A Comprehensive Pro-Choice Ethic

A protester holding a sign that says, "Health care is a human right." Image source.

Occasionally I see "pro-life" people advocating for the idea of a comprehensive pro-life ethic. Typically when people use the term "pro-life", it means "abortion should be illegal" and that's it. But, those who have a comprehensive pro-life ethic say that's not good enough. Pro-life can't just mean you care about protecting an unborn baby's life, but the moment they're born, you don't care any more. People who are truly pro-life are anti-war. They oppose the death penalty. They want gun control. They support universal health care.

I like that. If you're gonna be pro-life, be that kind of pro-life person. Provided, of course, that you recognize that abortion may be necessary to save a pregnant person's life. The most obvious cases are where the pregnancy is causing a life-threatening medical problem- but abortion may save someone's life in a less direct way than that. Domestic violence victims are more at risk of being murdered by their abuser if they are pregnant. 

Usually I put "pro-life" in scare quotes because it's not about life at all, it's just about banning abortion. But hey, if you really do have a comprehensive pro-life ethic, I won't even put it in scare quotes. You really are pro-life. 

I'm thinking about how to conceptualize something similar for pro-choice ideology.

I always felt like the pro-choice movement wasn't really *for* me, because I have kids and I'm happy being a mom. Sure, I can help out the movement by talking about how my experience of pregnancy was so bad, and no one should have to go through that if they don't want to- but it's not *for* me. It's for women who want to have sex but not have babies. Right?

(Note, though, that a high percentage of people who have abortions already have kids. [This data from 2019 says it's 60%.] The stereotype of the slut who just wants to have sex with whoever, and hates children, is not at all representative of who is actually getting abortions.)

Anyway, when I watched the video from the Democratic National Convention this year, and saw Kate Cox there representing Texas, along with Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, that really affected me. 

(If you haven't heard about Kate Cox, here's her story: She was pregnant, and then found out her unborn baby had a health problem and would not survive, and that for the sake of her own health and her ability to have another pregnancy in the future, it would be best for her to have an abortion. But she lived in Texas, and it was a whole ordeal which was in the news, about whether of not the state of Texas would let her have an abortion. Eventually she went to a different state and had an abortion. This situation was very shocking because of how clear-cut it seemed to be- Cox was basically a "perfect victim"- she's white, married, she's already a mom, and it was a wanted pregnancy. And there was no way her unborn baby would be able to survive. And still, Republican politicians in Texas did not allow it.)

The video from the Democratic National Convention serves as an update on what happened to Kate Cox after that. She got pregnant again, and fortunately, this pregnancy has not had any massive problems like that, and she's looking forward to a healthy baby who will be born in January. And everyone cheered. Everyone is happy for her. The former president of Planned Parenthood is happy for her. (Here's a link to the video- but I'll warn you it's sad to watch because everyone is talking about Kamala Harris being president, but that is not gonna happen.)

Seeing that video, I was struck with this thought, "what if the pro-choice movement really is about choice?" Here's someone who wants to be pregnant, wants to have a baby, and she gets pregnant and decides NOT to have an abortion, and as pro-choice people we celebrate that. In Cox's case, actually, she wanted to have another child, and an abortion was a necessary step on the way to reach that goal- because the complications in her pregnancy meant that there was a risk she would be infertile. She wanted to have another baby, and having an abortion was a means to get there. 

Maybe that's what it's about. 

In the "pro-life" movement, they talk about pro-choice people as if pro-choice people just really love killing babies, and twirling our mustaches evilly or something. But what if the pro-choice movement is actually like this: It's not about celebrating abortion as a good thing in and of itself. (Actually, in an ideal world, nobody would be in a situation where they need an abortion.) It's about being able to choose the life you want for yourself, and sometimes abortion is needed in order to get there. 

So we want to protect people's right to have an abortion, if they want to. And in the same way, we want people to be able to have babies, if they want to.

If we want to be comprehensively pro-choice, that requires a whole lot more than just "abortion is legal."

What if someone wants to have a baby, but for various practical reasons they feel like it's not really possible, and their only real option is to have an abortion? This is not okay. To be truly pro-choice, we need to address the problems that restrict people's choices in this area. It is very expensive to pay for prenatal care and hospital bills for childbirth- being truly pro-choice means supporting universal health care. It means society needs to implement policies that will help people get out of poverty- everything about kids is expensive, and that's one of the big reasons people have abortions.

And remember earlier I mentioned that victims of domestic violence are more likely to be murdered if they are pregnant? If we say "okay, then they can get an abortion, for their own safety", that is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. No one should be in a situation where they have to choose between their pregnancy and their safety; that's terrible. What changes does society need to make to keep people safe from abuse? We need to advocate for all those things, in order to be truly pro-choice.

But let's take it farther than that.

I always hear politicians saying "women can make their own choices about their bodies." This is nothing more than a euphemism for "abortion is legal" (or, possibly, "abortion is legal and accessible"). I don't like that. I want to live in a world where "women can make their own choices about their bodies" means exactly that.

Certainly that includes abortion access, but it includes so much more than that.

Let's start with giving birth. Giving birth is scary, and some people have traumatic experiences, or problems come up- and I sometimes hear moms reassuring each other by saying "the only thing that matters is that the baby is born healthy." 

I disagree with this.

If you have a traumatic birth experience because the medical staff don't respect your right to make informed decisions about your own body, that is not okay. That matters. If people tell you that your trauma doesn't matter because your baby turned out fine, they're wrong.

For example: if people are pressuring you to get an epidural during childbirth, or to not get an epidural, that's NOT COOL. It should be your decision.

I've heard about hospitals which recommend C-sections to birthing women at a higher rate than is necessary, because that's what's more convenient for the hospital. (This is an issue in China- I don't know about in the US.) For a C-section, the hospital can control the timing and the entire process. When there are lots of women giving birth there, it's hard to allocate rooms for all of them, and you don't know how long it will take to have a natural labor and vaginal birth- it's easier to just do C-sections. 

But a C-section is a major surgery; you shouldn't do that unless there's a good reason. 

Another example about giving birth: VBAC. (Vaginal birth after C-section.) This means that in a previous pregnancy, the person gave birth via C-section, and now in their current pregnancy they would like to try to give birth vaginally. Vaginal birth is better in terms of the recovery process for the birthing person- but VBAC is riskier than a vaginal birth in someone who doesn't have a C-section scar. The scar might rupture during labor. You need to be aware of the risks of trying this. You need a doctor with experience. 

All of this should be included in what people mean when they talk about "women can make decisions about their own bodies."

And so many other aspects of pregnancy. When you're pregnant, you always get random people trying to police what you eat, or telling you you're gaining too much weight... Emily Oster's book "Expecting Better" (which I reviewed here) was all about giving pregnant people the data they need to make choices during pregnancy, because typically that data isn't really available. It's about making choices during pregnancy, but I'm not talking about abortion. Even though this is for people who are NOT having abortions, it's an important pro-choice area.

And let's talk about breastfeeding and "making choices about your own body." Many people are pressured to breastfeed, or pressured to not breastfeed, or shamed and treated like they're a "bad mom" because of whether or not they breastfeed. Not cool. First of all, don't judge people for this. But, more important than that is people need to have the resources and support they need if they want to breastfeed. You need information about what to do- it's not straightforward. Maybe you need a lactation consultant who can give you hands-on instruction. If you have a full-time job and you want to pump milk, you have to buy a pump, and you need your boss to give you break time during the day, and a private room where you can pump.

Breastfeeding isn't something you can just do all in your own power- you need to be in an environment that has the necessary resources and support.

Okay, let's expand this pro-choice ethic to other areas of women's health care.

I've heard some women talk about being prescribed birth control when they were teenagers, because of acne or some other problem like that- not because they were having sex. And, looking back on it, they are unhappy about how they had to deal with a lot of bad side effects from the birth control hormones, and they feel like they didn't really have a choice. It was just "well we tried various things and they didn't solve your acne problem, so the next step is to take birth control" and that's that, and as a teenager they didn't have a real choice.

I've also heard that it's very painful to get an IUD inserted, and it's common that doctors don't inform patients about the pain, or offer any anesthesia or pain medication. Not cool. Are the people who talk about "women have the right to make choices about their own bodies" going to do something about this?

Or the many other scenarios where women's medical issues are not taken seriously by doctors. Being comprehensively pro-choice means having a society where women really are given the support and resources and information they need to make medical decisions for themselves.

But actually, this shouldn't just be about women, and/or people who can get pregnant. Everyone, of any gender, should have the freedom, information, and resources to make medical decisions for themselves.

This is something I've blogged about before, in the context of the question "what should consent look like for children in a medical setting?" I'm very interested in the concept of consent as it relates to health care.

You may have noticed that this "comprehensive pro-choice ethic" is in no way the opposite of a "comprehensive pro-life ethic." There's a huge amount of overlap. Many policies, such as universal health care, very obviously belong in both. People who are truly pro-life and people who are truly pro-choice should all advocate for universal health care. I mean, I don't want to spin this as "we have so much in common so let's just forget about abortion and focus on those other things instead"- I do think abortion access is very important. But being pro-choice shouldn't only be about abortion. It should be about "the right to make choices about your own body" in all health care areas.

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This post is part of the October/November 2024 Carnival of Aces. The topic is "sexual healthcare."

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Related:

What Pregnancy Taught Me About Being Pro-Choice 

"Expecting Better": Asking the Right Questions About Pregnancy 

Don't You Think If It Was Possible To Re-Implant Ectopic Pregnancies, We Would Already Be Doing That?

"Life's Work" (read this book and become even more pro-choice) 

Why I Am Pro-Choice 

On Gynecologists and Angry Turtles 

Boundaries With Dentists

Doctors (part 3 of Autism & Teaching Kids to Protect Themselves)

"Afraid of the Doctor" (I read this book because I have medical trauma) 

I Don't Want My Baby To Be "Brave"

Blogaround

1. RIP Tony Campolo (1935-2024) (November 20) "It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming."

2. Journal Club: The Bedroom and the Laboratory (November 20) "This chapter discusses some of the problems with the methodologies used in sex therapy, and the clinical study of sexuality." This was really eye-opening to me. I had always assumed sexology was about getting to the bottom of the grand mystery of why people like to have their partner do things to their genitals. Turns out it's not. Turns out it's the same confusing concepts of "how do I increase my sex drive" etc.

3. D&D Combinatorics (November 22) Love this xkcd.

4. House passes bill that would allow Treasury to strip nonprofits of tax-exempt status (November 21, via) "The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday that would authorize the treasury secretary to designate nonprofit organizations as supporters of terrorism and strip them of tax-exempt status." This is worrying.

5. The Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool (via) The CDC has a little interactive tool which can recommend vaccines you may need. Cool!

6. Sarah McBride And The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Criticism (November 24) "If McBride is caving in fear (and Yr Wonkette does not think she is), that’s not McBride’s fault. That’s the fault of 200 House Dems and 200 million Americans who oppose anti-trans bullying and could choose to step up (or step up more) but don’t."

So the story here is that Sarah McBride is the first trans person to be elected to Congress, and the Republican members of Congress are being weird about it and making rules that she can't use the women's bathrooms because she counts as a man. McBride responded by saying she will follow the rules; her intention is not to get involved in that drama but to do the work that her constituents elected her for.

Some trans people and allies have criticized McBride for not fighting back. (See this post from Erin Reed.) The post I'm linking here is from Crip Dyke, who says it's NOT COOL that people are criticising McBride for this.

Yes- she is the first trans Congress person, she is going to have to deal with a lot of this kind of bigotry, and you can't expect her to respond in whatever way *you* think a perfect activist would respond. She's just 1 person. It's not fair to put all that on her. Really, this is a moment where allies need to step up and take a stand against the bigots, rather than expecting McBride to do that all by herself.

Also, initially when I read McBride's statement that she would "follow the rules as outlined", I took that to mean she would use the men's bathroom (and maybe this would be a form of protest- everyone would see how ridiculous it was that she is forced to use the men's bathroom). But then after reading Erin Reed's article, I thought maybe trans people don't really consider that a real option because of the worry of being harassed in the bathroom, and actually this means McBride is gonna have to walk all the way to wherever the gender-neutral bathroom is, and it will be a huge inconvenience for her and won't affect the Republican bigots at all. But then Crip Dyke's article talked about getting a bunch of trans people together to protest by using the bathroom the bigots apparently want them to use. So. It could go either way I guess.

7. The Sanitary Pad Scandal Causing Uproar on Chinese Social Media (November 26) "In one clip, an influencer measures the lengths of the absorbent pads inside products made by leading Chinese brands including ABC, Sofy, and Space 7, and compares them with the product sizes listed on the packaging, which refer to the total pad lengths." 

Here's something really interesting about China: The lengths of pads (in cm or mm) are very explicitly advertised. Like it will be right there as part of the product name on the packaging. Zero effort is required to see "oh these pads are 25 cm, these pads are 29 cm" and so on. When you buy pads in the US... in the US I never thought about the length in inches or cm. (Assuming nothing has changed since I bought pads in the US a decade ago.) You have "long" or "super long", or you have "day" vs "night" with "night" being designed to go much farther in the back- but does anyone ever think about "well how many inches is that?" I'm sure you could find it in the fine print on the packaging in the US, but it's not big and obvious like in China.

Blogaround

1. You Can Buy A Malaria Net (November 7) "My ability to buy a bednet isn’t dependent on the behavior of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I can buy a bednet even if Joe Biden waited too long to drop out of the race, or the Kamala Harris campaign was too risk-averse, or the Democratic Party elites need to do a better job of disciplining their base. Buying a bednet in no way requires appeasing the Americans with the most confused, ignorant, incoherent, and self-contradictory beliefs, otherwise known as 'swing voters.'"

2. Steps For Transgender People Preparing For Federal Crackdowns Under Trump (November 12)

Also from Erin Reed: Opinion: The Trans Sports Attacks Were Never About Sports (November 16) "But by the end of 2023, the reality was clear: every state that passed a transgender sports ban went on to enact some of the most draconian anti-trans laws in history."

3. The 5Ds of Bystander Intervention (via) 

4. Elon Musk is sued over $1 million election giveaway (November 6) 

5. Sub-Radio - Bi Bi Bi (2023)

6. redbeardace says sex is like "bins at the Goodwill Outlet" and I love this analogy.

7. Harris lost the war of “ambient information” (November 18) "That’s how you wind up with a result like this: Harris won handily among people who were paying attention, but got clobbered among voters who just 'knew things' without checking them out."

Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. Image source.

I've been reading Wilda Gafney's book "Womanist Midrash," and it's got me thinking about the story of Michal, in the bible. Let's talk about Michal.

Specifically, I want to talk about the scene where Michal judges David for how he worships God. But, "Womanist Midrash" has made me realize we can't just look at that 1 passage by itself. We need the whole history between David and Michal, the way he treated her. So here it is:

• Michal was one of Saul's daughters. Saul was chosen by God to be the king, but later God rejected him and chose David instead. So you've got this awkward period of time where Saul is still the king, but David has God's promise that someday he'll be king, and there's conflict between Saul and David because of that.
• Anyway, Saul sees that his daughter Michal loves David, so Saul tells David he can marry her, and the bride-price is 100 Philistine foreskins (wtf). Saul hopes that maybe David will die in battle fighting the Philistines. But David succeeds and comes back with 200 Philistine foreskins (WTF). So he and Michal are married.
• Then Saul decides to kill David. He sends men to David's house. Michal helps David escape out of the window, and she lies to the men, saving David's life.
• While David is on the run, he marries a few other women: Abagail and Ahinoam. Saul ends up giving Michal in marriage to another man, Paltiel.
• Oh and at some point David married 4 additional women: Maakah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah.
• Years later, after Saul dies, Saul's son Ish-Bosheth becomes king. There is conflict between David's supporters and Ish-Bosheth's supporters. Finally, Abner (who was originally on Saul's side) comes to David to negotiate how to make David king. One of David's conditions is that Michal comes back to him. So, she is forcibly taken from her husband Paltiel, who follows after her, crying, until Abner tells him to give up and go home.
• Even though David and Michal were "together" again, it seems he wasn't having sex with her, or acting like a husband at all really. We can infer this because he's having lots of babies with his other wives, but none with Michal.
• And then, after all this, we come to the scene where Michal criticizes David for how he worships God. Now, after establishing all this history, we can talk about that.

2 Samuel 6:12-23

Now King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the Lord. After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty. Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”

David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.”

And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

Back when I was a good evangelical, "on fire for God," I loved this passage. I danced at church when we sang worship songs, and I had complicated feelings about it... I felt good, I loved God and wanted to express it in that way, but I also felt very self-conscious and kinda embarrassed. What if everyone is looking at me and thinking I'm weird? What if I'm bad at dancing? What if this is just super awkward?

I always heard Christians say "worship is just you and God." Meaning, we shouldn't care what people think. We should just repress those feelings of embarrassment; all that matters is that in God's eyes, you're genuinely expressing your worship towards Them.

And I truly believed that was the ideal. I strove to worship God in all the big wild ways I wanted to, and to repress my fears that I was being weird and people were judging me. This passage about David was an inspiration to me. The way I understood it, David was being a role model of what worship should be like, dancing in the streets without caring about how weird he looked, and Michal was being a wet blanket and judging him. She was in the wrong, and he told her so. He even told her "I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes." That verse was one of my favorites. It's all about expressing our love for God, I thought, regardless of what other people think.

(There's even a song about it, "Undignified" by David Crowder Band.)

But now that I'm reading "Womanist Midrash," which has a section on Michal, tying together all these events from her life, giving the reader a clear picture of how David and Saul mistreated her throughout her life, now I'm seeing 2 Samuel 6 completely differently.

Now I see it like this:

When Michal judged David for how he worshiped God, it wasn't about "wow you look so weird, dancing in the streets in your underwear, you should feel embarrassed about that."

Instead, her feelings were more like this: "You love God? You love God? After what you did to me, you have the audacity to go out there in public and act like you're just so wholeheartedly devoted to God? Come on."

She had loved him. She saved his life. And he used her as a political pawn in his quest to become king. (Both David and Saul used her in their struggle for power.) He tore her away from her husband, purely as a symbol of his dominance over the house of Saul, and then he didn't even seem to want her as a wife. Just the status, no actual relationship.

You can understand how, if someone treats you like that, and then they're like "I LOVE GOD SO MUCH, I SIMPLY MUST DANCE," you might hate them.

It's like the apostle John says in 1 John 4:20, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." David treats Michal this badly, and then he's all excited about worshipping God- no. Michal doesn't buy it.

It's like Jesus said in Matthew 5:23-24, "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." I remember reading that long ago, reading it as Here Are The Rules For How To Worship Correctly. The hoops that God has arbitrarily set up for us to jump through to get our worship to "count." But wait a minute, maybe it's not about that at all. Maybe Jesus is saying, if you've wronged someone, you need to go make it right, and that's a higher priority than coming to church to participate in "worship."

Maybe Jesus is saying, your relationships with other people have to come first, before your relationship with God. It's not "just you and God."

I think of Michal looking out her window at the way David performed his worship in front of everybody, playing the part of "a man after God's own heart," and I think of sexual abuse coverups in the modern church. Victims are told that they shouldn't speak up, because their abuser is such a good man of God, doing great things for God's kingdom, and to tell the truth about their abuse would [supposedly] be going against God's work.

She saw David dancing, and "despised him in her heart." We see an echo in the words of God, in Amos 5:21-24,

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

    your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

    I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

    I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

    righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Michal was right.

Let justice roll like a river. And after that, you can dance for God.

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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

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Related:

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

The things I've never let myself say about worship 

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)

Roundup of Vaginismus Posts

Machinery with tight bolts. Image source.

The topic of the October/November 2024 Carnival of Aces is "sexual healthcare." I've blogged a lot about my own experiences with vaginismus, so now I'm gathering the best ones into a convenient list. Here they are:

How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)

On Gynecologists and Angry Turtles

That happened to me too 

Separating Vaginismus From Asexuality

Sea Monsters on Land, and My Life With Vaginismus

Vaginismus Is Not A Problem, In And Of Itself 

When the Teacher Says, "Don't Look at Your Report Card" 

So this is new

Blogaround

1. Do not obey in advance (November 9) Yes, good advice. I think right now people are feeling like, the orange antichrist won and he'll have the power to actually implement all the bad ideas he campaigned on. And, yes, maybe, but he'll have to do a lot of work to get there- maybe his people will be incompetent. Let's hope for that. Don't act like he's already done it. Don't help him along.

2. Links to donate to help Palestine: Palestine Children's Relief Fund and American Near East Refugee Aid 

3. This Was Always Going To Be A Generational Fight For Transgender People (November 7) "To those who feel hopeless—don’t. The story didn’t end in 2004. Obama would eventually go on to champion gay rights, and public opinion shifted significantly over the next decade. Allies stood by gay people and grew in number, helping to foster broader acceptance. Anti-gay policy platforms slowly but surely became positions held only by the most fundamentalist religious politicians."

4. Number Shortage (November 8) Lolllll

5. We Fell For The Oldest Lie On The Internet (October 29, 13-minute video from Kurzgesagt) Love this! It's a video about tracking down the source for the "science fun fact" that the total length of all blood vessels in a person's body is 100,000 km.

6. She Helped a Survivor. Now She Is One. (October 25) "One thing that struck me repeatedly in this is that some level of fact-checking would have debunked some of these claims much earlier, if someone had had the presence of mind to attend to them (I dearly wish Abby had simply taken a medicine vial out of the trash and photographed the label — Abby does too). But these claims weren’t fact-checked, because to investigate the belief that someone you love isn’t telling you the truth is incredibly frightening. They weren’t fact-checked because the people who knew the facts were exhausted, caring for a newborn, toddler, and adult. They weren’t sleeping. They were largely isolated from others and had been pressured by someone they cared about deeply not to tell anyone what was happening in their home. They didn’t just do it out of fear of the next blow-up, and exhaustion. They did it out of love. They wanted this woman who they cared about to be happy and safe."

Very long post from Laura Robinson about Hannah-Kate Williams (a survivor of child abuse) and Abby Osborne, who opened her home to Williams and helped her with medical care and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for Williams' expenses- Abby has now come forward to say that Williams was dishonest and manipulative and all of this has been very harmful to Abby and her family. 

It's important to be honest about stories like this. Simplistically, we want Williams to be on the "good" side because she's an abuse survivor and she's involved in legal advocacy to hold the Southern Baptist Convention accountable for that. And so, we feel like we're not "supposed" to say anything bad about her. That's messed up.

7. Human Nature, Hope & Ice Cream (November 9, 11-minute video) A video from Pop Culture Detective making the case that it's NOT true that human nature is basically evil.

8. Two kinds of LLM hallucinations (November 13) "It’s not just about models saying something wrong, it’s about the way they say it. People are used to expressing some degree of uncertainty when they feel uncertain, and used to picking up uncertainty in other people. AI models often lack these signs of uncertainty, and this can be a problem in natural conversation. However, this subject is not discussed at all in the review, and so it appears not to be a major research area."

9. The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself. (November 11) Posting this here because wow I've never heard of anything like this before. Imagine a world where a political party is manifested as a local group of real-life people who meet up and get to know each other, and support each other.

10. How Originalism Ate the Law (May 8, via) "They understand intuitively that while public opinion favors reproductive freedom and sensible gun regulations and the right to vote, the MAGA faction of the Supreme Court has found a doctrinal party trick to ensure that nobody can have any of those things because they weren’t protected at the founding or at the time of the Reconstruction Amendments, or whichever point of history the high court deems relevant (it varies)."

And I'm noticing some interesting parallels between "originalism" and how evangelicals read the bible.

The Kleenex Box Guitar is Part of My Culture

The tissue box guitar- with rubber bands and an old paper towel tube. Image source.

When I was a little kid, I remember making this craft: you stretch some rubber bands over an empty kleenex box, and it makes a guitar because the rubber bands are right over the hole. Very cool when you're 8 years old!

I'm American, and I made this kind of kleenex box guitar in the US. Now I live in China, and here's something fascinating: You can't really do this craft in China. Because kleenexes don't come in cardboard packaging. In China, they're in plastic.

Like this:

Package of tissues in plastic. Image source.

So when you use up all the kleenexes, you're just left with a plastic wrapper. You can't make a guitar out of that.

I'm writing about this because it's about culture. The best definition I've heard for "culture" is this: "Culture" is the things that you think of as normal, but they might not be normal for someone else. This little tiny mundane detail- that in the US, tissues are typically sold in cardboard boxes, but in China they're in plastic- and because of that, this kids' craft project has arisen where you make a guitar out of the empty box, but you can't do that in China. 

(And yes, I'm aware that my use of the word "kleenex" also says something about the culture I come from. The "correct" word is "tissue" but I grew up calling them kleenexes. Good luck having anyone in China understand what you're saying if you use the word "kleenex" though. When they learn English, they learn "tissue"- or they just translate from Chinese directly and call it "paper.")

Of course, Chinese culture has other things instead. Off the top of my head, here's one: I started learning to crochet, and I saw this cool crochet project in a WeChat post. (WeChat is the social media app we all use in China.) Here are some photos:

A toy chicken, crocheted out of different colors of yarn. The whole chicken is very triangle-shaped and the side of the body has a really colorful large flower pattern.

Cute! I need to learn how to make these!

I showed them to my husband, and he immediately said, "That looks like a zongzi."

What is a zongzi, you ask?

3 zongzi in a steaming basket. Image source.

These are 粽子 [zòng zi], a food made by taking sticky rice and some kind of filling like meat or red beans, wrapping it all up in leaves in a tetrahedron shape, tying it up with string, and then steaming it. They are the traditional food for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday in June.

So I scrolled up on the crochet chicken post, and sure enough, the page title says this is a guide to crocheting "粽子鸡", zongzi chickens. 

I know what zongzi are, but I hadn't noticed that these chickens look like zongzi. My husband noticed right away because he's Chinese.

This is culture. The little everyday objects, which people can creatively reimagine as something else- but it shakes out different depending on what "everyday objects" you have.

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Related:

I Didn't Know I Had a Culture Until I Lost It

Tipping, Fruit, and Jesus 

Chinese Jokes Make Me Think About God

"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" is About Being an Immigrant

Keep Helping Each Other

Image text: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" - Mr. Rogers. Image source.

The orange antichrist won the election. Now we're in this weird situation where we know it's gonna be bad, but we don't know how. We can just hope he doesn't actually do all the bad things he said he'd do. (Be a "dictator on day 1", etc...)

What I want to say is, there are things we can do to make this not as bad as it could be. In every crisis throughout history, there have been ordinary people, doing what they could to help their neighbors- making it not as bad as it could have been. 

So don't give up. You can make a difference. Help each other.

What I'm doing, since I'm not physically in the US, is making recurring donations to organizations that help people who will be targeted by his bad policies. This is a great way to help- if you're able, give $10/month, or whatever amount you can. Here is a list; please feel free to leave comments if you have more recommendations.

Immigration:

• RAICES 
  
• Find an organization in your local area which helps immigrants, and donate to them. I think this is really important- working with immigrants directly, getting them connected to communities which can help them and protect them.

Trans people:

• Transgender Law Center 
  
• Also it would be good to donate to a charity that helps trans people with funding for medical care, but I don't know of one offhand- leave a comment if you have a recommendation.

Abortion:

• National Network of Abortion Funds 
  
• Planned Parenthood 
  
• And it's good to donate to local organizations because they know the challenges in their specific area and they help people directly.

Rights/ democracy:

• American Civil Liberties Union 
  
• Common Cause
  

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Okay, I can't think about the problems of the world right now. I'm gonna look through my drafts and find the most whimsical, low-stakes blog post and that will be be next thing I post. 

Blogaround

1. A Special Monologue for the Republican in Your Life (October 30) Video from Jimmy Kimmel, making the argument that Trump is unfit to be president. This is meant to speak to the average Republican, and mainly shows clips of Trump, so you can see for yourself what he is really like.

2. A few xkcd comics that made me laugh: Wells (October 28) and Demons (November 1)

3. Say their names: Savita. Josseli. (October 30) [content note: it's about women who died because they were unable to get abortion care] "It took six years, but there was a direct line from Savita Halappanavar’s agonizing, preventable death to the amendment of Ireland’s Constitution in 2018."

4. UNICEF warns of 'deadly' effect on Palestinian children after Israel ban on UNRWA (October 31, via)

5. Fairness in Sports (October 13) "If all the ad money spent screaming about trans people in sports were instead spent on providing scholarships, you would have far more new scholarships than there are trans scholarship athletes in the entire country." An article from a trans person, which goes through different levels of sports competition and talks about what policies actually make sense.

Also from Crip Dyke: Pro Publica has it half right. (October 19) "What was remarkable about all this was that in each case [since the 1600s] the people seeking to block some marriages argued that such marriages were anti-god, anti-family, sexually perverted or debauched, prone to illness and encouraging of drug or alcohol abuse."

6. Star Trek Retro Review: "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG) | Alternate Timelines (November 1) "Picard's like, 'whattttt?' Tasha says, 'I talked to Guinan.' Picard's like, 'Oh Jesus, what did she say?'" (27-minute video)

7. Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort (October 30) "But by Sunday, the door knockers were loaded into a rented U-Haul moving van with no rear seating or seatbelts, in a photo and videos viewed by WIRED. 'We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans, and I felt embarrassed and played,' the door knocker tells WIRED."

8. PBS KIDS shows that you totally forgot existed 📺📚🦁 (August 21, 52-minute video) Oh look, it's a video about my childhood. This makes me want to find episodes of "Liberty's Kids" for my son to watch.