[For some reason I can’t stop writing that as “Ass teh Ethicist”, which may be appropriate.]

I’ve decided to create a mechanism for reader input to the blog. I note the popularity of “open threads” on other blogs, but wanted something a little different here. I’ve also been worrying about the consistent lack of feedback or commentary on blog posts.

I know this blog is fairly low-traffic, but I also know that a good percentage of visitors are people who are knowledgeable about these issues and really interested in them. I don’t know why y’all don’t comment more. I’ve been telling myself that it’s because my posts are so thorough and comprehensive that there is just nothing more to say on any of the issues, but, I suppose, it’s possible that might not really be the answer. Another thought is that my posts may be generally interesting to readers, but not quite on-target enough to make them want to respond.

So, fine. Be that way. From now on you can do the work yourselves.

If there’s a topic you wish had been addressed here but hasn’t, or a question you’d like input on, or if you just have an opinion you want to get off your chest about something related to bioethics, you can now create your own posts and discussion topics on this blog.

Go to the top of the right-hand sidebar, in the section labeled “Ask the Ethicist!”. (See it up there? To the right - all the way near the side of your screen. Up at the top - below the words “Sufficient Scruples” but above all those lists of features and links. Got it?) Click anywhere in that box and it will take you to a permanent page with an open comments section. Use the comments section to post anything you like - a question, a proposed discussion topic, an argument on which you’d like feedback, or just an opinion. I will move that comment to the main page as a blog post, credited to you. In essence, you can be a blogger at “Sufficient Scruples”! Your comment will appear as a new post at the top of this page (so be sure it’s worded the way you want). Give your name or handle, and your e-mail or Web address if you like, so you get credit. I will give my response to your post, and other readers can then join in in the comments section. You can be sure, then, that this blog will always have something of interest to you on it - if it doesn’t, you have only yourself to blame!

So, welcome, to all my fellow bloggers! Let a thousand blog posts bloom!

NB: Your post will not appear immediately. I will have to create the new blog post from your text; it should usually take less than 24 hours. I reserve the right to delete posts that are offensive or trolls.

[This post will be back-dated for one month to keep the announcement at the top of the page. See below for other recent posts. 4/15/2008]

A friend of mine, and occasional Sufficient Scruples commenter, Angus Johnston, has started a blog focused on US student activism: studentactivism.net. Angus is completing his PhD in History this semester; his dissertation is on the history of student activist groups from the 60s. He is also currently hooked into nationwide student activist groups as they exist today, and has acted in an advisory role for some of them. (He was, you won’t be surprised to hear, more or less the Megaphone Mark of his own campus as an undergrad.) He comes to his subject with considerable experience and academic expertise.

studentactivism.net covers current controversies involving students or colleges, as well as student organizing, activism, and rights issues. Given the high representation of the academic world in the blogosphere, and the increasing politicization of campuses and the educational experience, it’s a valuable resource for anyone interested in what’s happening with campuses today, and the generations of young citizens they are turning out. Check it out!

tgirsch of Lean Left (and my own blogfather!) writes:

I’m interested in the issues surrounding animal testing. I’m certainly not a member of the PETA crowd or anything, but at the same time, I’d certainly think we should keep such testing to a minimum, using it only where it’s necessary, useful, and relevant. But I honestly don’t know what all the issues are.

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I really loathe PETA, for lots of good reasons.

But that can take many forms, one of which is mocking, in appropriately childish fashion, PETA’s own tactic for pressuring corporate chicken-torturers [sic]. They have a Web sign-generator site in which they encourage people to post comments about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s practice of, as they put it “tortur[ing] chickens for profit”. Whatever the hell that’s about, it interests me far less than the fact that PETA, as a group, is offensive and abusive to real people, whom I care about far more than the animal fetish-objects that are their sole obsession. So if we’re going to make little signs about cruelty and inappropriate moral priorities, well, let’s get our inappropriate priorities straight, first:

Make your own!

There has been a kind of mini-carnival developing across the blogs lately, on the subject of sexual violence in prisons. It began with a recent LA Times Op-Ed on the subject by high-profile blogger Ezra Klein. It’s good to see attention being paid to this issue; the number of bloggers getting involved is encouraging.

But, as important as the issue is, and as vital as it is to re-assess and reform our justice and prison systems overall, I think viewing this as merely an aspect of the mis-management of prisons is a mistake. Systemic sexual abuse occurs not merely in prisons but in the military, among the “contractors” of KBR in Iraq, between priests and congregants, in the workplace, and throughout society. As feminist critics of violence against women have long been saying, the problem is not one of sex in itself, but of the use and abuse of power in general. It is just one manifestation of an issue that pervades the authoritative control of human beings by other human beings.

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Michael Gerson, Bush administration tool and terminal sufferer from Conservative Comprehension Disorder, continues his pattern of getting everything exactly backwards in his Washington Post-sponsored campaign of attacks on Barack Obama. The day after April Fool’s Day (he must have missed a deadline), Gerson published another misinformed screed, this one claiming that Obama is an “extremist” on abortion for opposing laws that would have sentenced women to death. As usual with Gerson and the forced-pregnancy crowd generally, almost everything he says is factually false, and a repetition of standard right-wing myths. The column consists of nothing more than Gerson and the Post carrying water for the organized anti-woman crowd by repeating their well-worn talking points verbatim, with no pretense of originality or reportorial integrity. (more…)

“Reproductive Health Reality Check” is running an April Fool’s Day blog carnival against “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” that mislead patients seeking abortion with deliberately deceptive tactics and false information. “CPCs” are medical fraud - there is no other description for it. And they are an increasing problem as abortion services are continually targetted and women have fewer real options; currently they outnumber real, full-service reproductive health clinics 2:1.

College women are specifically targeted by these charlatans - sometimes with official support from the colleges themselves. Shockingly, not only does Georgetown University - a Catholic school - refuse to provide any form of contraception or abortion referral through its campus healthcare center or hospital, they apparently have also been blanketing the campus with anti-abortion stickers whose only pregnancy-care referral number is to a CPC, not a real health clinic. (Full disclosure: I have an MA from GU, from the early 90s, and their behavior in this regard was even more reprehensible then.) UNC Chapel Hill students have had to create their own sex-ed programs for fellow students, who mostly come from local high schools with “abstinence only” programs and literally don’t know anything about reproductive health, and then are targeted for lurid propaganda by a CPC located just off campus. Students at other schools have had to do the same.

CPCs are a threat to the larger patient population as well. Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation documents many of the problems they represent, including their deceptive tactics, medical fraud, and the support they receive from the anti-choice right (including over $30 million in taxpayers’ money from the Bush administration, and more from state legislatures). Allyson Kirk reports her experience with a CPC that had deliberately located itself along the entranceway to a real health clinic; after receiving an appointment at the real clinic, she mistakenly entered the wrong door, deliberately made up to look like a pro-choice facility, and was treated as if she was the expected patient, then subjected to invasive questioning and fraudulent misinformation.

This kind of behavior would be criminal in a real health clinic. CPCs present themselves in a deliberately fraudulent manner, impersonating real clinics with trained personnel (almost invariably, nobody at a CPC is a licensed healthcare practitioner) offering appropriate healthcare services, for the deliberate purpose of manipulating patients’ decisions and foreclosing their options; they then defend themselves legally by denying that they are subject to the professional obligations of real healthcare providers. The more this is known, and the more their tactics are exposed, the safer women will be.

I don’t usually write link-only posts, but this is worthwhile and the stories some contributors have to share are appalling. Go take a look.

I have posted elsewhere on my reaction to Obama’s speech on race, and conservative reactions to it. But yesterday’s column by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post moves me to comment here specifically on the provocative remarks about AIDS that have been quoted in this controversy, and their implications for the larger questions that must be faced by this country.

As most people will be aware, the right wing has been Swift-boating Barack Obama for the past few weeks over controversial statements made at various times over several decades by the pastor of the black-identified Baptist church Obama attends in Chicago. Yeserday Obama responded with a speech on the history and role of race and racial discrimination in America - a speech that will stand within the highest ranks of American political oratory, and, I am convinced, be seen in the future as the watershed moment in race relations in this country (certainly so if Obama wins the presidency; likely so even if he does not). There is almost nothing in the speech about healthcare, and only a little about the particular statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that the right wing has picked out to whip up into controversy. Rightly, Obama placed the entire controversy in the larger context of racial history; many conservative commentators, angry at seeing their manufactured controversy dismissed in favor of more important and more substantive issues, responded with criticisms that Obama did not explicitly repudiate Wright and specific statements he had made, as they had demanded. Michael Gerson, in particular, focuses on Wright’s endorsement of the far-fetched conspiracy theory about AIDS that has been circulating in the black community.

Obama’s excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor.

Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama’s speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama’s grandmother, which Obama said made him “cringe” — both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference.

Gerson regards holding such an opinion as beyond the pale - and anyone who would believe such things as deranged. (”This accusation . . . makes Wright a dangerous man. . . . Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America . . . .”) Gerson is obviously grossly ignorant of the history and substance of these rumors, and the historical context in which they arise. And - like other conservatives dismissive of blacks’ reactions to America’s racial history - he seems to have no sense of what that context means to the people it most closely affects.

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There is a terrible tension in healthcare - medicine, especially - between the use of expert knowledge to serve and heal those in need, and its use to aggrandize those with the knowledge and to control, mold, dictate to or torture those who fall into their hands. Knowing what can help another can easily be mistaken for “knowing what is best for them”, and historically has been so mistaken throughout the entire history of medicine as a profession. Today, it’s hard to hear the phrase “Doctor knows best” without an ironic smirk - the same smirk we conjure up for the parallel slogans of wrongheaded patriarchal oppression “Father knows best” and “Trust your government”. But it was not long ago that that slogan was the entirely literal creed of the most respected profession in Western society, and the work of challenging that creed and establishing the primacy of patient values and autonomy was lengthy and hard-fought. Its path was marked by the graves - quite literally the graves - of too many martyrs.

The most entrenched redoubt of medical power (though least well-grounded in research and knowledge) was psychiatry. Not only did the head-shrinkers lay claim to the most occult knowledge of human functioning and health, but they stood against a patient population that was inherently and societally almost unable to defend itself. Members of, possibly, the most severely and unsympathetically stigmatized stratum of society, mental patients were given no credence, and often had no recognized legal standing, to assert their own values and choices in treatment. And it is true that in many cases, patients with mental illness could not in fact act for their own interests or competently manage their own treatment and caretaking. But the presumption that no such patient could have a valid opinion about their own care, coupled with the prejudice that they were unfit for “normal” society, and likely dangerous, meant that virtually anything could be done to anyone, if advocated by a doctor armed with a diagnosis of mental illness. The things that were done were in many cases almost unthinkable.

Howard Dully spent over 40 years thinking about what was done to him. It took him a full life of hardship and failure to finally understand his own fate, and to come to terms with it. That anyone could have survived, let alone found peace and stability, after having lived his story, is an amazement in itself.

Dully is the author (with a professional co-writer) of My Lobotomy: A Memoir. The subject of the book is exactly what the title suggests. The story it contains is heartbreaking.

Dully’s life is difficult to summarize, except to say that it was unremittingly harsh almost from birth. Dully was born in California in 1948; his father was a hard and unemotional man who was driven to work excruciating hours, sometimes at as many as 4 or 5 low-skill physical labor jobs at the same time, partly by the need to support his family, partly by his own obsessive work ethic. Howard grew up a big kid (he’s now 6′7″, 350 lbs) who picked on his younger brother; when he was 4 his mother died after giving birth to a baby brother with a severe neurological deformation - the baby was placed with relatives and never spoken of again within the family. Howard and his family bounced around various friends’ and relatives’ homes as his father struggled to earn a living, and Howard suffered constantly both from missing his mother and from the severe discipline he suffered in some of these homes. Things really got bad when his father married again, to a woman with two sons of her own. Dully claims that she simply resented and hated him; from reading both his own stories of his home life, and some of his doctors’ notes, it is easy to believe he is correct. Howard, in the meantime, was legitimately a handful for any parent: he was apparently flightly and unreliable to an extreme degree, was aversive to school work, discipline, and hygiene, and often fought with his brothers, though they had a generally good relationship. As he got older he began doing stupid kid pranks - shoplifting and stealing items from cars, and playing hooky. As a huge and growing boy, he was constantly hungry, but was not allowed to eat between meals and was beaten for taking snacks. His step-mother also had some sort of obsession with her furniture and household trinkets, and would beat Howard for touching anything in the house, sitting on the parlor furniture, or using the front door. His step-mother would beat him for any infraction, and for things that weren’t infractions; later his brothers confirmed that she did indeed beat him for things she did not mind when done by her own sons, and would rave at him for no reason at all. When his father got home, he would get another beating - his father made him choose a piece of firewood to be beaten with, and Howard developed the skill of picking ones that were flexible enough to hurt less but strong enough not to break (which would encourage his father to continue the beating with his bare hand). Between his actual behavioral problems, his pre-adolescent awkwardness, the fact that his step-mother did seem to truly want him dead, and his father’s absence and emotionally and physically violent treatment, Howard seemed doomed to a life of misery no matter what might have happened. What actually did happen is unbelievable.

Howard’s step-mother apparently conceived the idea that she could get rid of Howard if she got the weight of professional opinion on her side. She began visiting a series of psychiatrists to complain about her son’s behavior, but none of them would agree he had to be institutionalized or removed from the home. Several wrote consulting notes to the effect that they were convinced her harsh treatment was the problem and that she should moderate her behavior toward the boy. She moved from doctor to doctor trying to find one that would agree with her. Finally she stumbled onto Dr. Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the pioneer, in the US, of the new treatment of psycho-surgery. He actually coined the word “lobotomy”, and popularized the use of that treatment in this country. He was the first US physician to see the procedure, after it was developed in Europe just before WWII; Freeman brought it back to the States and traveled the country in specially-modified vans or station wagons that he called his “Lobotomobiles”, giving demonstrations of both electro-convulsive therapy (using a machine he built himself; when it broke down, he simply held the bare wires against the patient’s head for as long as he felt was appropriate, with no mechanism for monitoring voltage or current) and lobotomy. According to the Dully, relating reports of academic researchers who studied Freeman’s career, Freeman was a constant self-promoter and showman: he would perform several lobotomies in a day, every day, in front of medical audiences, liked to demonstrate how easy it was by sometimes using ordinary household implements rather than surgical tools, and developed a signature two-handed bilateral technique in which he would insert “leucotomes” (the lobtomy knife) into both lobes of a patient’s brain and then simultaneously jerk them both through the tissue with a flourish. At times, his death rate ranged upward of 20%. Nobody seemed to think this was cause for alarm. Patients were operated on without their own knowledge or consent, and authorization was freely obtained from courts or patient guardians after reassurances from Freeman that the procedure would solve all the patients’ problems. Often, no precise psychiatric diagnosis was attempted before the lobotomy was performed; lobotomies were used for conditions ranging from headaches to schizophrenia. More than a few were performed on minors, even pre-teens; there were questions about such cases, but little organized opposition. Freeman was profiled in popular magazines, and sometimes hailed as a god, delivering sufferers from their misery. There were many detractors in the medical community, but the great benefit of lobotomy was that it often made patients docile enough to live with their families without monitoring, meaning they could be discharged from the large state mental institutions that were commonplace then. This made the procedure wildly popular with the managers of those institutions, whose patients had no effective representation to oppose the treatment plans made for them by others.

After a few years, Freeman heard about, and again pioneered, a variation of the lobotomy procedure called “trans-orbital lobotomy”, often referred to as “ice-pick lobotomy”. In that procedure, a long, sharp, thin instrument was pushed along the eyeball parallel to the nose, and through the back of the eye socket (”orbit”) into the skull, and into the frontal lobe of the brain. The instrument could then be levered back and forth, and up and down, to tear through the frontal lobes and disrupt their neural circuitry. There was no method for visualizing the exact placement of the instrument in the brain, or the location, depth, or extent of the lesions created; the method was simply to stick the metal rod in through the eye socket and wiggle it back and forth to tear the brain tissue randomly. The effect was almost as dramatic as an open-skull lobotomy, but there was no external wound, and it could be performed under mild anaesthesia. The procedure could be done in an ordinary doctor’s office, and took about ten minutes. In many cases, the surgical instrument used was, in fact, an ice pick. (Freeman’s personal lobotomy instrument was labled “Uline Ice Company”.) Patients were sometimes sent home afterward in a taxi cab.

Freeman began popularizing the trans-orbital lobotomy, sometimes performing as many as two dozen procedures a day on patients in mental institutions and hospitals. In some cases, patients were operated on against their consent; after the procedure, they lacked the drive and wherewithal to sue. After some years traveling the country in his Lobotomobile, he finally settled in the South San Francisco Bay Area, near where Howard Dully’s family were living. Eventually, Dully’s step-mother asked to see him.

Freeman met with her a number of times over a period of two months, duly recording her wild stories of Howard’s unmanageable behavior (some of which later turned out to be pure fabrications - such as the story that he had beaten his brain-damaged baby brother almost to death). From the beginning the step-mother openly solicited some kind of dramatic professional intervention. Freeman hesitated at first, insisting he would have to meet the patient and interview the other family members before coming to any conclusion. (What seems incredible is that he began formulating treatment plans with the mother for weeks before ever once meeting Howard.) He interviewed Howard’s father one time; the father gave a much more balanced report of Howard’s behavior, but Freeman didn’t pick up on the clue. He began to meet with Howard himself, and found him reasonably normal though somewhat uncommunicative (who wouldn’t be?). But he kept meeting with Howard’s step-mother, who still filled him with tales of how afraid she was of Howard, how her other sons were afraid of him and were constantly beaten up by him (they deny this), and finally how Howard had beaten up his baby brother in infancy (his entire family denies this - and note that the step-mother was not part of the family at that time). Freeman seems to have accepted everything she said, and viewed Howard’s truancy and other bad behavior through this fictionalized and delusional lens. After four meetings with the step-mother, only one meeting (ever) with Howard’s father, and four visits with Howard himself, Freeman recommended that they should attempt to “change his personality” with a trans-orbital lobotomy. Howard’s step-mother immediately agreed, and took the papers home for his father to sign, which he did without ever speaking to the doctor again. Freeman cautioned the parents not to tell Howard what would happen - only that he would be admitted to the hospital for “tests”. Howard excitedly looked forward to his night in the hospital, because he had heard they gave you Jell-O there. And they did. It was two weeks after his 12th birthday.

Freeman lobotomized Howard the next day. Howard has no memory of any of the events of that day. He contracted a fever and an apparent infection (Freeman was infamous for not sterilizing his instruments before surgery; you can see, in the actual photograph of Howard’s procedure, below, that he is not wearing gloves), but recovered soon enough.

The rest of his life was a disaster.

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I met Robert Rummel-Hudson last night at his New York book party, celebrating the release of Schuyler’s Monster, his memoir of his daughter’s struggle to meet the challenges of having been born with polymicrogyria - a neurodevelopmental disease that prevents her from developing spoken language - and his own struggle to meet the challenges of parenthood and the demands imposed by his daughter’s condition. The book grew out of Rob’s gripping, heart-rending blog, Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords.

Robert has been documenting, step-by-step, the pathway he, his equally-admirable wife Julie, and Schuyler (pr. “SKY-ler”) herself have followed, first coming to terms with Schuyler’s developmental difficulties, then battling the public schools’ broken and indifferent system for educating special-needs children until finally moving to a city (Plano, TX, of all places) that offered what Schuyler needed. At the urging of his growing base of enthralled fans and well-wishers, he turned the blog into a book that hit the market just this week. It has already received considerable word of mouth and small-market press attention even before release; I am convinced it is just about to explode into a real sensation, and deservedly so.

Robert has an ability to communicate the pathos and humor of his family’s situation, and even more strongly Schuyler’s unbelievably spunky and winning personality, and her brilliantly unique triumph over the multiple dirty tricks life has played her. Schuyler is without question the star of his blog (which, he says, she still has not read, nor has she the book, either, though she is fully aware that she is a media queen). It is impossible to read their story without falling in love with Schuyler (and indeed she is regularly showered with largesse by fans, often anonymous, who have visited the family’s Amazon wish-lists). “Schuyler has a posse!”, I told Rob, and he agreed that one of the most satisfying side-effects of blogging about her condition is that she has garnered such a wide-spread support base. That is due to Rob’s ability to make her come alive through his words - though it’s obvious Schuyler is giving him a lot of great material to work with.

In person, Rob comes across just as you’d imagine from his blog: funny, personable, thoughtful, fiercely dedicated to Schuyler and her needs, worried about her future, and laceratingly honest about his own uncertainties and shortcomings (which I think he overestimates). It was great fun meeting him, and I was glad to see the St. Martin’s Press staff just as enthused about the book as were the many fans who turned out to meet the author.

I mention all this simply to add this plug for a book that deserves to be read, and will break your heart and change your viewpoint when you have done so. I can’t communicate the impact of Rob’s blog or the book it gave rise to, but I urge everyone to experience them for themselves.

(1) Go buy this book:

(2) Go read this blog.

You can thank me later.

UPDATE: Fixed an editing mistake.

About a year and a half ago, I posted that I was cutting back on blogging to devote more time to other work, especially to finishing my graduate degree. That continues, with some progress made, I’m glad to say, but I was shocked to find I hadn’t posted anything at all in about 6 months. So herewith a couple of quick hits. I’m still far from swamped with time for blogging, but I wanted to at least keep my hand in.

More when possible.

The anti-choice brigade has a peculiar fondness for chirpy slogans, including many that don’t even make any sense. (”It’s a Baby, Not a Choice”; “Attention, Rebellious Jezebels“) Among their most annoying tics are the constant equation of marginally-differentiated embryos with whatever else they can think of that seems to carry some kind of emotional punch but has no moral parallel with the issue at hand (toddlers, black slaves, Holocaust victims), betraying not the slightest comprehension that the equation of those persons with marginally-differentiated embryos is an insult to the people they are piggybacking their obsession on. But logical rigor is not a part of that movement. For that reason, children’s story-books are as meaningful a moral argument, to them, as anything else.

In particular, I have heard the catchphrase from Horton Hears a Who - Dr. Seuss’s paen to tolerance and understanding - used as an anti-choice slogan. The story, as I’m sure you recall, involves Horton, an elephant who, with his big ears and profound moral sensitivity, hears tiny noises coming from a small speck of dust he finds one day; listening carefully, he discerns that there is an entire world of microscopic creatures living inside the dust speck. When he reports it, he is declared insane by the moral troglodytes around him, who seek not only to imprison Horton but to commit genocide by boiling the dust speck to put an end to all such nonsense. Horton goes to heroic lengths to save the dust speck until the Whos inside finally succeed - by joining all their voices together equally, including that of the youngest child in the town - in making themselves heard and thus acknowledged as persons in their own right. Horton bountifully concludes: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

As Wikipedia notes, the book was published in 1954, and the roles of the chief villains in the book seem to parallel that of Joseph McCarthy in his witch-hunts against unpopular or dissenting voices. It has been co-opted by anti-choice activists and organizations since then, however.

Which brings me to the point of this post, which is merely to predict and warn against a resurgence of ironically Seuss-based medical McCarthyism in the wake of the upcoming live/animated film version of the book, slated for release on March 14th. Seemingly unnecessary, given the existence of the lovely 1970 Chuck Jones animated version that brightened my childhood so long ago, the movie stars the annoyingly talented Jim Carrey, as well as Steve Carell and a raft of guest stars. It’ll probably be fun, but will probably kick off an incessant clangor of smug, misogynist voices chanting “A person’s a person no matter how small” with absolutely no appreciation of the irony that in doing so they thereby embrace the concept of “personhood” that the anti-choice movement usually tries to avoid or obscure.

I don’t advocate starting a slogan war over a children’s movie, nor do I advocate hanging women’s freedom from slogans and catch-phrases to begin with. But, as with the annual Roe v. Wade Day protests, organized clinic harassment, and the like, it’s as well to be aware of what’s coming.

UPDATE: It’s beginning. From the movie review page of Christianity Today: A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

Seuss’ beloved phrase, “a person’s a person, no matter how small” . . . embodies a principle as simple as it is profound, and speaks to so all areas of our lives and, indeed, our faith. It is a mantra that endows all created things with a sacredness and value found only in their Creator. While Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) never intended his phrase to become a salvo in the abortion debate, many see in its simplicity the totality of the pro-life message.

The film also acts, equally inadvertently, as a model of religious conviction. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” says the writer of Hebrews, “the evidence of things not seen.” Contrasting the words of Hebrews 11:1, Sour Kangaroo tells Horton, “If you can’t hear, see or feel something, it does not exist.” But Horton is persuaded. He knows that the Mayor and the Whos of Who-ville are real, despite not being able to see them. In the same way, Horton’s immensity actually makes him invisible to the microscopic Mayor. When trying to describe Horton to the rest of the Whos, the Mayor frequently employs the sort of language one uses to describe a God who has yet to make himself visible to us.

Here we have a grand Christian missing-the-point Double Stuff.

Of course “a person’s a person” at any size. The question is, are the Whos persons? And the answer, again of course, is that they are. Why do we think so? Because we see that they are - they have houses and villages, a Mayor, a community, thoughts and interests and fears. They’re aware of themselves and care about what happens in their own lives. They have all the moral content of personhood, living lives of interest and value to themselves as persons. Sadly for them, they’re easy to overlook, which decreases the likelihood that their interests will be recognized, let alone valued. But nobody questions that their interests deserve consideration, as soon as it is recognized that they have interests. Which captures in a nutshell the utter boneheadedness of the attempt to analogize their plight to the issue of abortion. The Whos’ problem was that nobody knew they existed; as soon as their existence was demonstrated, their personhood was self-evident. (Once they were heard, they could claim their own interests, which is pretty good evidence of having some.) Not the most evil anti-dust-speck denizen of Seuss’s world denies the moral standing of the Whos, once it is known they exist. But no such question arises at all in regard of the human fetus. The controversy in that case is precisely the opposite of the one facing the Whos. We have always known the fetus exists - but even having seen them, there is no evidence whatsoever that fetuses are persons. It is not merely that they can’t be heard, like the Whos (or, more exactly, can’t speak at all) - it is that they have no thoughts to express, no awareness of themselves to get anxious about, no consciousness of their own existence, no interests, no values, no moral content to the biological processes that make up the sum and total of their lives for at least most of their gestational period if not beyond. The Whos are persons - no matter how small. Fetuses are not persons - no matter how big. That’s the crucial difference that is nowhere acknowledged in anti-choice nattering about tiny little dust-speck lives. And, ironically, that idiocy is actually expressed using the term “person” - but using it in a way utterly oblivious to its meaning, and to the moral difference between entities that are, and that are not, persons. Hilariously, Dr. Seuss uses the term correctly, but his anti-choice followers lack the perception to understand the moral meaning of even a Dr. Seuss story.

The second blunder is just as dumb. Virtually nothing in the second paragraph quoted above is correct. “Faith” may well be as dunderheaded as the Bible describes it to be - certainly it seems to be in common practice. But Sour Kangaroo is exactly right (speaking in somewhat metaphorical terms), and both Horton and Dr. Seuss know it. Horton does not know the Whos are real “despite not being able to see them” - he knows they are real because he perceives them (by hearing them, not by seeing them, but with his physical senses in any case). And it is precisely because the other jungle citizens finally gain physical evidence of the Whos’ existence (supplied by the purely physical process of sound amplification by increased power input) that they finally come to believe as well - and immediately change their minds about the existence of the source of the sensory input that was previously undetectable, after once detecting it. It may be that the Mayor of Whoville “employs the sort of language one uses to describe God”, when referring to the larger world, but if he does so he’s as dumb as a Christian movie reviewer. Why would his constituents believe him when he persists in talking like an idiot? The reason their world shakes and trembles, of course, is that it is subject to large forces imposed from outside - and when the citizens of Whoville gain clear knowledge of the source of those forces, they then change their minds about the existence of the elephant, just as the jungle citizens changed their minds about the existence of the Whos when presented with evidence. And both groups are justified in refusing to believe until they are presented with that evidence - but neither persists in a false belief when the evidence has been supplied. The story is a beautiful illustration of the scientific method. Not only does this reviewer not understand that, but, unlike either the Whos or Horton’s fellow jungle-dwellers, she is incapable of seeing what is put right in front of her. Throughout and throughout the Who story, people insist on physical evidence for claims of the existence of physical objects, and then accept the evidence as soon as it is made perceivable. This reviewer insists on claiming, in sheer defiance of that obvious sequence of events, that they are acting on “faith”. They simply are not - there’s no two ways about it - but you can be sure that fact will in no way stem the flood of false and stupid nonsense we’re going to hear about this - and related - issues.

There’s an interesting article by Ron Rosenbaum, in Slate, regarding the fate of Vladmir Nabokov’s final, unfinished manuscript.

Nabokov left a manuscript on index cards, apparently totaling about 30 pages’ worth of text, for an unfinished book titled The Original of Laura. No one outside his family knows what is in the text, or what the title means. Nabokov left unambiguous instructions, at the time of his death, that the manuscript was to be destroyed without publication. This jibes with ideas he expressed elsewhere about refusing to publish imperfect works. His wife, the legendary (infamous?) Vera Nabokov, was his literary executor; she indicated she would follow his wishes but never got around to destroying the cards. When she died in 1991, the cards, and Nabokov’s imprecation, fell to his son Dimitri, who has otherwise actively defended his father’s literary legacy. Dimitri has indicated that he is ambivalent about destroying the work, but is apparently leaning in the direction of carrying out his father’s wishes. Rosenbaum has corresponded with Dimitri over the years, encouraging him to publish the material; in his Slate article, he broadcasts a call for input from readers, promising to forward the best responses to Dimitri, who is apparently finally nearing a decision.

Well. By itself all very interesting, no doubt, and arguably very thinly connected to bioethics by way of Nabokov’s background in biology. (Rosenbaum even tries to link Nabokov’s Laura to Petrarch’s Laura by way of a bird image in the latter and one of Nabokov’s ubiquitous butterfly images in Pale Fire; Dimitri scoffs at this.) But it really doesn’t seem to be an immediate issue in bioethics itself. Or is it?

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I read Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, Rant: an Oral Biography of Buster Casey, on the strength of a description of its plot. I thought it might raise some interesting bioethical issues. I suppose it does. Mostly it makes me want to take a shower.

Honestly, I have no idea what to think about this business, but . . . here goes:

Rant is a pseudo oral history of the life and exploits of the title character, Buster “Rant” Casey. Palahniuk delivers over 300 pages of short-paragraph-length observations from peripheral characters describing their interactions with him from overlapping and mismatching perspectives. (The book reads quickly because, given the large amount of white space between the “recollections”, it’s probably closer to 250 pages of real text.) We’re supposed to reconstruct the events described on the basis of which stories we believe. When you solve the puzzle, you get a picture of a dysfunctional and paranoid society suspiciously like our own, in which the government has vacated all civil liberties, imposed lifetime detention without trial for undesirable elements, and sequestered half the population in a dark underworld in which they are doomed to menial, marginal existences, receive a grudging minimum of social services, and can be shot on sight for being caught in the wrong place with the wrong paperwork; the justification for all this is . . . (wait for it) . . . the security of the nation, in the face of an existential threat from an invisible but omnipresent enemy. Young people respond to this with desperate nihilism, engrossing themselves in bizarre and self-destructive practices, as well as drugs, mindless sex, and violence. Behind the scenes are shadowy conspiracies enacted by powerful individuals who maintain the danger and the resulting oppression for their own interests: corporate, political, or religious.

Palahniuk’s take on this otherwise none-too-fictional theme is that the danger in question is not terrorists or traitors, or weapons of mass destruction, but biology. The world is driven to the brink of collapse by an unstoppable epidemic of rabies, passed mouth-to-mouth through close, casual contact, through sex between unknowing partners, and sometimes by those who deliberately seek infection as an act of rebellion. Rant Casey is the source of the infection, and of much else that goes on in this strained and tortured world.

[Spoilers Follow]

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Chris Muir is the bizarrely unfunny cartoonist behind “Day by Day” - a conservatively-themed Webtoon that is so consistently incomprehensible that it has spawned an entire cottage industry consisting of the reworking of his strips by liberal bloggers on a desperate quest to force them to make some sense. Adding to the through-the-looking-glass fun are Muir’s many signature artistic tics: utterly non-sequitur dialog, references to Muir’s personal political hotbuttons that are so obscure many of the cartoons appear to have no recognizable content, a cast of characters that consists of weirdly-drawn urban hipsters spouting conservative cliches while striking pointless poses, a female cast that consists exclusively of huge-breasted slim-waisted sexpots with low necklines and bare tummies, artistic skills so marginal that his human poses often simply leave out major body parts or appear deformed, and a strange penchant for showing dialog balloons emerging from implausible parts of the speaker’s body. Plenty of nutty goodness there for those who have the time and energy to wade through it, which I rarely do.

This week, however, Muir joined the creepy talking-fetus brigade of conservative ‘toonists. It’s been discussed before, but it’s apparently a growing meme on the right wing - fetal “personhood” taken to such a bizarrely literal extreme that they imagine fetuses as having fully-functional adult personalities, and sometimes adult bodies (and why not? - with all the retrograde scientific claptrap the right wing has latched onto, the homunculus theory is hardly out of place). This can’t be a coincidence. Literalizing the claim of fetal personhood distinctly changes the relationship between, and relative moral standing of, a woman and her fetus, to the detriment (need it be said?) of the woman. That this delusional characterization of pregnancy has become so common and so widespread of late signals another move in the ongoing assault on the effective moral personhood of women. Here is Muir’s contribution to the war:

 Classic Muir. The first panel makes no sense. (Emphasizing the word “must” makes the second woman’s response seem like a logical deduction from the first woman’s statement - but it’s non-sequitur. As commentary on the immigration bill issue, it’s equally nonsensical: who is legal? why “must”? what the hell is he talking about?) He hits bottom in the second panel, when the woman’s fetus addresses her directly and declares itself to be an “illegal immigrant” in a voice loud enough to be heard by the woman next to her. This panel’s a three-fer: creepy fetus fetishization, self-contradiction (the fetus appears to be claiming solidarity with illegal aliens, which is against Muir’s own point of view [does he not actually read his own strip?]), plus nutjob rhapsodizing about marriage that is both false and idiotic (there’s nothing illegal about being conceived before your parents were married, as this fetus is said to have been; he’s somehow elevated a right-wing obsession with adult women’s sex lives to the level of a criminal act on the part of the fetus, which is impressive doing even for Muir). The third panel is just dumb. (What has late-night TV got to do with a talking fetus? Is she hallucinating the voice? That would undercut the fetus-fetish message, plus the other woman seems to hear it, too. Is the fetus watching TV? That’s even creepier.) It’s like he feels no responsibility to relate the content of one panel to another, let alone make his weird asides and personal in-jokes make any sense to anyone else.

The bottom line, though, is the talking fetus. No matter how dumb the rest is, talking fetuses are weird, scary, and implicitly misogynistic.

Which means, of course, that it’s time for another Chris Muir cartoon upgrade project. I’ve posted my weak efforts below the cut. Feel free to pile on. (Add your edited cartoon in comments, or just quote the dialog for the balloons.)

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Mingle² - a blog that links a lot of quizzes, surveys, and other online game-type-stuff, offers this nifty service: What’s My Blog Rated? Enter the URL of your blog, journal or other Web site, and it gives you an MPAA-style rating of its content.

I’m delighted to report Sufficient Scruples received the following:

Why, however?

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• sex (17x)
• abortion (14x)
• breast (6x)
• death (3x)
• drugs (2x)
• gay (1x)