For a Friend, and She Knows Why

I don't blog often on political issues. Gun control is one, especially when it crops up involving schools, which it does far more often than I find acceptable, but that's another post all together. In general, gun control isn't a hill I intend to die upon, though I'm heartsick over the number of people who are dying because we lack it. It's a debate that is without solution given our current technology and willingness to compromise. Perhaps in my lifetime that will change. But like I said, that's a debate for another time.

What sparked this post was a short video posted by Bill Nye, regarding the abortion debate. If you'd like to see it, check here. I'll wait.

If you didn't feel like checking it (or if I forgot to hotlink it) the gist was this: no one likes abortion, but trying to stop it by making it illegal has and never will work. You might as well try to get people to stop having sex. That's never worked in the history of humankind, either. We have some kind of twisted nostalgia for times that never existed when men and women never had sex before getting married, when everyone was straight, when all marriages were for life and no one ever had sex with anyone but their wedded spouse. That time in human history only exists in our fantasies of some Puritanical past. It's about time we got over it before sitting down to debate an issue that is driving a wedge between otherwise smart and friendly people to the point of electing a raving lunatic for the highest office in the land because some on his team feel that the other side, if in power, would be forcing women by the busload to terminate their pregnancies against their will.

This is nonsense, and we need to cut it out. We need to realize that we are far closer in our goals than those who benefit from our fight would like us to think. We would both like to reduce the number of abortions in our country. In the world, even. We want living babies who go on to live healthy, happy, productive lives.

Yes, I really do want that. I suspect you do, too.

Democrats need to take back this issue. We lose so many single issue voters because Republicans have painted us as abortion-lovers.

We aren't.

What we are, are people who support abortion-reduction* ideas that actually work. (And are cost-effective in the bargain.) I think it is time we stopped framing the debate as "People who value unborn life more than the value of personal decision" VS "People who do not value unborn life more than personal decision." Which is how we have all framed it for as long as I have been aware of the argument.

It's a false argument, at least for me. I do not actually value personal decisions more than I value human life, and I'm not sure any of the other Pro-Choice people I know do either. I believe that life is more important than most personal choices I might make.† Like Bill Nye says: Nobody likes abortion.

As he further noted, "Abstinence, closing abortion clinics and denying women birth control do not lead to a healthier society." I am a liberal democrat and I want to reduce the incidence of abortion. Closing clinics, making abortion illegal, teaching abstinence only in schools (and at home) and preventing women from having access to birth control - common tactics of the "Pro-Life" campaign - do not reduce abortion. The facts support this. Anyone who claims to be against abortion and supports reducing it through these methods supports ideas that simply do not work very well. A person is not "Pro-Life" if they do not support policies that actually work to reduce abortion. Especially so if they respond with death-threats and prayers for the death of women who disagree with them. I'm not sure what label they should have, but it isn't "Pro-Life." If you are Pro-Anything, I ask you this: If you have a goal, and the methods you use to reach it are proven not to work well, why do you keep using those methods?

People who support comprehensive free, reliable birth control for all women, comprehensive sex education, and research into male birth control are the ones actually advocating strategies that will and do reduce abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

I know that for some, providing a free IUD for any woman who wants one is tantamount to a holocaust. I know this, and I'm sorry you feel that way. The argument as to when life begins exactly is an unwinnable one. The most ardent adherents of the anti-abortion cause claim it's at the moment the sperm meets the egg that a fully-legal person begins, endowed with the same rights that I have. I can't argue with that. There is no science that can tell us if that is truly right or wrong. There may never be. The scientific definition is that it has the potential to eventually be alive when the zygote implants itself in the uterine wall. Up until that point it's like a seed that has been cast upon solid rock. All the genes are there, but you're not going to get a tree. Still others hold that viability outside the womb is the marking point. Even the Puritans had a definition -- when the woman could feel kicking inside of her. Only at "quickening" was the baby considered an actual life. It's estimated that 1/3 of all fertilized eggs do not implant, for their own reasons, and simply leave a woman along with the rest of her period. Perhaps some Pro-Lifers mourn this as well, but it has nothing to do with what man has wrought. It's just nature, and if it grieves you, again, I'm sorry.

This is a quandry rooted in religion, so the best I can offer to them is this: trust in your God to do what is right by those lives. Making abortion and birth control illegal will not save them. The best we can work towards is for the conception to not happen in the first place. You cannot, no matter how hard you legislate, stop human beings from having sex. So you need to let that go.

Maybe my Mirena has resulted in over 100 lives started in my fallopian tubes that found nothing to implant in. Or maybe it prevented the sperm from getting to where they wanted to go and no conceptions happened. We will never know any more than we will know if the millions of "late periods" each year were zygotes that shook loose, or failed to implant or any number of things. If you need to personally grieve that, then grieve.** I want to work with you to do what we can to reduce abortions the most that we can. Stop the sperm from getting out there in the first place. Stop the egg from being released at all. Use the methods that lead us to not knowing at all what happens inside a woman's body. Think of it as Schrödinger's fertilized egg. We can still work together on this.

I may not know (and neither do you) at what moment "life" begins. But I do know that if every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy, then there is a very, very small need for abortion.††

This is something we can work together on. No more unwanted pregnancies. It's possible. We have the technology. All we need is the will to do it.

Pro-Life Liberal Democrats***. Striving to reduce abortions across the nation.

It's a radical notion, no?


*Yes, reduction.We are never going to get it to zero. If your goal is zero, then you're going to have to start killing a lot of women in the name of preventing them from having an abortion, and then all you have is a dead woman who cannot carry life inside of her. So let's aim to getting as close as we can to zero, without going overboard, shall we? To quote the inimitable Molly Ivins, "You cannot save the life of an unborn child by driving its mother to suicide."


†For the record, I think this is where the Pro-Choice argument usually goes off the rails by insisting that what I would choose for me, I cannot insist that someone else choose, too, for that is the foundation of our movement. No. It's not. Most of the Pro-Life crowd truly believe that an embryo is just as alive as I am, and killing that person is not a choice other people are allowed to make. I'm not allowed to choose kill a toddler or adult because they're making my life terribly, terribly hard, so why should I be allowed to kill an embryo? That's another trip down the rabbit hole of "when does life begin" and "when does the needs of that life trump the needs of my life" and it's just not an effective argument. Pro-Choicers need to quit arguing ineffectively, too.


**And can we stop with the sending of used tampons to legislators? It's counter-productive, makes Pro-Choice women seem crazy and dangerous, and it doesn't affect the people we want to affect anyway.

††No, I'm not getting into right now why someone might want to end a wanted pregnancy. All I'll say is that I know it happens, it's gut-wrenching, psyche-destroying, hellish awfulness I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and it is never done on a whim.


***for another bit of something ironic sounding, I found this study cited by a website that used it as evidence that birth control does not reduce the incidence of abortion. I found it ironic that they would use a study whose conclusions were that more comprehensive education was necessary, and that more emergency contraception would reduce abortion rates as well. Well, that, and the overwhelming need for foolproof contraception.

A Sense of Wander

I recently stumbled across an article about how pushing kids to find their passion and pursue it relentlessly is harmful to kids.  I don't know if it's harmful so much as, well, let's just say "not all that useful."
In our own school district, the 5th graders do a "Capstone" project as part of crowning their achievement at the end of their elementary school idea. This is a fine idea. It's a nice way to celebrate and commemorate the end of this particular little era in their lives. What the pilot teachers discovered, though, was that the "Passion" projects students choose in September (at the ripe old age of 10) were of little interest come January* and by April, forcing students to grind out this glorious Capstone project was, for most of them, an exercise in educational flogging. This isn't to say that Capstone is a bad idea. It isn't. But forcing most kids in September to choose what they're going to love for an entire school year is...not practical.
In my own classroom, finding passions is easy. We've started a unit on paleontology and the kids are so excited. Today, A. loves rocks. Flint is awesome. So are geodes and diamonds and minerals and everything igneous. Next week? It'll be plants of the Cretaceous. Or Ice Age Mammals. Or wolves....
We spent today "Wondering and Wandering."  It's an old phrase, and sometimes I can't stand it, but when the "What do I already know about Paleontology" part of the chart is blank except for a sticky note that reads "I thik it has to do with dinosurs," then asking the kids to pick what they are passionate about studying is a fool's errand. How could they possibly know?
On a related note, there are many times when I work with students who I know are gifted, but damned if I can find the gift. I poke and prod and throw all kinds of different challenges at them to see what might stick, and sometimes it's just....nothing. Can't find it. It's immensely frustrating for me, and, I presume, for the kid. "Here's this adult who is supposed to know things, and she never, ever once gives me anything actually worth doing, much less doing well" he thinks. Or, I think he thinks that because I honestly have no freaking clue what he's thinking.
And then, after two years of me fruitlessly attempting to get him to show a spark of anything, we start a unit on Chemistry. It's April. For two years, this boy has done...nothing.  Five minutes into "100 greatest discoveries in Chemistry"**this kid comes up to me, eyes wide, and asks if he can borrow the copy of the periodic table I have taped up. He wants to find every element Bill Nye mentions and see what it is. See what it's next to. He want's to press this table into his brain and learn this. This. Chemistry. He is sitting up, close to the screen. He cannot wait to see what comes next. It takes my breath away.
Maybe this will be his passion forever. Likely not. But with luck it will lead him to the next thing he has to learn. I can only hope.
We spend so much time preparing our kids to be career and college ready. Ready to take on a major and then a career that will keep them productive, taxpaying citizens for life. Maybe, though, we ought to spend a little more time teaching them how to wonder and wander. How to appreciate the vast breadth of things there are out there to know. How to find what is true, and what is simply, still, just unknown.
With any luck, I can get it to take their breath away, too.

*Or October, for some kids.
**featuring Bill Nye. Not the "science guy" though. Aimed more at highschoolers or adults who are just interested in things. I recommend it.

Cookie Notice: There's likely some in the freezer if you dig around a little

I haven't been here in awhile. I could say it's because I don't have time, but that isn't really true.  If I would cut my time on facebook in half, I'd not only have time to blog regularly, I'd also be able to exercise daily, keep my house clean and discover the cure for cancer. I did take the facebook app off of my phone recently in a futile effort to keep me from checking it compulsively, but mostly all it's done is reduce the amount of posting I do to my classroom page to nearly zero. There's a big push now to post about our classrooms on Twitter, which I suppose I could do, especially since Twitter has never been particularly appealing for me and isn't a time suck at all.  However, since I just don't quite get the fascination of Twitter, this also means I rarely post to my classroom Twitter account, because I never think of it. So much for coming into the digital age with grace.
So now that I'm back for my standard effort to post more during the Holidailies challenge, I discovered that there's a new (to me) little notice at the top of my page telling me that "European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies"  This is as far as I skimmed, initially, before I stopped reading and began to think "cookies?" I have to tell Europeans on my blog (all 2 of them) about American cookies? Is this a tourism thing? Hospitality issue?
Then, of course, the more reasonable parts of my frontal lobe wrested the controls away from the part of my brain that always bounds off the path like a cocker spaniel who's spotted a squirrel and I read a little further. They're talking about electronic cookies, of course, and apparently Blogger is just telling me that there's this issue and they've taken care of it, or something*. I'm supposed to check if it works or somesuch, which is too bad because it's really unlikely I will and then I'll wind up banned from going to Germany for my failure to inform people about my cookies.
So, just in case, for chocolate chip, you can't go wrong with the Tollhouse recipe. Just switch the amount on the brown sugar and white sugar. Also, quadruple the recipe. Because you can never have too many chocolate chip cookies. Especially if you have a fondness for raw cookie dough**
There. Done.

Happy Holidays.

*I didn't read it carefully all the way through. I got the idea to write about it and wanted to do that before I forgot what I was going to write about. I'm serious about that cocker spaniel thing, and my brain is sometimes completely filled with nothing but squirrels.

**Yes, I KNOW about the dangers of raw flour and eggs. I'm livin' on the edge.