anthropomorphising

That's not quite the right word for the concept I want to talk about, but I don't know what the right word is. I'm sure one of you all will help me out with that.

Anyway. I have to give you the tangential story that led me to today's line of thought. There's a story on my AOL welcome screen today about the Taliban acid attacks on young Afghani girls going to school and how the world is outraged. I felt about this the way I feel about all such similar things, like, say, American/Western outrage about female genital mutilation in Africa. There is nothing defensible about throwing acid on little girls for the crime of trying to get an education as there is nothing defensible about removing a girl's clitoris and/or sewing up most of her vaginal opening, no matter what your cultural norms are. Some shit is just wrong.

However, before we as Americans get outraged about this (with a thin sheen of unspoken "oh those savage barbarians!" coating our outrage) perhaps we should examine, and take care of, the injustices against women in our own country and culture. I just signed a petition last week about US servicewomen being made to pay for their own fucking rape kits when they are raped (usually by a fellow serviceman). I don't know what is more stomach-turning, that a raped women would be charged for the collection of evidence needed to press charges, or that a US soldier, fighting for her country, would have to fear her own compatriots as well as the enemy. I'm pretty "outraged" about both those things.

Or--and I promise we're getting to the point of this all real soon--I was thinking, you want to wring your hands about the Taliban's twisting of religion to the point where mutilating a woman or girl is somehow justified, how about the members of several different religious groups here in America who are working really hard to get a woman's right to a legal abortion taken away from her even in the case of rape, even in the case where the mother would likely, or certainly, die in the event she continued the pregnancy. That even a six-week-along glob of fetal tissue would have more rights and more worth to these people than an adult woman, a woman with friends and a family and perhaps other children, perhaps a job, perhaps a talent or a gift for something or other, someone with definite worth and value and contribution to society, I find that as hand-wringingly religiously-twisted as any other bit of faith-based cruelty. And I find it kind of incomprehensible.

But then I was thinking about why people feel that, in an attempt to comprehend. Did any of you all see Lake of Fire? It's one of the few documentaries I've ever seen that really looks at an issue fairly and with balance to all sides. That no matter *what* your own preconceived and firmly held beliefs about the subject are, at some point during the film, you'll be questioning them. It's kind of remarkable that way. Well, anyway, someone at some time in the movie makes a point about how differently you as the parent of said fetal tissue feel about its personhood depending on whether the pregnancy is dearly wanted and hoped for or not, and I thought, bingo!

When you are pregnant with a pregnancy that you are going to carry to term, and you are at a prenatal visit and you hear the heartbeat for the first time, it's exciting. It makes the fetus *feel* like a baby to you, like the potential person they're going to be. When, really, why should it? Lots of pretty primitive creatures have heartbeats. It doesn't imply personhood at all. And there's a fetal heartbeat long, long before there's any real brain function, certainly long before there's even a possibility the fetus can think or feel or have any kind of consciousness at all, all of which are far more important to personhood than electrical activity in cardiac tissue, I think/hope we would agree. But because you want the baby so much, because in a way you're already falling in love with the baby, or at least the idea of the baby, the heartbeat makes you anthropomorphise that fetal tissue. It's symbolic.

And for many people who have nothing to do with anyone else's pregnancy other than sticking their noses in, that tendency to anthropomorphise fetal tissue comes not from the fetus as a symbol of a future person whom they will love, but as a symbol of The Innocent. Human beings have an innate predisposition to wanting to protect the weak, the helpless, the cute. (Which is a good evolutionary strategy to keep us from chucking our own, or other people's, crying babies over a cliff, y'know?) And while fetuses are not cute, they are certainly weak and helpless.

It's the same tendency that caused people to want to string up Michael Vick over the dog fighting thing. I mean people kill, rape, mutilate, torture, and otherwise fuck up and fuck over other human beings every single freaking day; in that context, dog fighting, while not defensible, is also not by a long shot the worst crime a person can commit. We've seen our pro athletes accused of far worse. But, ooooo, doggies, they're so cute and sweet. (And you people know I love animals. But the hysteria and outrage whipped up over that case was ridiculous.)

So, in that context, the reason some people would value the rights of a clump of fetal tissue over the rights of an adult (not weak, not helpless, not so cute) woman is perfectly understandable. Well, especially when you add to it that that adult woman has been proven to have had sex(even if it's married sex or forced nonconsensual sex), which is the other part that flips these religious whackos out. But anyway, it's a good object lesson to me: every time human behavior or ideas pop up that have no logical explanation to me, I can, if I try hard enough, probably figure out what primitive instinct or drive they're serving instead of logic.

I'll shut up now.

xoxo