(R) for Rationalization

charley-on-the-mta   |   Mon, Aug 20, 2012 11:29 PM EST
  - promoted by david

This very thought occured to me. A tweet by Bill McKibben:


feeling more sympathetic to GOP: if how babies get made is hard for you, i guess climate science really might be too tough to follow

And let’s remember that Rep. Akin is on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Gulp.

So, here’s how these things go. Let’s keep a good deal of There But For The Grace Of God Go I about this …

  • Rep. Akin believes Life Begins At Conception — that every zygote, every embryo, every fetus is a full human being, possessing moral status, and any abortion is murder.
  • And then he’s made to answer a question about whether the case of rape might allow for abortion.
  • But a zygote as a product of rape is every bit as innocent as that created in the confines of marriage! So that can’t be allowed.
  • Akin understands on some level, however, that there must be consideration for a rape victim who did not wish to become a mother. (Internal conflict is brewing: Cognitive dissonance!)
  • Through the magic of rationalization, Akin decides that such pregnancies can’t really exist! Conflict resolved! Whew!

Obviously most of us don’t go as far as Akin. Most of us feel at some level that even though we were all zygotes and embryos once, a woman’s wishes ought to be given at least some weight, at least some of the time. Is a zygote a human being? Most of us would say, Not really. Is a viable fetus of 28 weeks a human being? Most of us would say Mostly or Definitely. But in much of this range stands It-Is-And-It-Isn’t.

But some of us do not see, do not want, do not believe in the legitimacy of ambiguity. And in order to keep that one thing constant (that a fertilized egg in whatever stage of development is fully vested with humanity, as it were), everything else must turn around it. Like light around a black hole, science itself must bend. Ethics must bend: Regard for women, their freedoms, and their bodies, must bend.

I keep thinking of Yeats, in the poem so tritely over-quoted: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” It is, I think, merely a normative description: That to be ethical and good means to consider consequences; to be full of doubt, fear and trembling. Rationalization such as Akin’s takes one horn of a dilemma and pretends the other doesn’t exist.

And sadly, our media’s attention span (140 character limit) allows for nothing else. The sound bite culture in fact wildly encourages such rationalization and elision — until someone like Akin rather ingenuously tries to talk it through publicly, and puts it in such naked and grotesque fashion.

Recommended by jhmccloskey, somervilletom.


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6 Comments . Leave a comment below.

  1. Why pay for contraception?
    (0+ / 0-) View voters

    We don’t need insurance to pay for expensive contraception, we can just have women will themselves into not being pregnant.

    The new Republican healthcare plan also stipulates that victims of “legitimate cancer” reject the pathology and they can will themselves into remission.

    tblade   @   Mon 20 Aug 11:40 PM

  2. Unfortunately, I suspect that his position...
    (0+ / 0-) View voters

    … wasn’t researched so much as absorbed as a meme that’s been around for a while. His particular crime was expressing the meme is an incredibily telling and offensive way.

    But while Akin is wrong in his assertion about rape and pregnancy, he certainly isn’t alone. His remarks tapped into a strain of thinking that dates back to at least the 1980s, with anti-abortion politicians from Pennsylvania to Arkansas making the case that the trauma of rape can often prevent pregnancy. The argument does not come up frequently, but when it does, it nearly always leads to political controversy.

    Ezra goes on to cite a history of this position in the legislature going back to the 80′s.

    mr-lynne   @   Tue 21 Aug 6:15 AM

    • Occam's razor
      (0+ / 0-) View voters

      Occam’s razor suggests a far simpler rationalization for Mr. Akin’s offensive beliefs — “she wanted it”. This is the first defense of many rapists.

      Here’s how it goes:

      1. Women who don’t “want it” don’t get pregnant
      2. This woman is pregnant
      3. Therefore, this woman “wanted it”

      So if the woman gets pregnant, it wasn’t really rape after all.

      somervilletom   @   Tue 21 Aug 9:32 AM

      • I intended this for the top level
        (0+ / 0-) View voters

        I still have occasional trouble managing the indent level of the very last comment on a thread.

        I intended this as a comment on the thread-starter, rather than a reply to mr-lynne (whose comment I wholeheartedly agree with).

        Sadly, the meme mr-lynne offers is FAR older than the 1980s — I suspect it is as old as rape itself.

        somervilletom   @   Tue 21 Aug 9:35 AM

    • Much farther back than the 1980s, too
      (0+ / 0-) View voters

      If I may geek out for a bit as a history nerd — I promise it’s related and I’ll come back to your comment and the relevant thread.

      I’m reading a really fun book, The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore (professor of History at Harvard), which takes us through ideas about different stages of life throughout history, usually American history. But in one section she talks about ancient ideas of where babies come from — basically the ancients didn’t know:

      How life begins is a mystery. … Everyone could see that conception required a man ejaculating into a woman’s body; past that, what else was needed, and what followed, was anyone’s guess. From antiquity to the Renaissance, most anatomists believed that people came not from eggs but from seeds (semen is Latin for “seed”). Beginning in the fifth century B.C., a Hippocratic tradition maintained that conception required two seeds, male and female. A century later, in On the Generation of Animals Aristotle argued that only one seed was needed; human life began, he believed, when a man’s seed mixed with a woman’s menstrual blood, inside the uterus. In the second century A.D., Galen rejected Aristotle; he believed that the woman contributed a seed, too. This debate lasted for eighteen hundred years.

      One-seeders and two-seeders agreed, more or less, on two points. First, conception happened when sex turned matter into life, by way of heat. Because this happened inside the woman’s body, her orgasm, as much as the man’s, was often thought to be required for conception to occur (which is why, for a long time, in some places, a woman couldn’t charge a man with rape if he had gotten her pregnant).

      It’s clear that somehow Akin got the idea that women who are raped have a biological way of rejecting the sperm of the rapist. I’d like to suggest that perhaps it wasn’t some random (made up) “medical report” that gave Akin this idea. Perhaps he is so anti-science that he’s hasn’t intellectually progressed, literally, past the Dark Ages. He knows that there *are* advances in science, and will gladly use them (it’s not that hard to learn how to use a phone, and he can rely on his own doctor’s knowledge) but basically he has no more insight into a woman’s reproductive system than people living over a thousand years ago.

      afertig   @   Tue 21 Aug 9:47 AM

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