Why Gosnell's abortion clinic convinces me we need to to protect abortion rights.

For anyone unfamiliar here is a link to the story.

Abortion Doctor’s Murder Trial Sparks Media Debate

First, let me say that what Gosnell has done is immoral and criminal. It's why he is on trial after all. He not only killed infants after they were born, he preformed illegal procedures, used dirty or faulty equipment and used underage poorly trained staff that resulted in women dying from botched abortions. No pro-choice advocate is in favor of protecting or excusing what Gosnell has been accused of. 

It is interesting then that there are so many conservative, pro-life groups claiming that the liberal pro-choice groups are trying to cover up the news story to as to protect the reputation of abortion. When I goggled the topic I found many articles on it, even excluding the articles written about how many other people weren't writing articles about it. One wonders about the irony of people writing about how no one writes articles about a subject while those same people fail to write any articles about the subject they are complaining no one writes about. 

I'm not convinced there is any attempt to avoid the subject, but I'm more interested in how pro-life proponents always take stories like this one as evidence we need to make all abortions illegal. It should be immediately apparent why this is absurd because what Gosnell was doing was already illegal. He should not have gotten away with it as long as he did, and there is evidence there were serious failures in the system that should have worked to shut him down, but you can't use Gosnell's actions as an argument against legal abortions anymore than you can use people who attempt to incite violence through speech as an argument against all free speech of any kind.

The problem is that I think most pro-lifers have a basic misconception about the pro-choice movement. That is to say they believe that pro-choice advocates like abortion. We don't like abortions; this is why, for instance, pro-choice advocates fight so hard for easy contraception access especially for the poor.  I have never personally met anyone who is pro-choice who would be bothered by the number of abortions being zero if all of the reasons people got abortions went with them. If you want a world without abortion then give us a world without birth defects, pregnancy related health issues, rape and incest, birth control failures, and the failures of sex education which often cause people to have unprotected sex when they do not want children.  Give us that world and abortion will disappear because no one will want one.

Is such a world hard to provide, Impossible perhaps? Then we will never have a world with zero abortions and because of this we must therefore focus on how to make the number as low as possible. Which brings us back around to Gosnell. Pro-life advocates act like it is legal abortion that allows people like Gosnell to exist, but this is completely and totally wrong. In fact is the the pro-life movement that allows people like Gosnell to exist.  Don't believe me? Check out these facts.

Worldwide Abortion: Legality, Incidence and Safety

There are two important facts here. One, the areas of the world who generally outlaw or restrict abortions have the highest abortion rates, often 29-32 out of 1,000 or higher. While areas with the most permissive abortion laws like Europe have the lowest, 12 out of 1,000. On top of that, the areas that outlaw abortion have the highest rates of unsafe abortions. I.E. they have the highest rates of people like Gosnell. 

Now, I'm not claiming that the abortion restrictions themselves raise the rate of abortions though they almost definitely raise the rates of unsafe abortions. Many of these countries that outlaw abortion do so based upon religious sanctions they have on sexual behavior and with those laws often go restrictions on access to birth control safe sex education. They also have little if any social services to help women who have a pregnancy they cannot afford. What we can take from this is that making abortion illegal has little to no affect on how many people seek abortions, the only thing that affects that number is making sure unwanted pregnancies don't happen in the first place as well as providing adequate health care to women who are pregnant or think they might become so. 

Yet on these fronts we see pro-life advocates standing in they way almost every time. Arizona is an abstinence only state who refuses to fund Planed Parenthood because of pro-life advocates. People in Africa are told not to use condoms by pro-life advocates. Every time I turn around pro-life groups claim they want to end abortion but then they do things are are guaranteed to increase it. It turns out that we pro-choicers are better at being pro-life than the pro-life movement is, and it's about time we started letting people know that.

Sexist shirts from Marvel.

I'm a nerd and I'm proud of it, I also think nerd culture should be well positioned to be more aware of gender issues than the population in general, which is why this story made me sad.

Sexist 'Avengers' T Shirts Tell Boys To Be Heroes And Girls To Need A Hero 

Marvel is selling these two shirts, the left one for boys and the right one for girls.

 

What kind of subtle sexist messages are we selling to children with these shirts? Some people have said that this is no big deal because the shirts are marketed to kids, but I think this actually makes it worse. Childhood and adolescence are when most people form a lot of their ideas about the world including how they relate to the other gender. Of course some people overcome those ideas in adulthood, but many will not. It is a bad idea to start kids out by providing them with sexist gender stereotypes before they are even old enough to fully understand what a gender stereotype is. 

We already have enough of this stuff from religion. I expect better from my nerdy icons.

This is why we need to legalize gay marriage.

So this happened.

Gay Man Arrested At Missouri Hospital For Refusing To Leave Sick Partner

Roger Gorley was arrested because the family members of his partner Allen(presumably because they don't approve of homosexuality) refused to allow him hospital visitation. When he refused to leave security handcuffed him and removed him from the hospital then the family filed a restraining order.

Further, for those who say that a lot of these rights like hospital visitation can be achieved without marriage through other types of contracts it should be noted that Gorley has power of attorney which apparently the hospital refused to verify.

Laws in this area are changing slowly, but it is clear that until gay people are allowed to marry these instances of discrimination are likely to continue with limited legal recourse to the victims.

An argument I wish people would stop using: Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color.

A meme has being going around the internet for a while now. It's usually something like atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color, off is a T.V. station, not collecting stamps is a hobby or other similar witticisms.

This is a response to theists suggesting that atheism is a religion. It's not a particularly convincing or useful in my opinion; for one thing I'm not a big fan of pretending an analogy is the same thing as an argument. Now, don't get me wrong I'm not going to argue that the atheism actually is a religion. What I will argue is that this is designed to be a sort of quick witty sound byte, with out any substance or meaning. It does not encourage any sort of discussion about the claim and will likely cause both of you to walk away from the interaction without learning anything about one another or yourself. Religion is a broad word with a lot of different meanings, so dismissing the statement without exploring what the theist means does no one any good.

Perhaps they think we are like a religion because we have meetings and social groups and some of us involve ourselves in activism. In this since I would be happy to admit atheists are like religious people, but only that we are all human and desire social interaction with others, and we also often wish to improve the world in which we live, and make it better for ourselves and our family. What's wrong with any of that? I didn't reject religion for anything here.

Or perhaps they think we are like religion because we are outspoken and possibly evangelistic about our beliefs. This one is only partially true. Of course some atheists, like myself, are quite outspoken, and I think there are good reasons for that, but I do think there is a significant difference between me and many religious evangelists. Most evangelism relies heavily on emotional arguments, not rational ones. In fact I was often told in my religious days to not rely on facts too much because the only thing that would ever convert people was "experiencing the risen Christ." The evidence isn't there so evangelists rely on personal testimonies and salesmanship so tricky an Amway representative would feel shame. Emotional manipulation is not a path to truth, people should be convinced of your claim because it is backed with good evidence.

Of course I often hear is that atheism is a religion because atheists have just as much faith that god does not exist as theists have that he does. On this point I obviously disagree completely. If they agree that faith is belief without evidence then it cannot possibly take faith to reject their claim and if they do not accept that definition then they still need to present evidence for their version of god. In other words this criticism is nothing but a smoke screen to attempt to move the burden of proof.

The point is, instead of using an argument that is completely dismissive, I would suggest asking the theist for clarification of this statement. How exactly is atheism like a religion? What specific thing do we do that they think is something only a religious group would do? Rather than shutting down the conversation this requires the theist to justify their position, and might just change their mind a bit about atheists.Comparing atheism to baldness or inactive televisions does none of this. It is the verbal equivalent of flipping off your opponent, it might make you feel better but it's not useful.

Creationist bets 10,000 dollars no one can disprove Genesis.

Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo

Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo, a member of the Creation Science Hall of Fame, wagered $10,000 that evolutionists cannot disprove the literal reading of Genesis. 

I would note that Mastropaolo's Ph.D. is in kinesiology and is therefore not terribly relevant to an examination of the physics or geology involved in radiometric dating or most of the other things he seems to think he is an expert it.

Full article here:

Prominent Creationist Explains Plan To Win $10,000 Wager About Genesis

So Mastropaolo correctly points out that proving the earth is old would disprove the Genesis account.

What evidence do they have that original creation didn't happen?" Mastropaolo said. "In order for them to cast doubt on that Genesis narrative, they have to prove that the Earth is very, very, very old.

So, along comes science with it's radiometric dating, dendrochronology, plate tectonics and the like, all of which demonstrate the earth is much older than 10,000 years. Ah, says Mastropaolo, those tests are all flawed. Why can't we trust radiometric dating?

As evidence he cites inconsistency in radiometric estimates of the Earth's age. In 1921 it was estimated that the world is 1.5 billion years old, while in 1991 it was estimated that the world was 4.5 billion years old.

Ah, that's right science sometimes changes because of new information so it must be totally wrong.

In fact Mastropaolo has a "calibration equation" he uses that basically seems to break down to claiming that every 1.163 million radioisotope years equals only 10 actual years. So apparently his argument is that 1,163,000 equals 10 and therefore creationism makes perfect sense.  He also believes that there were still dinosaurs around as little as 1,000 years ago.

After a bit of internet searching I managed to find his actual website (Science Supports Literal Genesis) in which I discovered what this "calibration equation" consists of. Part of his argument actually consists of claiming that most societies throughout history until recently believed the earth was younger and assuming that those answers must be the correct ones because they are the more common ones. The argument is based in extremely simply algebra and functionally ignores all of the discoveries in physics and geology that caused scientists to the change the estimates. 

Here is another in his long list of bizarre arguments.

Besides unreliability, another reason for rejecting the radioisotope data was their bias for older ages of the Earth. Note that the estimate in 1921 was 1.5 billion years old whereas the estimate in 1991 was 4.54 billion years old. These data would have us believe that in the 70 solar years from 1921 to 1991 the Earth, and everything on the Earth, aged 3.04 billion years.

It's difficult to tell if he statement is sarcastic or if he legitimately believes that these date changes were actually caused by the mere passage of 70 years and not because of a refinement of radio-isotope dating methods gave us more accurate results.

Over and over again he seems like he creates bizarre arguments to deny scientific consensus in order to justify his conclusions.  So it seems that Mastropaolo's claim that it is impossible to disprove Genesis is true...if you start out by throwing out all the evidence that proves it wrong.

Back from American Atheist convention and other things.

I apologize for not posting much this month, but I have been doing things.

I Spent this week in at the American Atheist Convention in Austin, TX. I met a lot of people in the movement I haven't had the chance to meet before and I learned some great things from the speakers.

Most of the talks haven't been posted on YouTube but I did find the one from Matt Dillahunty on skepticism, so I'll post that for those who are interested.

AACON 2013 Matt Dillahunty speaks on Skepticism and Atheism

Here is a few pictures I got at the convention:

With Darrel Ray, author of Sex and God

With Dan Fincke from Camels with Hammers

With a new friend Ben Conner at the pub crawl on Saturday

Some random guy at the bar who jumped into the photo
I don't know who he is.

A photo I took of my leg and a table by accident.

I also did a debate on  March 25th about gay marriage with Vocab Malone, you might remember him as the guy I debated abortion with a few months ago. We touched a a number of topics in the debate some of which we didn't have a change to delve into deeply, and both of us brought up a lot of statistics. I was planning a post to go up when the episode is posted, but it was ending up crazy long so I'm probably going to break it into four of five posts dealing with topics separately. I'm still putting some time into researching a couple of the statistical claims my opponent brought up, since many of the claims he brought up can be found on hundreds of websites most of sites by fundamentalist Christians with clear anti-gay biases,  it makes finding the legitimate published studies or even an abstract difficult. Even then one has to read the study to see if the conclusions reached by Vocab and other fundamentalists are legitimate conclusions to reach from said study.

This is often the way it is with debates, particularly ones that involve statistics. It is incredibly easy to make a claim, but as a skeptic I don't want to dismiss a claim without giving a proper reason so it can often take much longer to debunk a claim than to make it. I'll wait until the actual debate is online in a week or two to post anything though.

Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council explaining why single people shouldn't have sex.

Here is another in a long list of articles published by conservative religious groups who think the sky is falling down because people have sex. Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council complains that some people have sex without his permission.

The Supreme Court's First Assault on Marriage

Patrick Fagan is angry about Eisenstadt v. Baird, a supreme court case from 1972 in which they ruled that the government does not have the right to make laws barring single people from purchasing contraception.

He makes a lot of outlandish and bizarre claims in this article so lets look at a few.

The Court played God by redefining the purpose of sexuality. In the process it unleashed sex’s destructive power detached from marriage. 

First off this is built upon an argument that allowing single people to have contraception will cause them to have all sorts of sex they would not have had otherwise. This is quite frankly false, people have been having sex outside of wedlock since always and the invention of marriage did nothing to curb it. The court did not redefine the purposes of sexuality. Human sexuality is about more than procreation and has been since there have been humans.

Since then, the community has been paying to raise children born outside wedlock. The cost comes in the form of welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, supplementary education, costlier child and adult health bills, more prisons, addiction centers, and mental health services. The list goes on and on, now cumulatively and possibly to the tune of trillions of dollars.

He suggests here that all this contraception somehow led to more children born out of wedlock and is somehow also causing us to spend more money on other government programs. First off the notion that making contraception more available leads to more pregnancies is not only wrong, it is absurdly wrong since the goal of contraception is to stop unplanned pregnancies.  First, there is no evidence that people start having more sex when they have access to contraception than when they do not, secondly when properly used most contraception is very good at preventing pregnancy and third teen pregnancy rates are lower now than they have ever been in U.S. history. The highest year for teen pregnancy in the U.S. was in 1957, long before this court case.  Check my article here for some more stats on this.

As far as the claims about higher government costs, what is the evidence that any of these higher costs (assuming they are in fact higher) were caused by contraception access?  He acts as if it were obvious, but it strikes me as an overly-simplistic explanation.

He also goes on to blame planned parent hood on single parent families, but eliminating unplanned pregnancies is one of their goals, one they would be able to meet much better if certain conservative religious groups like Family Research Council stopped trying to shut down their funding at every turn.

Prior to that time, those who intended to raise children together were expected by tradition, common sense, and culture to marry first. The law protected these expectations.

A statement that is not entirely true. I would agree that due to the path our evolution took pair bonding is the most common form of relationship in most societies, but there have been and still are many successful human societies that do not work this way, so claims that we are doomed if we do things any other way are simply scare tactics not based upon real facts.

This interdependence plays out in the raising of children. They grow quickly to become the actors in each of these realms, and if they come from broken families, they generally bring lessened capacities to these tasks in their own lives and to the institutions involved in the functioning of society.

This statement just seems bigoted against people who come from single parent families, suggesting they are less able than "normal" people. It should be deeply insulting to people from single parent households.

In America, the chaos from Eisenstadt must eventually be checked. If not by the Supreme Court and Congress, then by whatever government will follow after the collapse of our present order. Sexual license and republican liberty cannot live together. One of them will supplant the other. Either we become a sexually restrained people—a form of self-control needed for institutions that depend on liberty—or, as we become more and more sexually unrestrained, we will need the all-helping state to do what we won’t be able to do for ourselves and our children.

There is something odd  about this argument, since he is arguing that in order to be free of control from the "all-helping state" we must submit to state regulations telling us who we can sleep with and when. This is clearly theonomy, but I suppose he thinks that is a good idea.

Of course he ends his article mentioning how he hopes that the decisions on the current supreme court cases of Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor will protect marriage ( I.E. make sure all those people he doesn't agree with don't get their civil rights).

I too hope these decisions will be a new beginning to our country. I hope that the supreme court will send a message to the Patrick Fagan's of this country that their hateful attitudes and opinions are no longer welcome here. I'm sure there are a lot of racists out there who don't like the Loving v. Virgina decision either, yet I don't lose a bit of sleep at the thought of racists feeling disenfranchised with the U.S. government. I have no patience at all with people who believe they have the right to use the government to tell me where I can legally stick my penis.

Science reporting on evolution still bad

Ran across this article last night.

Have scientists discovered reversible evolution?

The article is about evidence that dust mites who are currently parasites may be evolving into a free living organisms. The reason it is talked about as reverse evolution is because dust mites used to be free living organisms before they became parasitic. The article is written as if the author is presenting a startling new find that is over turning scientists previous belief that evolution does not work in reverse. The idea that evolution is working towards some sort of goal is inaccurate

The main problem here is that the author seems to confuse the evolutionary process which is basically genetic variances, with the taxonomical or behavioral changes that are sometimes produced. That is, in order for evolution to reverse the species would have to follow the exact same genetic changes one step back at at time, considering all of the possible variances it is easy to imagine that, while this is technically possible, it is not very likely. This is actually a concept called Dollo's law of irreversibility.

However, it is entirely possible for a species to follow an evolutionary pathway that leads something very similar behavior or taxonomy to an earlier or separate species. It's called Convergent evolution and we have know about it for a long time because there are already examples of it everywhere. For instance, most birds, many insects, and bats all use wings to achieve flight but the genetics that created those wings are each completely different, and we can see this in taxonomical differences in these wings. Another good example is whales who, despite their earlier ancestors moving out of the water, moved back into it. They did not stop being mammals but they did evolve many traits to deal with aquatic living that are very similar to fish. Again whales did not go backwards, they did not use the same genes as fish, they evolved a new set of genes that created similar taxonomy.

There is nothing to suggest that dust mites have followed some path backwards to an earlier form, but why should the facts get in the way of science reporters making up attention grabbing headlines on their articles to increase their readers? People will know what they really mean right? It's not like there are systematic misunderstandings of evolution in this country or anything.