brain is equipped to do, and so man must find out what kind of brain he has before he can understand his own behavior."
Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal (from Sleep, 1966)

Besides blogging about politics and current events, I'm something of a biosciences geek.  Reading articles and studies, or listening to science podcasts, is some of what I do purely for fun. Rarely do I have an occasion as entertaining for me as the one presented by a recent study in the UK, which connects these different interests. 

Readers, from Penigma or other blogs, know that I include quotes at the beginning of posts as a sort of focus for the subsequent writing. The Winnie the Pooh quote here is to add a touch of humor, and a tip of the hat to the UK for providing source material, because I'm an ardent anglophile; not to insult anyone.  But it is worth noting that despite allegations that so-called socialized medicine restricts innovation and research, the UK seems to be producing some amazing studies relating to our bodies and our minds.

A brain scan study started out as a joke, a whim, initiated and funded by actor Colin Firth.  The study, as reported by the Daily Mail, involved the MRI scanning of some 90 students at the University College London (UCL).  It uncovered an apparent correlation between the thickness of a section of the brain, the amygdala, and political views.  The study was lead by Professor Geraint Rees, who summed up the study results,

"The anterior cingulate is a part of the brain that is on the middle surface of the brain at the front and we found that the thickness of the grey matter, where the nerve cells of neurons are, was thicker the more people described themselves as liberal or left wing and thinner the more they described themselves as conservative or right wing,

The amygdala is a part of the brain which is very old and very ancient and thought to be very primitive and to do with the detection of emotions. The right amygdala was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative.

'It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342239/Brain-study-reveals-right-wing-conservatives-larger-primitive-amygdala.html#ixzz1ABcgmlN8  This photo is from the daily mail website article linked above:



The right amygdala - an ancient part of the brain - was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative. It's located where the yellow area meets the red in the centre of the picture.

 This intrigued me because it raises the question, are these differences in the amygdala we are born with - are conservatives born, not 'made'?  Or is this a case where the changes to this part of our brain that develops as a result of our thoughts and emotions?  I suspect in further studies, it will turn out to be the latter, that our brain changes because of what we do, think, and feel; and that conservatives and liberals will turn out to be made the way they are, not that they are born that way.

Let me digress to another UCL study from back in 2000, by Professor Eleanor Maguire, who did a study on a different part of the human brain, the hippocampus, using London cabbies rather than college students:

Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 97(8), 4398-4403 doi:10.1073/pnas.070039597.

 Quoting from the BBC report on the study:

Taxi drivers given brain scans by scientists at University College London had a larger hippocampus compared with other people. This is a part of the brain associated with navigation in birds and animals. The scientists also found part of the hippocampus grew larger as the taxi drivers spent more time in the job. "There seems to be a definite relationship between the navigating they do as a taxi driver and the brain changes," said Dr Eleanor Maguire, who led the research team.

Both the hippocampus and the amygdala are part of the traditional classification of the limbic system, which wikipedia describes, (quoting the Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia) as the 

"Paleomammalian brain.. a set of brain structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, septum, limbic cortex and fornix, which seemingly support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, and olfaction."

Without getting into too complex an exposition of the limbic system, and acknowledging that to understand it properly requires extensive specialization and education, I am a firm believer in the principle that form follows function, that form subtly changes and adapts based on what it does, as my basis for my anticipation that this may prove in later studies to be the case. It is as good a theory as any other.

But further supporting that speculation is the book written by one of my favorite FindLaw writers, John Dean (of the Nixon Watergate burglaries notoriety, yes, that John Dean).  His 2006 book, Conservatives without Conscience, addresses a post-Goldwater authoritarian change in the politics and beliefs of conservatives, building on the research of Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Robert Altmeyer, which Dean indicated in a recent television interview, posits a correlation between the instilling of fear by parents in children with subsequent shaping of later views.  That was summed up here as :

According to Altemeyer (1996), authoritarianism can be defined as the co-variation of three specific psychological tendencies. These include submission to authority, aggression toward individuals targeted by authority, and adherence to social conventions established by authorities. Stated another way, authoritarians are submissive toward authority figures and the norms of ingroups, and aggressive toward deviants and the members of outgroups. Decades of research support this interpretation of the construct (but see Kreindler, 2005) and indicate strong to moderate correlations with racial prejudice, anti-homosexual attitudes, punitive jury decisions, and many related attitudes and behaviors (Altemeyer, 1996; Stone, Lederer, & Christie, 1993). The authoritarian potential for prejudice, hostility, and aggression is well documented, yet there has been considerably less empirical research on their other emotional tendencies. One conspicuous gap in our knowledge concerns the level and varieties of fear that authoritarians experience. This is rather surprising considering the frequency with which fear is mentioned in theories and discussion about authoritarianism.[bold type, my emphasis added - DG]

This would seem to summarize at least some if not all of the positions of the right wing culture wars, especially some of the positions promoted by the Christian Right.  If the study of Right Wing authoritarianism is correct in their conclusions, I would expect that MRIs of individuals who hold those views might very well support the study of differences in their amygdala from control group subjects that do not show those changes, or hold those views.  If right wing authoritarians develop from a fear base, and given the Moral Panic promoted by the right through misinformation and disinformation to their base, these factors would all be consistent with form following function and with the parts of our brain changing by what we think, feel and do.  This premise is even consistent with the prediction of Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi in the UK in his 1990 BBC series, if you posit that opposition to the modern world derives from fear and distrust of the modern world:

:I think you're going to see faith return and return in a way that will cause some problems because the most powerful faith in the modern world will be the faith most powerfully opposed to the modern world.

That suggests that there is a possible convergence between political science, represented by John Dean, psychology, represented by Altemeyer, the humanities as reflected in the observations of Lord Sacks, and Professor Rees and his researchers at UCL in understanding the physiology, differences, and possible causation for those differences.

The study funded by Colin Firth needs to be supported by peer review, and other studies, including a larger sampling; these early findings are inconclusive, but tantalizing in what they suggest.  Applause, to Colin Firth for perhaps the most innovative and creative uses of celebrity and the resources that celebrity provides for initiating this study, and a standing ovation to UCL for their continuing work in neuroscience.