Fighting Skills

Fighting rarely accomplishes much good.  It doesn't prove we're right or solve a problem.

One technique, however, can change a profitless conflict into a victory, and that's coming alongside.  If you can change the context from 'me against you' to 'us vs. the issue', you'll both win.

Remember fighting?  Over some issue, you and your adversary face off, voices escalate, angry faces, accusations spill, the kitchen sink shows up ... typical.  
Tactical change required -- deescalate, discover the goal, collaborate, sit side-by-side with the issue across the table from the two of you, and search for pathways to the goal.

Deep breath, and think it through.  Pointing your frustration at the other person triggers defensiveness.  Instead --  Question the issue, the science, the solutions, the alternatives, the ethical and moral context.  Ask specifics about how and where and how much; about what has or hasn't worked before, about what's safe, about what's fair.

It's tough.  It means I'll have to hear and understand my partner's viewpoint and concerns.  It means they'll have to objectively present their own view, and so will I, but it's worth the effort.

Husband and wife
Parent and teen
Employer and employee, co-workers, neighbors, friends, acquaintances ... and the subjects span the spectrum.  'Conservative vs. liberal' is a big one recently.

We're more polarized as a society today than is healthy; that's polarized, as in 'shallow', perhaps, but we needn't be.

Note: for scorekeepers.  Every time you fight with your wife and win, you erode the trust and closeness of the relationship, maybe just a little.  It's perhaps more immediately destructive in your relationship with your teen.  At work, it breaks down the team, and among friends, it undermines the safe place of being able to depend on each other.  Statistically speaking, the price is high.

Politidrivel

Celebrities and others spawn strange logic.  This photo and comment, for example, have circled the country and beyond.

If you care about refugees, you don't care about homeless, according to the message.  Nonsense.

The issues are separate.

• The homeless -- Poverty and inequality in the U.S. are inadequately addressed by either party; the results are devastating with more than 20% of our children living in poverty. (UNICEF, 2012, the United States ranks second highest child poverty rate of 23.1% among developed nations, just under Romania's 25.6/%.)
• The refugees -- On the far side of the world, displaced people fleeing for their lives are a life and death crisis. At latest count, the U.N. has identified 13.5 million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance (food, shelter, medical help).  Included are more than six million inside the country and five million outside who have been driven from their homes.  Half of them are children.  Millions have had to quit school.  They've left their jobs, their possessions, their communities, and fled for their lives while 11.5% of the country's population has been injured in the conflict or killed.

Both issues are relevant to Americans as individual and national conscience concerns. Neither can be ignored or swept aside as part of some political rhetoric.

Either we have a heart of compassion for the disadvantaged and oppressed, or we do not. Criticising compassion for one as a neglect of the other is political wordplay. Both issues are critical humanitarian concerns, and the list is much longer than just these.

Shallow, inflammatory political statements are not helpful, are they.

Freedom of Speech and the Challenge of Alt-information

Strongly biased media offers varied interpretations of the same information.  Alt-truth? Untruth?

• Climate is or isn't changing.
• Muslims are bad or not.
• Politicians are crooked, or ... okay, that may be true, pretty much.

Climategate, as one example, was a manufactured controversy.

True?

True, but it took time to sort out the truth.  Emails and files at the East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit were hacked and distributed a few weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.  Quotes from the content were published as evidence of a conspiracy among climate change scientists.

Was it deliberate misinformation via the media?  Perhaps.  We subsequently spent months and money on official investigations that found there had been no scientific misconduct or inappropriate data handling.  All work had been openly discussed and appropriately peer reviewed. Further, we found that criticisms and accusations were unsubstantiable and based on partial statements taken out of context and misinterpreted.  All the accusations proved false, but public trust in the science community suffered.

That sort of thing has become the norm, and it seems folks are often believing what they prefer, perhaps as the easier path.  Critical thinking is somewhat rare in the public forum, especially on social media.  Exaggerations, gossip, and misinformation; they're perhaps all the same in validity and intent.

Critical thinking follows an ethic of inquiry without bias, a basic element of honesty.  That's asking a lot.

Unfortunately, everyone demonstrates all of the traits listed in the illustration here.  That's everyone of us and all of the critical thinking errors, some more some less.  Note that the errors are the 'easier, quicker path' solutions to resolving internal questions.  Rising above such error is a tedious, lifelong task, one required for knowing truth.

Are we able to monitor ourselves about such things?  The last time I objectively considered an opposing viewpoint was ....

Convictions about truth need never change.
Acceptance of information, however, should perhaps be critically refined.

False news, then, is a difficult problem as the number of media sources and our exposure to them continue to increase.  Suggestions?

Shhh, listen

Among the more difficult tasks we face, understanding others with clarity, especially those who have reached different conclusions than we have. 

An exchange of opinions is not full communication. Not until we can grasp the path by which another has arrived at their convictions and conscience values can we knowledgeably relate to one another. 

Anything else is more likely to be conflict than conversation. 

Of such is the foundation for understanding and practical love. Of course.

James 1:19 👌

When abortion suddenly stopped making sense

Roe v. Wade - Abortion Won the Day, but Sooner or Later That Day Will End  — by Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Real Choices: Listening to Women; Looking for Alternatives to Abortion.

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.” 

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. 

But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. 

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names. 

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad. 

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting. 

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” 

For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine. 

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made. Abortion can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. 

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child. 

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals. 

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.” 

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along. 

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.) 

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.” 

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life. 

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?” The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters? 

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear. We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child? 

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them? What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? 

What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her? 

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people. 

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us. 

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion. 

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on. 

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” 

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it. 

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression. 

*** 

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes. 

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story. 

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us? 

In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters. 

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind. 

 ~ Frederica Mathewes-Green 
National Review January 22, 2016
(I’m glad for anyone to reprint anything. However, the publication that commissioned and paid for the essay in the first place asks that you note where the essay originally appeared.)

Read more at: National Review

Life and Law -- the Limits

Conflict among us requires law; limits imposed
on our individual freedom for the sake of all.
Must we legislate on behalf of a mother
and her the unborn child?

When my life bumps into yours and we affect each other, then perhaps the law should assert some constraints on our behavior. That's the general context of American jurisprudence, protecting the rights of persons where there freedoms overlap.  We share the roads, the airwaves, the marketplace, the schools, and more by law.

Courts struggle to apply the law to today's question. A person born in this country is a citizen and protected by the Constitution, but an unborn child just minutes away from being born isn't anything.  (Thirty-eight states do have laws identifying the killing of an unborn child as murder or equivalent.)

We're left to work with laws and rulings that have to be stretched to cover the questions.
For an unplanned pregnancy, the interests of the mother are acknowledged by all. She has a measure of autonomy when it comes to decisions she makes about her own body. The problem arises if her body is the shelter for another person.  We understand their needs, but only if both are persons do they both have rights.

Many have been persuaded that there is only one person involved, but that's not in the ruling.

The Supreme Court did not say that the unborn child wasn't a person.  Or that abortion was a constitutional right, or that it was moral or just.    

The last question ...

In its perhaps most controversial ruling, the court did allow for a "right of privacy" which it "discovered" in so-called "emanations" or "penumbrae" of our constitution. The consequences of Roe v. Wade have been culturally divisive and deadly.  

The court did not declare that abortion itself was a constitutional right, morally acceptable, or ethically appropriate.  What the court did say was, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins ... the judiciary at this point ... is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." 

The court went further with a key admission:  "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case [i.e., "Roe" who sought an abortion], of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment."

If somewhere along the timeline from conception to delivery, 'personhood' begins, then a line is crossed.  Life does begin before birth of course, and we do have a problem. 

The extraordinary conflict is that everyone knows the child is alive and present before birth, but you can describe it in terms (like 'fetus') that allow you behave as though that were not a fact. Everyone knows. For the expectant woman with limited financial resources, the choice is offered, and she hopes she's doing the right thing.  There are life circumstances that can make that option a less difficult choice than the alternative.

Pro-life and pro-choice advocates agree, no one wants to have an abortion. No one wants to have an abortion, but circumstances along with today's imprecise legal definitions may encourage them to choose that path.

What if this application of the law was made more by preference than by understanding? 

You can read it all, beginning to end, if you care to know.

 Ethical resolution will come, one might hope, but it's unlikely to be an easy path.