Lamar Soutter Newsletter

The nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court has once again thrust the abortion debate into the national spotlight.

Why does this topic generate such hatred on all sides of the issue? The pro-life are seen as fascists trying to dominate women, while the pro-choice are wanton murderers. Not to mention that many women take no small measure of satisfaction in arguing that men don’t even have a right to voice an opinion on the subject. This level of loathing makes any attempt at finding a middle ground nearly impossible, to the detriment of two sides who don’t even know what they are arguing for.

There is only one question relevant to abortion: what makes a “person”?

Nearly every culture in history has had a definition of “person”. A person has powerful and enforceable rights. Anything not a “person” (mosquitoes… monkeys… car salesmen) receives varying degrees of that protection based on our perception of their cognitive abilities, economic value, and how cute they are (it’s “worse” to kill a baby seal than a baby cow).

Given the assumption that “people” all have a right to life, both sides of the abortion debate should be able to easily agree on the following:

1) Assuming that a fertilized egg is not a “person” until birth, abortion should be completely legal.

2) Assuming that a fertilized egg is a “person” from conception, abortion can not be allowed in a civilized society.

So at what point, from conception to birth, does a fertilized egg, become a person?

This is difficult to answer because rights are assigned by development (a 5 year old may have a right to life, but he does not yet have the right to drink, smoke, or carry firearms) but development is a process, with no definitive event where we can say “we can conclusively say we have a person after this, but not before it”. Sometimes even death is a process, resulting in similar problems (see Terry Schiavo).

In the absence of an empirical method for defining a “person”, people naturally choose a method which is convenient and comfortable to them, given their previously held beliefs (at conception, at birth, in the second trimester). All of these points are utterly arbitrary, and indefensible (for example, how can one argue that a baby is a person at birth, when developmentally the baby was not measurably different the day before from the day after. How can one argue that a small mass of cells with no central nervous system, is a person either?).

Because we ultimately make a decision on our views based solely on what is most convenient definition for us, any attack on our decision becomes an attack on our entire belief structure. This causes people to defend and argue their positions to ridiculous lengths.

One of many such arguments is that men, unable to bear children, and thus having little or no stake on the outcome of the abortion debate, have no right to express an opinion. The argument demonstrates a complete unwillingness to even begin to examine the topic judiciously, and is ludicrous on its face. It’s also been heard before.

Before the civil war, it was illegal to have slaves in the North. The North attempted to extend this ban to the South, whose entire economy was based on slavery. Thus, the South argued, without a stake in the outcome, the North had no right to attempt to abolish slavery.

If one believes that abortion is murder, men of conscience must stand and voice their objections to the dehumanization and murder of his fellow man. What would you, dear reader, think of a man who watched what he believed to be the mass murder of innocents and said nothing?

If one believes that abortion is not murder, men of conscience must stand and voice their objections to the systematic attempt to interfere with people’s domain over their own body. What would you, dear reader, think of a man who watched what he believed to be the subjugation of half the population of this country and said nothing?

What do I, as a man of conscience, believe?

I believe that debate is good, that people must express themselves. But I believe this debate has lost all sense of reason, and voicing a pro-life or pro-choice opinion at this point contributes to the divisiveness which paralyzes any attempt at a resolution.

Therefore I believe that Reliable contraception (that is, methods or preventing fertilization of an egg) should be completely unrestricted, available inexpensively and without a prescription.

The truth is that Roe v. Wade will not likely be overturned any time soon. Overturning it, despite Alito’s nomination, is actually the lowest man on the Republican totem. The abortion debate is the center of Republican power in this country. Evangelical Christians have chosen it as their defining issue, an issue where the Republicans represent them best. If the issue were “resolved” to Evangelicals’ satisfaction, they might turn to issues of poverty, healthcare, or human rights, issues where they are far more liberal. Further, many Republican women (even within the Bush administration¹) are pro choice. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Republicans could galvanize those women (and women previously too apathetic to enter politics) against the party.

Even if Roe v. Wade could be overturned in the next 10 years (highly unlikely), that will not make abortion illegal, it would simple give states the power to decide the legality for themselves. Many states would still allow it. Even if abortion were illegal in all 50 states, it would continue in high numbers, if history is any judge.

Most pro-lifers have a knee-jerk objection to wide availability of contraception. But even Fundamentalist Catholics, who believe that contraception is a violation of God’s edict to “be fruitful and multiply”, may still see this as a solid step forward. By allowing or even encouraging contraception, pro-life groups can make a dramatic and rapid cut in the abortion rate while no way whatsoever impeding their own ability to continue to fight to make abortion illegal.

Wide availability of contraception would, however, increase the rate of pre-marital sex, a significant downside for many pro-lifers. However one must realize that that effect dwindles every year. The abortion rate in this country continues to rise steadily, indicating that fear of pregnancy is loosing effectiveness as a deterrent. Once it is no longer a deterrent, contraception would no longer be an incentive.

Given that most pro-lifers (including Fundamentalist Catholics) find contraception preferable to abortion, this leaves them with a rather simple utilitarian decision.

How many babies should be murdered, before the increase in pre-marital sex caused by the wide availability of contraception, is preferable to abortion? Thousands? Millions? Tens of Millions?

Figure out a number. Before that number, argue against contraception. Afterwards, actively push for contraception, the lesser of two evils, as a means of stemming the tide. The other option is to continue to fight a battle which will remain in a stalemate for decades, while we perform 1.4 million² abortions every year.

Many pro-choicers, while supporting this move, would not give it their full throated support, arguing that it ignores the fundamental issues of a right to choose. This is correct. But it doesn’t impede their ability to argue their case either, and is definitely a step in the right direction.

I have never met a pro-choicer who thought abortion should ever be a primary means of birth control. I have never met a pro-lifer who didn’t think that contraception was preferable. Both sides want to see a reduction in the abortion rate. It is an area all agree on, but few will make a strong push for it, choosing instead to focus on areas of disagreement, rather than where both sides may meet and help each other and themselves. I suspect that once the abortion rate drops dramatically, both sides will see the issue with less urgency, and have an easier time finding an equitable solution.

Until that time, the debate will continue with little reason being shown on either side, and potential gains passed up in the desperate attempt to avoid any compromise.

Footnotes:

1. Gerhart, A. (2005, July 19). Women Closest to Bush are Pro-Choice. The Washington Post [↩]
2. US Government Census: http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/02statab/vitstat.pdf [↩]

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Hello All!

The year is drawing to a close, and while we all spend time with friends and family, the political landscape in the country continues, as it always has, to shift.

This was the first year for my newsletter (well, half a year, the newsletter started in June). I would like to sincerely thank all of you who have taken the time to read and reply to some or all of the publications, and to refer them to friends. I see it as a good sign that referrals to friends outstripped referrals to Belleview by just over 6 to 1.

As the year wraps up, the question is… how did we do?

The Recipe for Haggis / The Impeachment of a President:

Last week, Representative John Conyers took the first official step towards impeaching the president. He has introduced three house resolutions.

The first of these would create a select committee charged with determining if Bush and Cheney should be impeached. The committee would investigate whether they had intended to invade Iraq before given the authority (as per the Downing Street Memo), manipulated intelligence, and advocated the use of torture. If the committee recommends impeachment, the HJC will consider and vote on specific charges.

The second and third resolutions call for censure of the president and vice president for, among other things, failing to respond to John Conyers’ letter of May 6th regarding the Downing Street Memo.

God’s Tenure:

Also last week history was made in Pennsylvania.

A Dover area school board had voted to require Intelligent Design (ID) to be taught in science classes as an alternative to Evolution. The ACLU challenged the policy, and on December 23ed a republican judge, appointed by Bush, ruled that ID is not science, and teaching it in science classes violates the separation of church and state.

“We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” he wrote. “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom.”

—

It is my goal to offer a unique perspective on a wide range of topics, and challenge and educate readers. Given the feedback from articles such as Three Months at N2 and Día de la Resistencia Indigena, as well as the success of The Recipe for Haggis and God’s Tenure, I am hopeful that the newsletter has succeeded.

In the next year, expect to see discussions on how perception influences reality, Chaos Theory, the great psychologist Albert Einstein (who also, as you may know, did some obscure work in physics), freedom of speech, the Kennedy Assassination, Political Action Committees, and deterrence and the criminal mind, just to name a few.

I hope you all enjoyed the year, and hope your next year is even better. Thank you all for your support and feedback, and have a wonderful 2006.

Nicholas Lamar Soutter.

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A flashbulb memory is a memory so powerful that it is forever burned into your brain. Where were you when JFK was assassinated? When Pearl Harbor was attacked? On 9/11?

Flashbulb memories are caused by flashbulb events. These events commonly affect a society as a whole. There are many side effects of these events- they tend to bring families closer together, inspire people to follow their dreams, and to start families.

They also have a surprising and long term side effect… They shake people’s faith in their own ability to understand the world so deeply that people tend to actively seek authority figures in whom to place near absolute trust and confidence. Because these events affect large societies, they can cause hundreds of millions of people to abandon reason and critical thought for a sense of security. In psychology, it is a phenomenon unlike any other.

When JFK was assassinated, the public assumed that the Federal Government would do the investigating, that it could naturally do a better job than the police. They assumed that the government would naturally have our best interest in mind, and would never abuse the power placed in their hands in a time of emergency. It never crossed anybody’s mind that they might even have been involved in causing it.

The assassination of a president is not a federal crime. This is intentional, to prevent the possibility that the military, or any other branch of the federal government, would assassinate the president and then cover it up.

In times of crisis, people seek opportunities to abandon their judgment to a higher authority. The civilian doctors, who began the autopsy of JFK, did not question the military illegally taking the body and altering their notes. The Dallas police didn’t hesitate when the FBI took over most of the investigation. The media and police remained largely silent when the new president, Lyndon Johnson, had the bullet-riddled limousine completely rebuilt before any forensic analysis could be done on it.

Forty years later, evidence that the government was involved in JFK’s assassination is pretty conclusive. But most people prefer not to investigate or demand answers from the government. They argue that it was 40 years ago, and answers today would be irrelevant. The truth is it is far easier to leave it at “that was then, this is now” than it is to investigate the matter thoroughly, possibly finding both that the assassination wasn’t particularly difficult, and that it could easily be reproduced in modern times.

On September 11, 2001, America suffered another flashbulb event. Immediately after came the assumption that it was both necessary and wise to make drastic changes to our government, that it should be given broad new powers, and would never abuse the power placed in its hands in a time of emergency.

The first thing we lost was perspective.

We were not fighting a new enemy, and they were not suddenly all that powerful. Al-Qaeda has been at war with us for over 20 years. They’ve made dozens of attempts to bring down the World Trade Center. They planned Millennium attacks, to simultaneously blow up 12 passenger planes over the Atlantic, and probably hundreds more attacks the public doesn’t know about.

2001 was not a banner year for them. They didn’t recruit a new evil genius to lead them, they didn’t increase their dedication to our destruction, and they didn’t grow in numbers by any significant amount.

The only difference was that after 20 years, one of their plans finally, unequivocally, worked.

Well, give Ray Charles 200 darts and stick him in front of a dartboard, and even he will eventually hit the bull’s-eye. Doesn’t mean he can see.

They were willing to die to do us some damage. They were bound to succeed eventually. It was a question of time. And as spectacular as their success was, over 35,000 people die every year on our highways, 100,000 people from smoking. After 20 years of passionate hatred of our country, and a total commitment to destroying us, they have had only one major success, taking a total of 2,000 American lives. This suggests to me that they aren’t the threat we think they are.

Yes, there were failures on our end. Yes, the system could be improved. Improving inter-agency communication, reinforcing cockpit doors, and allowing for fuel dumps mid-air would all prevent the same thing from happening again. But an overhaul of a system which by all appearances has been working quite well seems to defy common sense, as did the assumption that we’d have to lose freedoms and weaken our moral positions to protect ourselves.

The Germans honestly believed that they were liberating Poland. Pinochet believed that the best way to protect his country was to silence dissidents who made his job harder, and to attack countries before they could attack him. Just as each murderer in jail believes himself innocent, that his crimes were justified and not as heinous as his cell mate’s, so do nations.

We should understand crime and punishment. Russia, the former record holder for the greatest percentage of its population in prison at 6%, has lost that title. With just over 7% of its population in prison, the US, the “Land of the Free” holds the world record for the percentage of its own people in jail (beating out China).

For the first time in history, we have changed from an enlightened policy of retaliation to the imperial policy of preemptive strikes against countries which might be a threat- acting in self defense by striking first.

We have used White Phosphorus, which we classified as a chemical weapon when used by other countries, in the war in Iraq (and, after using it, re-classified it as a conventional weapon).

We are rounding up suspects in Iraq¹ and Afghanistan²(including known U.S. allies³) who are detained, sometimes for years, tortured⁴ and raped⁵, then released without charges. Human Rights Watch has called Abu Ghraib the “Tip of the Iceberg”⁶, and calls it a fair sampling of treatment which occurs, to this day, in 25 U.S. detention centers⁷ across Iraq. By the Army’s own accounting, a minimum of 28 to 31 detainees⁸ are suspected to have been murdered⁹ by U.S. officials while in custody (only one of them in Abu Ghraib). These murders are routinely listed as deaths by “natural causes”¹⁰. In some cases, prisoners who are released and speak out about what they experienced in U.S. custody have disappeared¹¹.

The Red Cross estimates that 60-90% of the people currently detained by the U.S. are held by mistake.

According to our own military personnel, children as young as 10 are being captured, raped and tortured by the United States¹². Labeled as “Internees”, they are held indefinitely, without notification of their families, and are denied access to the International Red Cross. It has become common practice for the U.S. Military to detain the families of suspects so that they may be used as leverage. In one case, the ACLU believes a tape exists of a 14-year-old boy being raped in front of his father to elicit a confession. Though ordered by a U.S. Court, the government refuses to turn over the tape on the grounds that to do so would humiliate the boy, and thus violate the Geneva Convention¹³.

The United States refuses to cooperate with UNICEF in regard to its child prisoners, and routinely denies medical access to prisoners from the International Red Cross. Amnesty International¹⁴ has called Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our time”¹⁵.

It should be noted that Iraq does not present a security risk to the United States, nor was it involved in the 9/11 attacks. It should also be noted that the evidence that torture doesn’t work is overwhelming. People being tortured (both guilty and innocent) simply lie- make up stuff, to get the torture to stop.

Vice President Dick Cheney has said that, in the finest American tradition¹⁶, prisoners are being treated better than they would be by “virtually any other government on the face of the earth”¹⁷. He is also currently lobbying congress to legalize human rights abuses¹⁸ by the United States.

We have more classified documents, unreviewed by civilian authorities, than at any other time in history, including the Cold War and the McCarthy Era.

The Patriot Act appears to be being actively being used against U.S. citizens who are not thought to be, or even associated with, terrorists. Of the over 400 convictions brought about by the Patriot Act, only 39 of the people convicted were convicted of terrorism¹⁹, and of those the average sentence was 11 months. The Patriot Act requires judges to grant FBI warrants, with no oversight, if the FBI simply clams that it is part of a foreign intelligence investigation²⁰. It also empowers the government to declare any US citizen a “Material Witness”, a status which allows indefinite detainment, and denies the detainee the right to counsel and a preliminary hearing²¹. It makes no requirement to notify friends, family, or any civilian organization of a person’s detainment.

In at least one case, a newspaper reporting these facts appears to have had it story misrepresented by, and the target of, the Department of Justice²².

We have gone from being a country so bored with our everyday lives that we impeached our own President for possibly lying under oath in a civil suit (a misdemeanor, by the way) based on the testimony of a single person…

… to a country that watches phenomenal amounts of evidence pile up that multiple members of this administration (including the President²³) have lied before congress (a felony, by the way), deliberately violated the Geneva Convention and international law, endorsed and authorized war crimes²⁴, and ruled over a period in which, for the first time in history, America has been denounced by every major human rights organization in the world ²⁵.

All of this is printed every day in newspapers, and that I can tell, few people have noticed.

The difference between the two (investigating a president for possibly lying about sex, and forgiving a president who may be guilty of multiple felonies) is simple. It is a single flashbulb event.

Footnotes:

1. Tanner, A. (2005, January 12). Iraqi Victim Says U.S. Torture Worse Than Saddam. Reuters [↩]
2. Sheed, J. (2005, March 21). Guantanamo Abuse ‘Videotaped’. The Australian [↩]
3. Bahrain royal family member tortured at Guantanamo prison camp. (2005, August 10). Associated Press [↩]
4. White, J. (2005, August 3). Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs. Washington Post, p.A01. [↩]
5. Buncombe, A. & Morris, N. (2004, August 4). Shocking prisoner abuses are revealed. The Independent [↩]
6. Simpson, I. (2005, April 17). Rights Group: Abu Ghraib Abuses ‘Tip of Iceberg’. Reuters [↩]
7. Croke, L. A (2004, September 24). Torture and Rape Rampant in Iraq Prisons. The New Standard [↩]
8. Jehi, D. (2005, March 26). Pentagon Will Not Try 17 GI’s Implicated in Prisoners’ Deaths. The New York Times [↩]
9. Jehi, D. & Schmitt, E. (2005, March 16). U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide. The New York Times [↩]
10. U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. (2005, October 24). ACLU [↩]
11. Harding, L. (2004, May 12). Focus shifts to jail abuse of women. The Guardian [↩]
12. http://www.sundayherald.com/43796 [↩]
13. ACLU Blames Gov’t for Abu Ghraib Delay. (2005, July 22). Associated Press [↩]
14. Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails. (2005, June 6). CNN [↩]
15. Cohn, M. (2005, June 16). Bush Plays Politics with Guantánamo “Gulag”. Truthout [↩]
16. Patterns of Abuse. (2005, May 23). The New York Times Editorial [↩]
17. Lewis, A. (2005, June 21). Guantánamo’s Long Shadow. The New York Times [↩]
18. Vice President for Torture. (2005, October 26). The Washington Post [↩]
19. Myths and Realities About the Patriot Act. ACLU, [↩]
20. See Above [↩]
21. See Above [↩]
22. The Editor, (2005, December 5). Washington Post’s Response to DOJ Patriot Act Letter. The Washington Post [↩]
23. FBI E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques. ACLU [↩]
24. The Pinochet Principle: Bush Defends Torture in the Name of National Security. (2004, June 9). Democracy Now [↩]
25. Lobe, J. (2005, May 26). Give Rumsfeld the Pinochet Treatment, Says US Amnesty Chief. International Press Service [↩]

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