Are Words Only Words?

As in most other communities and subcultures, the blind community has terms it uses to denote in-group members and out-group members. Conceptually, this doesn’t bother me. On the ground, however, I am bothered, because the terms used are either demeaning in and of themselves, or they, to put it plainly, sound silly and reflect poorly on the user. Let’s start with two in-group terms, blink and blindy.
As with a lot of contemporary slang, users may disagree on the boundaries or limitations of a particular word, and there’s really no reliable documented source to go to. However, being blind myself, I hope I have some idea of what I’m talking about as I attempt to set up these terms. Blink is a slang word for a blind person. It is mostly used by blind people to refer to other blind people, but not always. In an online blog, one person, presumably someone who can see, refers to himself as “an honorary blink.” O … k. Blindy gets a little more airplay. Twitter has a page styling itself Blindy.Tv, described television for the blind. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that some blind users of these terms consider there to be a difference between blink and blindy. Namely, a blink can allegedly be anyone who is anything ranging from being qualified as legally blind on to totally blind, whereas a blindy is usually described as being totally blind or having no functional vision. Interesting.
Let me move on. Sighty and sightling are interchangeable words used to designate a person who can see, one who is not legally blind. They can be derogatory, but they don’t have to be. It depends on the attitude of the speaker. If someone is frustrated and says, “the damned sighty kept asking me whether someone picks out my clothes for me,” then obviously it’s being used negatively. However, if someone says, “so when I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to see if I could find a sighty to help me with it,” the word isn’t being used derogatorily, at least in so far as the intent of the speaker has anything to do with the meaning of the word.
As a linguist, I know that many groups throughout history have taken intended epithets and made them sources of in-group identity. We’ve seen it in both the Gay and African-American communities, to cite two modern examples. However, I’m not at all certain that the four terms I’ve talked about originated as out-group epithets. So far as I can trace them, which is not very far, they originated within the blind community itself. TO my way of thinking that makes a world of difference.
As a blind person, I have to start by asking this question: are words like blindy and sightling the best we can do? Really? I’ve heard everyone from blind college professors to blind high school-age students use them, and I find that no matter the user, they leave a bad taste in my mouth. They sound demeaning and silly to my ear, and as an in-group member of the community, being blind, I ought to be qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, I know I’m not alone. Most of my blind friends also reject these terms outright.
So what is the blind community trying to do by propagating these terms? Is it trying to create an identity for itself? Let me close on a humorous note. If I find terms like these offensive and inane, overcorrection in the form of ridiculous political correctness is also silly. I am not visually impaired, for example, because I have no vision to impair. I’m not handycapable, differently abled or physically challenged. I’m blind. More specifically, I’m a person who is blind, the relative clause making all the difference. That said, I’m not a blink or a blindy, thank you kindly. So, you might ask, which terms do I use? When I’m referring to someone I know has some range of usable vision, I’ll say visually impaired. Otherwise, I’ll say blind, that is if the disability comes up at all, and there’s no law saying it has to.
In conclusion, I want to reply to those who would say that these words are just words, and nothing more should be made of them. On the contrary. Words are extremely powerful. The bible calls the tongue a two-edged sword, for example, and we should take care in how we exercise it. Words matter. What people say about a group matters, and what a group says about itself matters even more.

20 Signs That You Attended a Massive Public University

20 Signs That you Went to a Massive Public University

1. You spent your first two years taking classes and you rarely if ever met an actual professor.
2. You learned the Greek alphabet by driving down fraternity/sorority row.

3. The word Campus Town was used to describe the dozens of square miles occupied by university buildings.

4. "Is that on campus," was a frequently asked question because: A. you just didn't know when campus ended, and B. a lot of local businesses set up shop between classroom buildings and kitty-corner to dormitories.

5. Half of your town's local businesses close between May and August and for a month starting in mid-December because the town's population seasonally drops by tens of thousands and can't sustain them.

6. Once admitted, you have to apply to a department in order to declare its major as your own.

7. University departments are so big that most classes in the major are restricted to those majors, because in terms of enrollment figures, they can afford not to give a flying flip about what you're interested in if you're not one of them.

8. You went through your major courses and never had the same prof twice.

9. When it comes time for grad school, you have to remind your letter writers about you and your achievements, because they've forgotten who you are completely.

10. The university police force functions as a heavily manned police department in its own right, patrolling the town at large.

11. The question, "are you a student at U. of X" results in a "yes" in three out of four cases no matter where you are in town.

12. There are so many bars that they can be rated using a likert scale, and so many social sciences majors around that someone is likely to have done so.

13. New apartment complexes invariably target students before townspeople.

14. There are enough graduate students so that they either have formed or would like to form some kind of union.

15. Nearby eating and drinking establishments can be divided into graduate or undergraduate hangouts.

16. Your library, invariably a massive, sprawling edifice, measures its collection count using 7 or 8-digit numbers.

17. Your dormitories average five stories or taller, and there are a ton of them.

18. You need more dormitories, always.

19. You have your own memes, and everyone in your part of the state, possibly in the entire state, recognizes them.

20. Everyone you meet is automatically impressed when you tell them where you go to school. So you can leave out the fact that you're failing that course and dropping out anyhow.

Loaded Language, From "Communist" to "Homophobe"

Commenting on loaded language is a tricky business, because you run the risk of being called the very things you’re talking about if and when you upset someone. Still, in seems to me that every era has particular terms that can be used by one side against the other to stop the public discussion and turn it ad homonym i.e., make what might otherwise be a legitimate airing of political views into nothing more than a vicious personal attack. For this commentary, I selected two terms that particularly interest me, communist and homophobe. I have to say at the start that this essay isn’t about political systems. Nor is it an endorsement of or a philippic against homosexuality either in the public square or anywhere else. It is, however, a brief look at these two words and their power to alter public perception and/or derail discussion. For much of the twentieth century, the quickest way to trash your political opponent and start fist fights in bars was to refer to the person as a communist. Other fashionable terms for a communist included red, used as a noun, pinko, commie fascist, and other such charming descriptors. From the first Red Scare, 1919 to 1921, to the much more widely remembered McCarthy era and beyond, dissenters were effectively silenced or ruined through the application of the sobriquet “communist.” In the early 1920’s, the media made a regular habit of portraying labor strikes and other attempts at collective bargaining as threats to the American way of life. If you were pro-union, you could count on being called a communist by someone at some point. The government also got into the act. In alleged crackdowns against militant anarchism, which really was a threat back then, the government arrested and deported quite a number of what it considered “undesirable” persons, applying the labels communist, seditionist or anarchist, for they meant just about the same thing, to them all. Here, though, I’m less concerned with what the government does than with what the average person or the average journalist, some of them being very average indeed, does. Consider this. Do you think southern segregation was wrong? Now, who’s going to answer no to that, right? As it happens, southern dixycrats of the 1950’s and 1960’s, in their fight against desegregation, argued vehemently that desegregation would irreparably harm the American way of life. Those who favored desegregation were often called, you guessed it, communists. Never mind that the desegregationist’s didn’t believe in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism at all and could prove it. Calling your opponents communists, whether pro-labor activists or desegregationist’s, was an effective means of framing them in public discourse as a threat to society. It shifted the discussion away from the pros or cons of the particular issue and turned the discussion to topics like national safety, the American way of life, etc. In so far as the individual so named was concerned, it effectively stopped the original discussion. The word homophobe strikes me as interesting, because even though its history is shorter than communist (Mariam-Webster traces the word homophobia only to 1969) it’s doing the same thing today. Regardless of your sexual preference or point of view, I think you’ll agree with me that gay rights is one of the hottest issues in the American public sphere today. With recent supreme court decisions about laws concerning marriage, states passing, banning and then unbanning laws against same sex marriage—hello, California,--I would be hard pressed to find another issue that is more before the notice of the American public than this one. That brings me to homophobe. Let me say up front that I’m aware of the radical right fringe. I know there are those who identify themselves as conservatives and who espouse nothing less than hatred or deep-seeded fear of homosexuals. There are, in short, genuine homophobes out there, just as there were those comparatively few who got called communists and who actually were. What concerns me now is those who are not homophobes, but who are being so labeled in liberal media, which is to say most media. I’m avoiding mentioning particular names for two reasons. First, I’m not interested in defending or criticizing any particular person or publication. I’m talking about the broad picture here, and people should be free to apply what I’m saying to whoever or whatever needs the application within reason. Second, the moment I drop a name, the discussion will turn from the merits of what I’m saying to a defense of or an attack on that person or publication. So for both reasons, I’m steering clear of names. What is a homophobe? The Free Mariam-Webster dictionary defines homophobia as, “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals.” Fair enough. That definition brings to my mind the image of sign-waving radical chanting about how homosexuals are hell bound. I don’t have any tolerance for that sort of behavior and would agree with my liberal friends and colleagues in terming it homophobic. Having said that, if the term homophobe was being applied only to that sort of person, I wouldn’t be writing today. Alarmingly, I’m observing a tendency in a number of media outlets, particularly online media outlets, to use the word homophobe rather loosely, and it’s starting to have an effect. Pretty soon now, if you voice anything other than unqualified support of gay marriage legislation in your state, for example, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia. If you voice anything other than unqualified endorsements of homosexuality in your churches, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia. My question is this: are we coming to such a point in our discourse that no divergent views on homosexuality will be tolerated? Those on the left, whether they’re called liberals, progressives, whatever, have a reputation for promoting fairness, tolerance and diversity. I should know. Being blind, I can attest to the fact that I’ve been most successful in more liberal environments, and I’ve had the hardest time making my way in very conservative ones. That’s very ironic, considering my strong Christian values often align me with those in whose communities I find it hardest to live and work. So, I have nothing against an atmosphere of fairness, tolerance and diversity. However, what I’m seeing vis-à-vis the use of the word homophobe is a growing intolerance for those with whom the left disagrees. This is deeply ironic, because the left often styles itself as being open to divergent points of view. Yet, labeling someone a homophobe does not seem to be reminiscent of tolerance, fair-mindedness and diversity. So then the question becomes, are we as a society now going to tolerate only those who agree with us? Are we going to demonstrate fair-mindedness and openness just so long as the other person doesn’t disagree with our point of view? As I asked in a recent Facebook comment, can you disagree with anything having to do with homosexuality itself or homosexuality in the public sphere, no matter how the disagreement is voiced or what the disagreement may be, without being labeled a homophobe? I’m coming to the fearful conclusion that you almost can’t. In conclusion, if what I’m talking about sounds like public suppression of opinion, it is. And yet—and I know this won’t go down too well in some quarters—public suppression, which is to say societal suppression, of divergent opinion is part of the American way of life just as much as the first amendment and its guarantee of free speech. If you look at our history, you will find this truth played out both on the governmental and the personal level. The use of the term communist in our public discourse is one proof of that claim. Is the term homophobe starting to serve the same purpose in the public square? I’ve told you what I think. The question is what do you think?

On Being Useless

There’s nothing quite as heartwarming and uplifting as being told that what you’re doing is unproductive, unprofitable, and useless. I’ve always said that. Further, at no time are you likely to be given this soul-stirring assessment of your interests, dreams and goals than when discussing your choice of college major. I’m leaving out graduate degrees, because for now graduate school still has a certain, if limited, prestige to it, and so we’re not subjected to quite as much abuse as undergrads. Note that I didn’t say we don’t come in for any ridicule at all, just not quite as much. There’s been a lot of talk lately about what the most and least useful college majors are. Site after site, from The Daily Beast to Forbes, has been publishing its take on what’s most useful and what’s least useful to aspiring work force initiates. What’s interesting is that Forbes and the Daily Beast used the same data provided by Georgetown and came up with differently ordered lists, but that’s a methodology question interesting only to those of us in the social sciences. The lists are based loosely on earnings data and projected earnings and growth in the field. You will notice that money, and only money, is the driving concern behind both of the lists I’m going to present as well as any others you may find. “How much will you make with that,” seems to be all that matters, and from a philosophical perspective (philosophy ranking somewhere on everybody’s list of useless majors) I find that interesting and discouraging. Here are the lists, ordered from most abominably useless, number 1, to merely unprofitable at the bottom. If you don’t want to read them, skip down to find the rest of my thoughts. The 13 Most Useless Majors From Philosophy to Journalism Published April 23, 2012 http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/04/23/the-13-most-useless-majors-from-philosophy-to-journalism.html 1. the fine arts 2. drama and theatre arts 3. film, video, and photographic arts 4. commercial art and graphic design 5. architecture 6. philosophy and religious studies 7. English literature and language 8. journalism 9. anthropology 10. hospitality management 11. music 12. history 13. political science and government The 10 Worst College Majors Published October 12, 2012 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/10/11/the-10-worst-college-majors/ 1. anthropology and archaeology 2. film, video and photographic arts 3. fine arts 4. philosophy and religious studies 5. liberal arts 6. music 7. physical fitness and parks recreation 8. commercial art and graphic design 9. history 10. English language and literature Did you major in anything on those lists? I double minored in two of those items and majored in a foreign language. I didn’t see foreign languages on either list, possibly because they fall outside the parameters the “researchers” were using. Honestly, these lists tell us more about the people who compiled the data and about our culture as a whole than they do about any value there may be in these majors. What does it say that value is defined by so many through earnings? Countless people, from the guy next to me on the bus to Governor Rick Scott of Florida, have called for the closure of departments like anthropology and philosophy and for increased funding to STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With those calls, a misperception of liberal arts is on the increase. College students and their families will talk about religious studies and English lit in one breath as they slam the liberal arts, and then they go on to extol the virtues of biology and calculus as though those subjects are outside the liberal arts. In reality, math and science have always been at the heart of liberal arts studies as well as language. Grammar, rhetoric and logic have been at the core of the liberal arts since the ancient Greeks. Rome gave their study the name Artes Liberales, and during the Middle Ages, the study of these three core subjects was expanded to include music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. So we see from this thumbnail sketch of history, another of the subjects deemed useless in both lists above, that subjects like music and language arts have been considered just as essential to the makeup of a person as science, technology, engineering or math. These lists, while they might appear convincing to some because of their use of statistics and projected earnings data, also don’t represent the whole picture even from an employer’s point of view. Carol Christ, president of Smith College, makes a few interesting points. Here’s her article, www.smith.edu/docs/president/Spring2012Christ.pdf. She quotes a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and universities in which three quarters of employers surveyed indicated that the most valuable skills they seek in new hires are: strong communication, flexibility, creativity and critical thinking. Now, I ask you. In which subjects are those skills taught? Mathematics? I don’t think so. Physics? Not likely. Engineering, sometimes. You’re going to find those foundational skills taught and fostered in core required subjects: communications (public speaking), English, philosophy, logic, history, to name but a few. President Christ goes on to make another telling point. Even as we’re trying to narrow down the focus of education and slashing funding to certain liberal arts departments, our economic competitors, particularly China and Japan, are discovering the value of a broadly based liberal arts education: Surveys in China and Japan, cultures long held as supporting regimented learning, have begun to show that employers there are complaining about the inflexibility of a workforce educated without a focus on creativity or problem solving. Facing the same pressures of internationalization and innovation that have generated increased scrutiny of educational styles in the United States, universities in Asia are adapting liberal arts education as an economic necessity. You shouldn’t need to be the president of Smith College, where I applied for a job last year by the way, to know that other liberal arts apart from math and science have value. As a doctor, how are you going to make judgment calls about patients’ lives e.g., quality of life and the merits of continuing life support without a basic understanding of ethics? How are you going to communicate your scientific findings in a way that will land you that three million dollar grant without a good grasp of writing skills in general and of persuasive writing in particular? How are you going to find that creative solution in particle physics if you’ve never been taught to think outside the box? The short answer is that you’re not. Being able to think across fields and disciplines makes you a more valuable hire than having expert knowledge in one subfield of physics and that only. Leastways, that’s what President Christ seems to have uncovered. So where does that leave us with our handy lists of “useless” majors? It’s time we reconsidered the notion of value as being solely money-driven. The fact that a graphic designer might get paid less than a computer engineer is trumped, for me, by the possibility that it may be that designer’s logo that makes the computer engineer’s company universally recognizable, boosting sales, productivity and pay checks for those computer engineers. It’s worth thinking about.

Small town, Champaign-Urbana?

As I write this, John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” has been playing in my head. After five years here, if I were asked to describe Champaign-Urbana, the description “pleasant small town” is the first thing that would come to mind. Calling Champaign-Urbana a small town, what with its population of about 123,000 not including the rest of the county outside the towns of Champaign and Urbana, is something of an understatement. Even subtracting the tens of thousands of University of Illinois students and faculty who leave each summer and Christmas, it’s still pretty big. So how can I get away with calling it a small town? It’s the atmosphere. The longer I live here, the more I like the personal touch you find at local businesses. The Urbana Garden Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue is one of my and my wife’s favorites. Whenever we go there on a date, the serving staff usually recognizes us and asks how we are. At my favorite Indian restaurant, Bombay Indian Grill on Green Street, they know how I like my vindaloo and my korma. Our preferred cab company, Orange Taxy housed on South Neil Street, keeps our debit cards on file. We know most drivers by name, and our favorite drivers, people we ride with whenever we can, never fail to treat us with friendly respect, and city bus drivers greet me by name. We live on a residential street across from a middle school and high school in Urbana, its population being half that of Champaign. When I catch my morning bus at the corner of Vine and Washington, I can usually count on at least one driver pulling up to the stop sign and asking me if I need any help getting somewhere or whether I’d care to cross the street. Lately, a lady drives by with her dog who’s always barking. At first, she apologized for the dog, seeing me standing there with Delaney, but now I simply wave to her when she pulls up and she greets me in return. Some part of this neighborliness may be chalked up to our blindness. I’ve noticed that people are often a bit nicer to me on that account. But I would be doing people a great injustice to suppose that was all of it or even a significant part of it. For many, my disability may play no part whatsoever. I rather think that much of it has to do with the kind of atmosphere that town residents, which is to say those who aren’t university students, want to engender in the town. I think the university and its student population get most of the attention when people write about the CU area, so I’m deliberately not talking about U. of I. itself. Neighborliness is a quality that hasn’t totally disappeared from America yet, though I suggest it’s on its way out. Getting ahead and staying there has become a driving force in our culture, so when people you do business with take the time and effort to remember your name without consulting a computer screen, it’s simply pleasant. Wouldn’t you say?

Where are They Now?

Alright, so it’s been a while. In tech terms, it’s been forever. And why have I been absent? Life, like the Borg, has a habit of intruding and occupying one’s attention. I’m sure a good psychologist would have a field day with my life/Borg comparison. What have I been doing? That implies an update. After five months and four days, an update is due, to be sure. First, I finished my dissertation! Alright, I nearly finished my dissertation. That is to say, I finished writing the bulk of the thing and survived my doctoral defense on May 2. If you have never had the pleasure of enduring a doctoral defense, imagine a group of four or five professors who have read over a piece of your work and take it upon themselves to ask you the hardest, most trying questions their minds can conceive. Further imagine that your answers determine your fate, and imagine, lastly, that this exercise is done before the merciless gaze of the public. If you can imagine these conditions, you well imagine a doctoral defense. It happened. When it comes to my university endeavors, my wife is the most supportive person I know. Before the defense, she was trying to talk me out of my pessimistic view of the pending exam. She even joked that we would have to work on my “Pollyanna complex.” After the defense which she witnessed, all she had to say was, “I understand now.” Like most other dissertations, mine did not escape unscathed. I have revisions to do which are fairly minor and fairly inescapable. “Wife,” you ask? Alright, I got married. I told you I would, and I did on April 20. My stoner acquaintances were delighted. Being a German scholar, I didn’t think of weed and 4/20; rather, my first thought was that it was Hitler’s birthday. I decided not to let this ruin the day, because it’s also my paternal grandmother’s birthday, may she rest in peace. It was an excellent star trek-themed wedding and reception. We don’t have it on YouTube … yet. Suffice it to say that we chose not to dress up in costume, but all the music was from trek, with all four major series (I reject Enterprise utterly) being represented in the ceremony, and the preacher wove a number of trek references into his sermonette. Good for him! Being a graduate student and living on a graduate student’s pay, the planned honeymoon in Fiji will just have to wait. So, I’m married and the biggest milestone of a Ph.D.’s life, my defense, is behind me. Where are we now? What about the job market? … We’re still here in Illinois. To put it bluntly, this year on the job market has been a near total flop. Apart from the Boston interview (see the blog entry for January 6) nothing else has happened except a pile of reject letters. My professors tell me that this is not unusual, and now that I have defended successfully, I have raised my job prospects for the next round of applications. The department at U. of I., meanwhile, has offered me a final year of teaching so that I can do two things: finish my revisions with the help of Disability Services’ text conversion office, and make another run at the job market. It was kind of them to offer me that year of funding; they did not have to by any means. So this year I will teach and work on turning my dissertation into a pair of publishable articles. At least this year, if there are MLA interviews, they’ll be in Chicago, the site of the 2014 MLA conference. My advisor, meanwhile, is encouraging me to continue bolstering my application by submitting an abstract to the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, which will happen in March of next year in Portland. I would be thrilled to visit Portland again, as my guide dog came from there and two dear friends live there. Aside from great memories and awesome trekies, this means no massive conference hotel expenses and no overpriced conference hotel food. Lastly, we’re moving. We’re moving into a duplex in Urbana so that we can pay less and get more. It’s a one-bedroom residence with a shared front and back yard. Delaney will be delighted. It’s also within walking distance of several stores and other things that will be worth walking to, not the least of which will be bus stops that will enable me to do certain things such as … going to work? My future students and current employer would appreciate it if I were to do that. Selecting this place proved an exercise in discernment and necessitated a crash course in CU apartment hunting. For example, when one place, a reasonably attractive prospect, waited until the tour to tell us about the mandatory $30 per month water bill, we rejected it. With all of this going, the logical supposition would be that I have not had any time for a social life or hobbies. That would be logical, though incorrect. I am still playing chess, still watching the news for blog topics, and still teaching at church. In fact I’ve recently started playing what may be the only respectable star trek RPG on the web. As someone who has done administrative work on online games, I’m impressed with the massive size and detail work of the gaming environment, especially the Enterprise. And as a footnote, I should add that playing a Vulcan is proving interesting, though with my decade plus of studying that race and its relatives, I should be able to manage it in a way that would be, as a Vulcan would put it, “satisfactory.” So, what topics of note interest me? Edward Snowden? Perhaps. Prop 8? Not really. I always thought that was a states’ rights issue. The George Zimmerman trial? Maybe. We’ll see. But it is time to start writing again. Now that I’m not writing a dissertation, working on this blog has again become possible. PS. I loathe the fact that the appearance of this blog site continues to change. I thought for a few minutes that it was inaccessible now.

The Language of Abortion, Part IV

            Hello again. First, before I get to today’s topic, an update is in order. The bad news is that I haven’t been invited to any further interviews. I’ve received a couple of reject letters, and to be fair, one of them was of the, “we’re keeping your file open,” variety, so perhaps it doesn’t count as a total rejection. This is nothing unusual. One particular school’s pass stung, because it was a position that everyone I know, including me, really wanted to see me get, but that’s normal. In fact it’s quite normal for someone in my position. That doesn’t make reject letters any more fun and it doesn’t make waiting any easier. As my advisor pointed out, only academic searches can get away with the amount of wait time they put people through. The good news is that more positions continue to come out. Right now they’re of the one-year visiting lecturer or visiting professor variety—the idea being that you stay there for one to three years and move on—and I’m applying to five positions as we speak. Meanwhile, I’m putting out appropriate feelers in other areas, but we’ll see. I can only continue applying, continue working on my dissertation, and continue trying to think positively. While I’m not a pessimist at heart, that isn’t always easy to do. Some Christians seem to find it very easy to pull out those scriptures about God’s good plans for you and use them when they’re troubled, and the result is a serine individual even when everything’s gone completely wrong. Those people are rare, and  admittedly, I am not as yet one such person. I pull out those same scriptures, I remind myself of their truth, and I tell myself to knock it off with being anxious. Still, I repeat that I am not a pessimist by nature, and things will work out somehow. More accurately, things will work out as God means them too. Now on to today’s topic.

 

            Abortion is a topic I’ve tackled before as you may know. I have posted a series of items on the topic under the title “The Language of Abortion.”

 

Part I: 

http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/02/language-of-abortion.html

 

Part II:

http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/02/language-of-abortion-part-ii.html

 

Part III:

http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/05/language-of-abortion-part-iii.html

 

In the series I examine the language we use when talking about abortion e.g. words and shades of meaning we use as a culture when seeking to promote abortion. In part III, I shifted to talking about the growing consistency in the language of those who advocate abortion. In that essay, I talked about several cases, the wrongful birth angle and two legal cases that came out of it, and the case of Emily Rapp, who wrote an article in defense of abortion given her son’s Tay-Sachs Disease. In all of those cases, I was talking about what I might call post hoc abortion rhetoric. These people, the Estrada family being the exception because they don’t appear to have ever wanted abortions, talk about the abortions they might have had if only they’d known. In other words, these are the abortions they would have had in light of birth defects. The rhetorical situation, however, is worsening, and so I’ve decided to speak up again concerning our growing, and shocking, consistency in our views about abortion.

            What do I mean when I say the situation is worsening? I simply mean this:  some are starting to set aside euphemistic labels such as ‘termination’ and ‘tissue,’ and even outside of notions of wrongful birth and genetics testing screw ups, there are folks passionately arguing that, yes, the baby is definitely alive, and that, yes, the mother definitely has the right to decide if it lives or dies. They argue that not all life is, in fact, created equal, and that mothers should be left alone to make the decision about this medical procedure and life choice for herself. At least they’re setting the euphemisms aside, though now that they have, the conversation changes direction.

            Two things recently grabbed my attention. One is an article in the online news venue Salon.com. The writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, passionately defends the very point of view I’m talking about. Since I will be referring to this article heavily, here it is:

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/

 

Please also watch the Planned Parenthood video that’s on that page, because I’ll be discussing it as well. So to get straight into it. Williams’ title is, “So What If Abortion Ends Life?” There are two ways to interpret the intended meaning of this title. Rhetorically, she might have meant, “So, what if abortion really does end life? We need to rethink abortion in the light of the fact that these fetuses are living babies and stop the practice,” or she might have meant, “Abortion ends life. So? It’s my right and I’m going to do it anyway if I choose.” The fact that I am (A), writing this post at all, and (B), choosing to discuss her article in it, should lead you to conclude without having read the article that the second interpretation is the author’s intended one.

            Let me make a couple points about Williams’ article before getting into specifics. First, it is a polemic, an attack piece. Her language is fiery and sometimes colorfully exaggerated. In my discussions, I am going to ignore that aspect of it and delve into the meat of the article, the point she was making beyond all the heated rhetoric. Second, there are a couple of points that she and I agree on. She says it’s time to stop quibbling over whether or not a fetus is alive and to acknowledge that they are living. We need to stop using euphemisms to evade the question of life. I wholeheartedly agree.

            Williams begins her discussion by claiming that it was unfair and misleading for those of us who oppose abortion to put it in terms of life versus choice, because we force the other side to come out somehow opposing the notion of life. She claims that we, those of us who are anti-abortion, in standing on the platform of “it’s a life,” somehow deprive her side of equally semantically powerful choices. SO, she claims, she and those who think as she does have been stuck using less charged words:  women’s rights, reproductive freedom, etc. In other words, we who believe that abortion is wrong have somehow unfairly stolen the semantics show by capitalizing on word such as ‘life’ and ‘alive,’ and in Williams’ opinion, we wrongfully force her side to debate the matter on a life versus choice basis,  “… it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.” On that, she’s absolutely right. As to the rest, it’s an interesting argument. Her discussion of semantics is fairly accurate as far as it goes; ‘life’ is a more attention-grabbing word—in linguistic terms it primes more--than ‘reproductive freedom.’ Yet, have we stolen the show, or have we been discussing it correctly? Well, since Williams is willing to admit that we are talking about living human beings, we can leave that last question aside and go on. Williams and I agree. Fetuses are living human beings.

            Mary Williams and I differ sharply, however, once we pass that point of agreement. She goes on to argue that unborn children are ‘non-autonomous entities,’ and that the mother’s rights automatically supersede those of the baby. It is a baby, Williams acknowledges, but it has no rights that the mother need concern herself with:  “a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her.”

            Once I got over my own stunned shock at reading that, I asked myself, has this person fully considered the ramifications of what she’s saying? Let me spell out some of those ramifications and flesh her argument out to one of its logical conclusions, and please keep in mind I’m speaking in purely hypothetical terms. Supposing we somehow came up with a law allowing for the forced euthanasia of the severely mentally challenged. We could rationalize it with all sorts of utilitarian arguments about their “drain on society” and all sorts of humanitarian arguments about their “quality of life,” and so this law gets passed. Then, when this hypothetical law is in place and the people are dying, we acknowledge that what we’re doing is killing people. Our defense is that they don’t have any rights, or certainly far fewer than we do, that we, those with mental competence, are making the decisions and we have the right to make those decisions because we’re the ones who have to decide what to do with these mentally retarded people, these ‘non-autonomous entities,’ to use Williams’ phrasing. In fact, why confine it to the mentally challenged? Why not the physically disabled too? Supposing my parents would have had the legal right to euthanize i.e. kill me if I’d become too much to handle. Sound familiar? If you’re thinking Nazi Germany, then we’re on the same page.

            Ok, back to reality. We don’t have laws like that and my parents would never have done so anyhow. Yet, isn’t this line of thinking just what Williams employs to advocate the right of the mother to kill the unborn baby? The question isn’t why would she expand this line of argument to other populations besides the unborn, but rather, why wouldn’t she? It is a logical next step, and it’s not a very far step at that. It’s the sort of thinking (whether applied to the unborn or to anyone else) that could make you lose sleep at night. It should. Lest you think I’m exaggerating or overinflating her case, consider Williams’ closing words:  “I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.”

 

            If that article was all I had to go on, this blog post would not have been written. I could have dismissed Williams as the lone voice of lunacy. Yet Williams refers her readers to a Planned Parenthood video on the page. The video is called “Moving Beyond Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Labels, You’re Not in Her Shoes.” It’s not a long video. Take a moment to watch it. You can also find it at www.notinhershoes.org.

            The video, a promo from Planned Parenthood, urges viewers to stop thinking about labels such as pro-life or pro-choice. It argues that those labels box us in and confine the abortion discussion, oversimplifying it. Finally, it contends that abortion is a “personal medical decision,” something on par with a mammogram or a cancer treatment. We are urged to think of the woman in her personal circumstances and to be more empathetic and compassionate.

            That last bit rather strongly implies that you can’t be empathetic, caring and compassionate if you oppose abortions. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, actually, because anyone on my side of the conversation who takes that video seriously now has to justify our beliefs and demonstrate how compassionate we truly are and how our compassion is not diminished by the fact that we happen to oppose the killing of an unborn child. Remember, according to Mary Williams, that’s exactly what we should be calling the “fetal tissue,” and unborn child. So, the fact that we only want that baby to live somehow makes us coldhearted?

 

            I realize that Mary Elizabeth Williams likely doesn’t speak for many people even on the pro-abortion side of the debate. Yet the fact that her article was published by an organization that sees itself as a reputable independent news venue is telling. More importantly, Planned Parenthood’s video reaffirms those sentiments. So, do labels like pro-life and pro-choice confine us? As a linguist, I am here to tell you that we can go round and round on that one. It would be more profitable to ask whether those labels and their various versions, pro-abortion, pro-choice, anti-abortion, pro-life, etc. et al really do portray the situation inaccurately. If they do, and if those of us who oppose abortions have been dangling red herrings in front of the public for forty years, then the game would be up. In fact, if that is what anti-abortion folks like me had been doing, we would have been busted and debunked about thirty years ago, maybe twenty.

            The fact, and here I speak of the fact of language and linguistics, is that the debate we have been having has been expressed in the most accurate terminology the English language can provide. If you are anti-abortion, you are de facto against abortions. If abortion means the ending of a fetus, and if a fetus is alive, then abortion means the ending of something that is alive. What more do we want here? No, my friends. No. The reason that Planned Parenthood and people like Mary Williams want us to dispense with our terminology and its accompanying framework isn’t because our words are inaccurate and our conceptualizations baseless or unjust. It is because our terminology is highly semantically accurate, and our frameworks for the last four decades have been right on point. Dancing around the semantics of the words we use or lying to patients about fetal development, as Planned Parenthood counselors have been caught doing several times in Indiana and Wisconsin, won’t change any of that.

 

“A person may think their own ways are right,
but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:2-3, NIV).