South Moves to Legalize Killing Abortion Providers!

“South Dakota moves to legalize killing abortion providers!” claims a recent sensational Headline from Mother Jones. In the article, Kate Sheppard announces that “If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.” The Iowa State Daily recently printed an editorial that asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of an abortion provider who provided an abortion to a woman who’s father didn’t approve of such an act, and then asks us to “[i]magine South Dakota State law says it’s all right for him to walk into that small, lonely clinic, and kill you.” It then goes on to say that this law “endorses terrorism.”

This is a huge moral issue. Or it would be, if anything these two news providers said about the law is true. Fortunately, the law in question will allow none of those things. The writer of the bill, Rep. Phil Jensen” says that the bill’s purpose is “simply is to bring consistency to South Dakota statute as it relates to justifiable homicide.” You see, the State of South Dakota has it on the books that someone who causes the death of an unborn child, say, by pushing the mother down the stairs or putting abortifacient pills in her food, can be tried for murder. Or, if someone killed a pregnant woman, they would be tried for two, not one, counts of murder. This isn’t something new. Thirty-eight states, including Iowa, have laws on the books that protect unborn children in this way.

South Dakota also has a justifiable homicide law. It allows the killing of a murderous assailant in self-defense. This, again, is not something new or novel. The bill in question only seeks to reconcile the two laws. It gives the ability of a mother of an unborn child to protect her child, and it is written for cases like this one outlined by Jensen:

“Say an ex-boyfriend who happens to be father of a baby doesn’t want to pay child support for the next 18 years, and he beats on his ex-girfriend’s abdomen in trying to abort her baby. If she did kill him, it would be justified. She is resisting an effort to murder her unborn child.”

That’s the “consistency” that Jensen talks about. The bill has absolutely nothing to do with abortions. There will be no one who will escape murder charges if they kill an abortion provider. The law is pretty clear and unambiguous about that. The law states, explicitly, that "This section does not apply to acts which cause the death of an unborn child if those acts were committed during any abortion, lawful or unlawful, to which the pregnant woman consented." So, in fact, an angry father would not be justified in killing an abortion provider, even if the abortions provided are illegal. The law goes out of its way to protect abortion providers’ right to live, and yet still it gets attacked.

Now, it may be prudent to debate whether the law is necessary. In fact, it may be true that a South Dakota expectant mother’s ability to protect her unborn child is already thoroughly covered by law. It can’t be said, however, that this law endorses the murder of abortion providers or “terrorism”. That would be simply dishonest. I certainly hope that the mistake was just that—an incomplete body of evidence.

Reflections on the Strange Creed of Transhumanism

Last week, while I was trying my hardest to avoid completing my homework, I ran across a rather interesting article in Time magazine. The article basically enumerated the beliefs of the Transhumanists, a group of people that believe that the advancement of technology will, in the near future, lead to an event called the Singularity. The Singularity is a hypothetical event that is supposed to drastically change the entire nature of humanity. Computers will become as powerful as human minds. We will “plug in” our brains into computer networks. The immense power of these new computers will help us reverse aging and we could even upload the memory and data in our brains and live forever. It was at this point when I stopped reading and put my thinking hat on: Even if we could live forever on this veil of tears known as planet Earth, would we really want to?

The most outspoken proponent of this scientific fountain of youth, according to Time, is a British biologist by the name of Aubrey de Grey. I’ve read about de Grey before. He’s a rather eccentric self-educated man whose work on aging has gotten him a number of honorary doctorates from rather prestigious universities. According to the article, de Grey has divided the process of aging into seven categories, and he takes an approach similar to a car repairman when it comes to aging, and he sees the body entirely as a machine that needs maintenance. While I can appreciate a good deal of his work, the amount of effort that he puts into avoiding death is almost unnerving. It reminds me of a rather chilling excerpt from Peter Lawler’s essay, “Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism”:

“The more secure or free from contingency he is objectively, the more he experiences his existence as contingent and the more he is haunted by death. The more death is pushed back by modern technology, the more accidental it seems. The more accidental or less necessary death seems, the more terrible it seems.”

I certainly believe that Lawler is onto something here. Surely, death seems scarier when it is seen as something completely avoidable and accidental. You can imagine a man, who by the grace of science, can never die of natural causes. Because of this, this man takes no risks. While it might be normal to avoid something like skydiving, a calculating immortal man may never get in a car or never even step outside, because one day the odds will catch up to him. The modern man who dies in a car crash may have risked and lost maybe 80 years of life. The immortal man may lose hundreds of thousands of years. Paradoxically, the gift of eternal life may take away man’s ability to live his own life.

I think that there is a far more pressing potential problem with human beings being immortal, even if we put aside the obvious demographic and health care issues. The problem would be empathy. Author and political advisor Jeremy Rifkin argues in his talk “the Empathetic Civilization” that our empathy for each other is dependent on our mortality. The fragility of our own lives is what allows us to understand the plight of others. The immortal man is put on a much less empathetic and far more independent trek. In this way, immortality robs a man of his own humanity.

While the predictions of Transhumanism are rather far out and may never come true, it’s quite easy to see how it or a similar brand of Utopianism may one day catch on with a large number of people. The philosophic al problems posed by it will most likely need to be addressed as technology advances, no matter what. While Transhumanism advocates that we shed our mortal coil and become something more than human, I believe that is far more imperative that we do not lose our own humanity in the process.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Consequent-Free Sex Whenever You Want it

This column was rejected from the Iowa State Daily. Do you think that it is "weak as hell."? Or that it "It sounds like a throwaway philosophical diatribe ghost-written by the girls at Cosmopolitan."?

Alexander S. Anderson

Column

Sex is beautiful. During sex, you give your whole self, both physically and spiritually, to your partner. Even better, you allow for the creation of new life—a new human being that can love, create, think, and dream just as well as you can, or even better. However, the grand things that are involved in the act of sex are today often divided, repackaged, consumerized for convenience or, worst of all, cheapened. There is a lot of effort on the part of many today to separate those grand ideas of the unitive and procreative roles of sex from the pleasure which we get from sex. Along these lines, we are told that sex is good, but none of its consequences are. We are told that we can, nay, we should have sex as often as possible, so long as we do it “safely”. We have sterilized ourselves, not only physically, but emotionally.

I can barely step out of my door in the morning without seeing one of the many colorful signs, most of them provided to us by Planned Parenthood, advertising condoms or some other form of birth control. When I look at them, I can’t help thinking that they look bright, cheery, friendly, and very, very fake. Behind the cheery faces and bright graphic design, these ads push something very inauthentic. They certainly push something sterile, that’s the whole point of the product, of course, but it also seems industrial, almost inhuman. Lots of advertisements fail to recognize that their targets are living, breathing humans, but few have a subject that is so close and intimate to our own bodies and minds. There’s something inauthentic about condoms themselves—like someone refusing to touch their significant other unless they’re wearing rubber gloves. And this authenticity spreads to those advocating them.

It is even easier to see the cheapening of sex today in an average party in Ames during any weekend. Go to them, and you will hear both men and women talking about the other sex as instruments; they are treated as nothing but tools which help achieve pleasure. There’s an odd prevailing mentality that women or men are simply tools for our enjoyment, to be used up and thrown away when they stop performing that function. It’s remarkably selfish, but the idea has been treated as somehow “enlightened” by many of the educated and their educators. Women are often told that, somehow, they can be empowered if they can use men for pleasure and then toss them to the curb as effectively as some men use and toss away women. The rejection of the unitive aspect of sex is not just cruel, it’s also a horrible distortion of the act. It deconstructs a complex and beautiful act into power relations or the accumulation of pleasure, and it leaves behind the horrible casualties of hollowed-out souls in its wake.

Sure, most people today are not so forceful in their rejection of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex, but they grow up and are nurtured in a culture so hostile to both that many people do not realize that there are other options. The modern twisting of sex is not a semantics issue, or a vague, philosophical issue. It is an issue that affects all of us. When we fail to respect our own bodies, we fail to respect ourselves and we fail to respect life itself. Sex is beautiful, and we only hurt ourselves when we cheapen it.

Update: I cut this column down to 450 words, and it will be run as a Letter to the Editor. Look for it