Undead Preemie: didn't surviveIn a story that will likely be featured in pro-life literature for years to come, a baby that had been pronounced dead began breathing and showing vital signs hours later in Nahariya, Israel. A baby breathing hours after being pronounced dead—it’s a pro-life activist’s wet dream.

The baby’s mother was five months pregnant when tests showed that there was intrauterine bleeding, and that her fetus had no pulse. Doctors then initiated what’s being called a “second trimester termination procedure” the baby was delivered and pronounced dead. The baby was then sent to a cryogenics lab where she was put in a refrigerator, and five hours later, when the baby’s father asked to see it, doctors found that the baby showed signs of spontaneously breathing. She was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to survive for even 24 hours. Presumably this time, when doctors pronounced the baby dead they checked a little more thoroughly.

Here in America, pro-lifers are being forced to make a tough decision in the upcoming Presidential election, and pparently neither candidate has convinced hardliners that he’s the best choice.

Name-dropping and gossip-blogging aren't really my thing, but before I say anything about the big story out of America's oldest college daily yesterday, I had better disclose that I definitely once had a class with Yale College senior Aliza Shvarts --- if memory serves, it was either George Bealer's seminar, "Philosophy of Language: Frege's Puzzle," or (more likely) Leslie Brisman's "The Bible as Literature."

I'm sure of this because seeing somebody wear the same furry boots every day for twelve weeks come rain, snow, or sun tends to stick in your head. Still, for all the non-conformity in her fashion choices, at the time it never would have occurred to me to guess that one day, for her senior project, she would decide to spend nine months artificially inseminating herself "as often as possible" and deliberately inducing miscarriages to prevent any of the pregnancies from coming to term. To package the project for display, she is preparing a big cube wrapped in blood-stained sheets (from the miscarriages) with video monitors installed on four sides showing a highlight reel of her artistic journey. "I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity," Shvarts told the YDN.

Or at least, that was the report that went epidemic on the intertubes within hours ofMore of Shvart's Work: Squint and you'll see the murder being posted, prompting a surfeit of thoughtful responses like this one, which refers to Shvarts as a "murdering Jewess" and posts her e-mail address (anyone you'd like to reach at Yale, by the way, is firstname [dot] lastname [at] yale [dot] edu)†. I suppose, if you're convinced that abortion is murder and inclined to think there's a special Jewish inclination to be an executioner, the odds aren't too strong that you'll think for a goddamn minute about just how likely it is that any woman, even a wanton fornicating She-Jew whose diabolically prolific womb can nurture a brood of horned hatchlings from larvae to bankers in mere weeks, would be fertile enough to get pregnant, miscarry, get pregnant, miscarry, and then get pregnant and miscarry in a span of nine months. Or that there are such things as non-prescription "herbal" abortifacients, of the sort Shvarts claimed to have used in lieu of RU-486, that would a) be reliable in ending her pregnancies without b) killing or crippling her through repeated use in so short a time. Or that a Yalie would be committed enough to her "art" or "politics" to actually risk her life for them. (Please understand that, unlike the tortured, socially-inept auteurs at a certain safety school up on the Charles, we are all in it for the money.)

So the whole thing was (duh) a stunt, as Shvarts now admits, though the university is calling it "performance art" and awarding her credit, presumably to put the issue away and avoid further unwanted attention from resentful jackasses with basic html skills and an abundant surplus of malice built up over years to compensate for not having much else. Even if she didn't mean it this way, Shvarts' abortion tableau is at least accidentally a fairly brilliant subversion of the discursive conventions around abortion --- reading through a sample of the brick-dumb responses to Shvarts' hoax provides any member of the less fair sex a rare and useful glimpse of the moral blackmail women who get abortions must experience fairly regularly --- as well as a fashionable brand of "I won't draw but I'll cut my cock off or swim in feces and hang the photos in a gallery" art.

Boola boola and huzzah to murdering Jewess Aliza Shvarts '08, from this old Blue.

UPDATE: "Schvartz [sic], for my senior project, I offer to buy you a hysterectomy," says a freshman in the College. Stay classy, Cooper Lewis '11.

†If you're mulling over whether or not to let some depraved youth-corrupting monsters in New Haven know that they're on a direct path to hell and God will see to it that someone sends them there soon, bear in mind that information like this can be dangerous, that four of the last six US presidents took degrees 'neath the elms, that the CIA was founded in a small windowless building on Chapel Street near High next to the Old Art Gallery (!) and kitty corner from the philosophy department (!), and it would be wise to think very carefully about what you'd be fucking with.†

††I kid.†††

†††No, I don't.

No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – "How To Sound Smart This Week" will provide the Cliff's Notes.

Pre-bris, he was a baby Schwarzenegger: Everyone's favorite wimpDoes counting superdelegates put you to sleep? This week, the big-idea magazines are all obsessing over the presidential campaign, but it won’t be that hard to change the subject while still sounding respectably erudite. Just bring up one of the following eye-opening essays.

In The New York Times Magazine, Annie Murphy Paul looks at the distinct possibility that fetuses can feel pain. This has major implications for the abortion debate, so you shouldn’t be at a loss for discussion questions, but there’s also a Jewish angle. Scientists think that people who are exposed to pain as babies might grow up to be more pain-sensitive:

Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, noticed more than a decade ago that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than their female counterparts. This discrepancy, she reasoned, could be due to sex hormones, to anatomical differences — or to a painful event experienced by many boys: circumcision. In a study of 87 baby boys, Taddio found that those who had been circumcised soon after birth reacted more strongly and cried for longer than uncircumcised boys when they received a vaccination shot four to six months later.

Is it possible that one of the central tenets of Judaism causes male wimpiness? Does that explain, like, all of American Jewish pop culture? Dazzle your audience with this possibility, and they’ll forget about Obama’s performance in Maine instantly.

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, Lori Gottleib takes advantage of the Valentine’s Day season to propose a deeply romantic idea: If you’re a woman over the age of 35 and you’re still single, maybe you should lower your standards. “Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics,” Gottleib advises – otherwise, you’ll never be able to organize a stable family life.

Mention this article in the vicinity of anyone male or female, married or single, and you're bound to provoke a strong reaction. It makes everyone involved look terrible: women are either demanding, men either shallow or, if it’s possible that their wives married them out of desperation, pitiable. Also, halitosis is so much worse than bad taste – isn’t it? Actually, that’s another direction you can take the conversation: Would you rather marry someone with perpetual coffee breath, or a collection of Cosby sweaters?

Last week: Super Tuesday

Whenever a politician, pundit or celebrity says something amazingly stupid, offensive or naive, "The Gaffe Factory" is here to document it.

This week we have a gem from Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, explaining why he would outlaw abortion and gay marriage (italics mine):

"It's an issue that goes to the very heart of our civilization of all people being equal, endowed by their creator with alienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Gay, Pro-Choice Squirrel Reacts: to Huckabee's words Welcome to the first installment of Words or Turds, where each week, we'll bring you a money quote on God, faith, religion, or any number of other shadowy concepts. It's up to you to decide and explain whether they're words or turds. This week, because he's just got so much to say, here are two gems from from Republican wannabe-president Mike Huckabee:

Huckabee on the problems of the Constitution, as it relates to and deals with issues of abortion and gay marriage:

"I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards."

Huckabee on why he feels so at home in South Carolina:

“South Carolina’s a great place for me. I know how to eat grits. I speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel. We’re on the same wavelength. I bet you never did this: When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they’d let us use in the dorms, and we would fry squirrel in a popcorn popper in our dorm rooms.”

Possible Tuesday Taste Test recipe? Perhaps! But for now, we're more interested to know whether you think Huckabee is a man of words or turds. This one's a real head-scratcher, right?

Headlines were made in Britain this week when it emerged that some checkout workers at one of our largest supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s, are refusing to handle alcohol products because of their Muslim beliefs. The supermarket has pronounced itself happy to accommodate their sensibilities, and so if your cashier objects to the bottle of wine you’ve got in your basket, you’ll have to wait for another member of staff to come across and ring the purchase through for you. There has been some pleasingly acerbic commentary from the blogosphere as a result, notably Scottish schoolteacher Shuggy, who’s now on the lookout for a new posting:

Quite. But a private retailer is perfectly entitled to make whatever arrangements it sees fit with its employees; if my local Sainsbury’s has long lines at the checkout, maybe next time I’ll take my custom elsewhere. The consequences of allowing people to pick and choose which parts of their jobs they are happy to perform, however, go much further than queuing to buy booze. Some Muslim doctors in the British National Health Service are going so far as to purposely avoid lectures on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, because it offends their religious beliefs. From the Sunday Times:

Nor, of course, is this solely a Muslim issue. In the US such religious considerations are more often voiced by Christian doctors, particularly in the context of emergency contraception and fertility treatments. Notable cases have included a lesbian woman in California was refused artificial insemination because of her sexual orientation, and a doctor in Washington refused to fill out the prescription that would have put lead in a gay man’s pencil.

Religious groups argue that individual physicians and pharmacists should be allowed to choose what procedures they will perform (being pro-choice isn’t always bad, then, eh?). And some degree of accommodation for religious sensibilities does seem sensible – no doctor is forced to perform abortions, and indeed many on both sides of the Atlantic do not, and this is surely right.

But abortion in the US and UK is, by and large, freely available. You schedule an appointment to have the procedure done and it is done; you don’t give a damn if someone has passed on performing it. And, despite the best efforts of activists, time limits are generally fairly generous; a delay of a day or two is seldom of much consequence. But not all medical situations have time on their side.

Picture the case of the woman who has been raped and goes to an emergency room to try and get the morning-after pill, only to be turned away on religious grounds. It’s been claimed – by a pro-choice Catholic group – that only 167 of 597 Catholic hospitals in the US offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped. Quite apart from the emotional distress involved in having to go from hospital to hospital to find a non-judgemental pharmacist (“I sympathise, honey, but you don’t have the right to kill that baby”), emergency contraception is more effective the quicker it is taken. (Nor, by the way, is this a mere debating point. It’s estimated that there are 25,000 pregnancies in the US every year as a result of rape. Read that sentence again.)

Freedom of religion is an important right and, in the sphere of private worship, inviolable, but it seems to me that if you take the Hippocratic oath then you don’t get to turn patients away at the door because you don’t approve of their lifestyles. I say this as a libertarian who believes, strongly, in an individual’s freedom to believe whatever he likes and practice his religion accordingly. But when we have a situation where doctors are not even willing to learn about diseases like gonorrhea, or cirrhosis of the liver, simply because they disapprove of the lifestyle choices that hasten their onset, then those choices are putting lives at risk, and that’s just not acceptable. Refusing to show up for those bits of the course you don’t care for just shouldn’t be an option.

And who’s to say it ends here? What about white supremacists that don’t want to treat black patients? Are we to permit Christian fundamentalists to refuse treatment to drug users? Democrats? Jews? (If so, that’s Aaron Sorkin fucked.) And if you think that’s ridiculous, exactly what is the bloody difference? If you call yourself a doctor, and you’re tempted – even for a second – to pass on treating a patient with liver damage because your religion forbids you from drinking alcohol, you might want to stop and ask yourself if you aren’t in the wrong profession. Wouldn’t you be happier cutting hair or running a dry cleaner’s instead? 

Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what religious garb you dress it in. It’s a shame so many people are willing to make excuses for it.

Writing about your life is dangerous. The only thing easier than putting your audience to sleep (“I remember the rich aroma of my grandmother’s delicious matza ball soup”) is shocking your audience so thoroughly that you’ll never get hired or go on a date again (“I remember the rich aroma of my grandmother’s delicious matza ball soup the night we first made love.”) A good personal essay has to tell a good story, and most of the time, the best stories are the most personally incriminating. Which is why we’re always so excited when Jewcy users respond to a personal essay—or a feature, for that matter—with long, nakedly honest stories of their own. They’re not ...

Ann Hulbert shares some insight from a recent Pew study on sexual and political principles of Gen Next that are worth a look in today’s Sunday Times Magazine. It captures, certainly from my own experience, the rooted openness of a cross section of this generation. Though specifically geared toward views on gay marriage and abortion, the study sheds light on their independence of thought as well as their deep connections to their parents’ generation. And dovetails with one aspect that summarizes their essence: they are, without a doubt, charting something of a new path–wherever it leads, in American political life. More in relationship to homosexuality than on the abortion question, one sees this study validated, which I suppose makes sense given the more public nature of seeing or knowing two gay people than knowing who had an abortion. Hulbert writes, “On one level, Gen Nexters sound impatient with a strident stalemate between entrenched judgments of behavior; after all, experience tells them that in the case of both abortion and gay rights, life is complicated and intransigence has only impeded useful social and political compromises. At the same time, Gen Nexters give every indication of being attentive to the moral issues at stake: they aren’t willing to ignore what is troubling about abortion and what is equally troubling about intolerant exclusion. A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work.”

Mike Kinsley nails it:

[G]iuliani's story line about standing firm would have been more impressive if it hadn't been accompanied by stories--apparently leaked by his staff--about how they came to settle on this strategy and how clever it is. In the first Republican presidential debate, Giuliani tried to project ambivalence (not a bad place to be on abortion), but it came out as indifference (a bad place to be). He said it was O.K. with him if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and O.K. with him if it didn't. So his campaign decided to go with a "standing firm" narrative instead, as if these were racks of suits from which you could choose the one you thought fit the best. If "standing firm" seems like a clever campaign strategy, then it isn't very clever, is it?

When I ran for N.Y. State Assembly, my argument for being pro-choice was that it wasn't just a matter of a woman's right to choose but also one of a doctor's right to choose. Abortion is, after all, a medical procedure, and most medical procedures are not undertaken lightly or without a fair degree of emotional distress on the part of the patient, no less the physician. This is where politics ends and the doctor-patient relationship begins.

Everyone is, or should be, "personally" opposed to abortion; it's bound to upset your weekend plans, no matter how much you may donate to NARAL or Planned Parenthood. The very thought of flushing out a human fetus -- or surgically removing any part of the human body -- makes us queasy. But this visceral, as it were, reaction has no bearing on the medical or moral justifications for the procedure, especially when it is performed in emergent or life-threatening conditions.

A candidate for president has no business legislating what goes on in the OR. The sooner we realize this as a nation, the better.

Giuliani's pro-choice bona fides were never in question, try though he might to appear red state-friendly as prez material:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani in his campaign appearances this year has stated that he personally abhors abortion, even though he supports keeping a legal right to choose. But records show that in the '90s he contributed money at least six times to Planned Parenthood, one of the country's leading abortion rights groups and its top provider of abortions.

 

Albert Mohler: Wants to put your gay fetus on the patchSometimes I think we should really invite Rev. Albert Mohler Jr to be a guest blogger here on faithhacker. The man is just an eternal spring of practical spirituality! Now yes, it’s true he’s not Jewish, that he’s in fact president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and that he likes to brag about how he’s been called “an articulate voice for conservative Christianity at large” which suggests that being articulate and a conservative Christian is something of a revelation (no pun intended). So okay, I can see how he wouldn’t be the first name to come to mind, even though he’s contributed to blockbusting anthologies like “Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment.”

But Rev. Mohler’s recent writings make it pretty clear he’s dedicated to making sure spirituality can be practically infused into your family life. Specifically, Rev. Mohler is working on a plan to help you ensure that your baby won’t come out gay.

I know. It’s a relief to know you’re not the only one pining away for a prenatal gayness vaccine, right?

According to this article in the Washington Post, Mohler holds the somewhat liberal view that homosexuality may be an innate and natural condition, something you’re born with. This is in contrast to the majority of the Christian right, which likes to refer to homosexuality as a “life choice.” But instead of thinking to himself, “Hey, if they’re born with it, it might actually be something God intended for them. It might be an acceptable way to live one’s life,” Mohler decided to post something on his blog with the catchy title, “Is Your Baby Gay? What if You Could Know? What if You Could Do Something About It?” In the post he discusses the dilemma that’s been floating around the media for a few weeks now. If babies are born with a predisposition to be gay, and if we eventually develop a genetic test for homosexuality in the same way that we can test for Tay-Sachs or Down Syndrome, what does one do with a fetus that’s predisposed toward homosexuality? Abort it?

Mohler weighs in by reminding his readers that because all people—even homosexuals—are created in the image of God, aborting a fetus that is known to be gay would be wrong and sinful. Then he says, “If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.”

It’s hard to deny that this is a very practical view on the matter of homosexual babies. But, and I just hate to shoot holes in the theory of such an intellectual like Mohler, it seems to me that all babies have a little problem with sexual temptation when they grow up.

Mohler, obviously, got trashed by a number of groups from both the left and the right who were angry at him for a whole slew of reasons. In his response, also posted on his blog, he reminds his readers that original sin really sucks: “Let's remember that all of us are born with a huge moral defect -- we are sinners from the start. Christians who have responded with claims that God would not allow a person to be born with a bent toward sin miss the clear biblical teaching that all of us are born with a bent toward sin and with a sin nature. We are born marked by Adam's sin and already under God's just condemnation for that sin.”

At this point I don’t care what Mohler has to say because he’s proven himself to be a windbag and a whackjob, but it’s interesting that the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so despondent about homosexuals that he decided the only way to deal with them is to sanction genetic engineering.

It's an interesting take on practicality, I guess. And by "interesting" I mean "vomit inducing."

Ultrasound: The Emotional Rorschach

I heard this morning on the radio that Georgia just passed a new law requiring women to watch an ultrasound before they decide whether or not to have an abortion. I was stunned by this. It just seems very very very wrong and cruel.

But it got me thinking about abortion in general, and reminded me about a conversation I had once with a very cool rabbi, who explained to me that in Judaism, the issue isn’t so cut and dry as it is in the American legal system It isn’t black or white.. As with many complicated issues, Jewish thinkers have recognized that there isn’t really one ethic to uphold. There are shades of grey, and compromises that get made.

So to refresh my memory, I ran over to Aish, to see what they had to say on the matter. Here’s one nugget of wisdom from their site:

The easiest way to conceptualize a fetus in halacha is to imagine it as a full-fledged human being -- but not quite.

Isn’t that helpful?

Far more helpful is this:

As a general rule, abortion in Judaism is permitted only if there is a direct threat to the life of the mother by carrying the fetus to term or through the act of childbirth. In such a circumstance, the baby is considered tantamount to a rodef, a pursuer after the mother with the intent to kill her.

Which is an interesting way of looking at things.

More interesting still is that the fetus doesn’t have to directly cause the DEATH of the mother in order to affect the LIFE of the mother. Which is just the kind of distinction I love…

Judaism recognizes psychiatric as well as physical factors in evaluating the potential threat that the fetus poses to the mother. However, the danger posed by the fetus (whether physical or emotional) must be both probable and substantial to justify abortion.

Which makes a lot of sense to me.

See, while I am a super-vehement pro-choice advocate for a lot of social issues I won’t go into here, I don’t take abortion lightly, and I think people SHOULD have to weigh and evaluate such a massive decision carefully. And I think that this response, the Jewish response, is as good (though it can be interpreted in ways I don’t like) as any.

Except maybe my own. But then, my response is pretty fucking personal. And a bit unusual.