Category Archives: Politics

Individualised Subjects

There is a trend in America — and likely elsewhere — to decontextualise events like the mass shooting last week by turning the perpetrator into a completely autonomous, loner, mentally disturbed, ‘sinful’ individual. I’ve heard this from both religious and non-religious people over the weekend. However, I’ve begun to wonder about such a move — especially the last one (the ‘sinful’ part). In discussing this with ministerial figures, they were quick to differentiate ‘killing’ (especially that ‘sanctioned by God’ in the HB/OT) and ‘murder’. For him, at least, there is a prior commitment to accept the literal (well, literal in English at least) wording of the Biblical texts as being directly from God and, therefore, to reject seeing the language of ‘divinely-sanctioned murder’ as political insertions by religious and political leaders of the time. This person was also quick to declare the actions and life of the shooter as ‘sinful’ as a result of his final act. Yet, I wonder if the share of ‘sin’ extends far beyond simply the act of shooting children in a school room. Ignoring the additional argument that ‘guns don’t kill people’, I want to explore the ‘sins’ of the community which far outweigh the shooting of American children.

First, while the shootings occurred in Connecticut, the American military has been involved with an ongoing campaign of murdering people indiscriminately in Pakistan. This includes children just as innocent as those in American elementary schools. When this fact is brought up in conversation, most people shrug their shoulders as if it is an inconsequential number (as is attributed to Stalin: ‘if a person kills a dozen, it is a tragedy; if five million, a statistic’). Interestingly, there was another mass killing on Friday in China. While this did make mention in the news, it was lost soon after in the deluge of speculation about the latest shooting in the US. Apparently, it is only newsworthy to the media when American children are gunned down by posthumously ostracised ‘individuals’.

Secondly, there is the looming question of gun control. This shooting — like the many before it — has rekindled the debate regarding gun control. There is a liberal knee-jerk reaction every time which shuts down this debate in the name of ‘respect for the victims’ — as if it would not be respectful to discuss a way of preventing further instances. It is a myth to say that outlawing handguns and removing them from public access will not affect how ‘criminals’ can acquire weapons — as if there is a gaping hole in the government’s oversight of its borders whereby guns flow freely. I believe the issue stems from an American romance with the Wild West in which laws were suggestions and ‘individuals’ could interpret ethics and legalities by the gun. For these people, outlawing guns would be a tragedy because they think by giving a person a gun, that person is empowered as a defender, equipped with deadly force, trained as sharpshooter, and prepared to become a vigilante at a moments’ notice. Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are not stopped by average citizens with guns (and in fact, those who have tried to do so have become part of the body count) but by people who are actually trained and prepared to deal with mass shooters (i.e. the police and military). In other words, the general American romance with the mythological Wild West is one in which lawmakers and upholders of the law are also individuals decontextualised from their positions as government employees. They are freed from the constraints of the legal system and community mores in order to protect it. The same could also be said of the military. This kind of liminality makes the individual somehow superior to the urbanites who rely on civil services. It also implicates the desire to return to a post-civil society in which laws are relative to the individuals who are the sole and final arbiters of law (a la Judge Dredd).

Third, there is a meta-narrative which develops around each of these shootings whereby the assailant is a mentally unstable individual who must bear the complete guilt, shame, and sin of his actions against a ‘tight-knit’ community. Time and again, the police and the media work together to sell the story of the lone gunman who had serious signs of mental instability and was able to acquire (legally!) numerous weapons prior to his assault on the community. Rarely, if ever, does the ‘tight-knit’ community actually see the warning signs of such an individual, yet they are quick to excuse their own lack of care (how ‘tight-knit’!) for the assailant. In other words, if the assailant is an outcast of the ‘tight-knit’ community, it is mutually decided between the person and the community.

Fourth, the meta-narrative of ‘tight-knit’ communities is made to decontextualise the location from its embedded-ness in a city. Newtown, CT, for instance is a suburb of Danbury and part of the greater New York City region. Columbine is a suburb of Denver. Oftentimes, these ‘tight-knit’ and ‘non-city’ communities are part of an urbanised landscape. However, this decontextualisation is done to fabricate a fantasy of a Wild West town in which legal systems are superfluous and all the citizens of the town are as closely connected as can be without being related.

To speak, then, of the ‘sins’ of the shooter is misleading at best. Had the community been as close to its fantastical utopian narrative as it claims to be, the event of violence which actually occurred would not have happened. The ‘sins’ of the community may be that of the narcissist whereby nothing and nobody is of a concern except for the ‘tight-knit’ community which has a bad history of excluding people who do not fit the orthodoxy of the community. Adam Lanza, for example, was a stranger in his own community, alienated by the very narratives which construct Sandy Hook and Newtown as ‘tight-knit’ communities. If that is the case, then his violence was more than just violence for the sake of violence but also a cry of desperation for the community to see its narcissistic reflection. To put this in terms of ‘sins’, Adam Lanza was the sacrificial scapegoat by which Newtown and Sandy Hook can continue their ‘sinful’ practises of alienating those who live within their borders. Please do not misinterpret me here: yes, Adam Lanza shot and killed dozens of people; however, it is short-sighted to blame him as an individual for the sins of the community which produced him as the alienated individual.

Social Capitalism

I’ve been thinking a lot about the opposition between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ which groups like the Tea Party reinforce. However, I am beginning to think this opposition is artificial in some serious way. By taking the current economic climate as a ‘capitalism in practise’ and following it to its logical conclusion, I want to argue that the end result will largely be no different from ‘socialism’. This is primarily a speculative fiction through which an argument by analogy can be made. My argument hinges on two primary concepts: (1) owners within capitalism will pay as little as possible for everything — labour, goods, etc — and the least they can pay is nothing, and (2) governments take the responsibility for public welfare precisely in the places where ‘normal’ people are unable to afford the ‘luxuries’ of a healthy, productive life.

The current state of affairs is that there is rampant unemployment. One of the dominant ways corporations exploit this is through unpaid (or horribly underpaid) internships whereby a person who needs an income to live ‘normally’ undertakes massive debt to work at below-market rates in order to get a job which pays at market rates. In some places (e.g. Georgia’s Georgia Works program and the new federal ‘Bridge to Work’ variation, UK’s workfare program), the government supports this initiative by pushing unemployed workers currently receiving unemployment funds to work at corporations which do not need to pay for that labour in return. In other words, corporations are receiving unpaid labour while governments compensate the workers involved at rates well below the minimum wage — hence my two central concepts above.

With the continued push for privatisation of every imaginable public service (education, construction, military, prisons, medicine, etc), we are seeing the rise of corporate ownership and control rather than any kind of ‘free market’ idealised utopia which libertarians so desperately want. Combining all of these elements, the logical conclusion is the collapse of a capital-based economy because the majority of people within the system will continue to be institutionally marginalised, de-valued, and discarded as anything but property. People will continue to work, but their subsistence will not come in the form of wages from their employer-owners but in the form of corporate-sponsored social programs which dictate the lives of their worker-slaves from what workers can ‘purchase’ with their work credits to how workers can spend their ‘free time’. A central government will disappear because its primary source of revenue — taxes from the working class — will have dried up; if it continues to exist, it will do so only through loans and bailouts from private corporations which shall use that power to control the social order.

Workers will be evaluated and valued according to their production; those who produce more will be valued more. Teachers will be evaluated according to how many of their students can understand basic instructions to become workers. Universities will be valued according to the direct ‘usefulness’ of their research (which shall be reduced to disciplines in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because they will have become departments of industrial research for their corporate owners. Police and courts will be evaluated according to how many people are disciplined (through tickets and fines which require more work from the workers, or imprisonment for those which reject the corporation’s right to labour). Politicians will become corporate representatives and the political process will become one of agreeing on ways to exploit workers for corporate accumulation of capital. All media (internet, television, films, radio, etc) will be much the same — that is, artificially produced — with the added effect of being 100% propaganda for corporations.

Perhaps my handful of readers are wondering how would this be ‘socialism’. The answer is simple: workers have access to all basics of life — food, shelter, medical care, etc — without a mediating system of exchange (i.e. currency). Everything is reduced to a distorted version of Marx’s labour theory of value. This distortion arose through a capitalist supply-and-demand moment of inspiration: massive unemployment through the replacement of paid human labour by unpaid machine labour has produced an excess supply of labour which has driven down its value to nearly nothing. Every worker in the corporate system is reduced to a status equal to that of machines and nothing they produce has any value (because their labour value is also nothing). Instead, the value which corporations desire is the value of flesh — and they begin to exchange workers and potential workers while simultaneously trying to takeover each other. In the end, only one corporation remains and owns everything. In other words, those owners (which also eventually are reduced to one) have accumulated everything of value because they own the entirety of the planet despite the proliferation of brands which have no actual difference because their products are produced in the same factories by the same workers using the same source materials. The branding of products, corporations, and workers is used to control the workers by making them believe that there is a competition amongst brands and that their brand is demonstrably superior to all others.

The analogy to this fictive dystopia is simple: this planet has limited resources. The logical end of capitalism as it is currently practised and as a ‘free market’ ideal which libertarians and others wish it to become is the kind of future I describe. By going to its logical conclusion (albeit only through speculative fiction), there are clear dangers in taking the existing economy and moving towards a ‘free market’ utopia. The first danger is that it will actually produce a sort of corporate-controlled ‘socialism’ that most proponents despise. The second danger is the abuse of a corporate-government alliance to overstep government boundaries and revoke civil liberties. The obvious response is to increase regulations on corporations and break the marriage between corporations and governments rather than to deregulate, privatise, and lax regulations.

Education for Profit

Open admissions sounds like a good thing. Who doesn’t want to enable people a chance to get a university education? However, this has two major flaws: most students are underprepared academically and, at least in the case of a for-profit institution, there is a distinct cycle of abuse. I will address both of these flaws dealing from my own experience from within an open admission, for-profit university (OAFPU).

Underprepared

The first is fairly straightforward: most students (from my experience) who attend open admissions universities do so because they are unable to gain admission at a ‘normal’ (i.e. selective admissions) university. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Many community colleges are geared towards taking in underprepared students and building up an underprepared student’s knowledge. Some might require a student to first complete remedial courses before enrolling in other courses. This is a good thing because it prepares students for higher education and it prevents the (further) ‘dumbing down’ of courses. However, when remedial courses are prescribed as ‘optional but recommended’, students only harm their own education. For example, at one of the for-profit universities where I have taught, I have found students who are unable to cite material in any format, double-space a paper (in MS Word), or even properly format a header. That’s in addition to having little to no grasp of grammar and spelling. The result is that these students do poorly in written assignments despite having some intriguing content (the university’s grading rubrics require a dedicated grammar component). What’s sad, though, is that this includes students in their third and fourth years of their education.

Connected to being underprepared, I have noticed that most of these students simply do not have the time or effort to do their assigned work. Students rarely, if ever, read the assignments beforehand. In order to fit their schedules, many classes at the OAFPU meet just once per week for four hours each meeting. Oftentimes, the material for one intro-level course is compressed further so that one meeting might cover what other universities might have made into an entire course by itself (e.g. the Mathematics course covers trigonometry in one week, statistics in another, etc). Add into that mix the fact that most students want to leave an hour early because they have to wake up early (as early as 6 hours from the end of class) for work, family, etc. The result of this mix is that the OAFPU has reduced its educational goals to overly-simplified ideas which do not resemble those of a university. For example, it is an institutional requirement that students upon completion of intro level (100/1000) courses are merely able to identify concepts. For a world religions course, this means being able to correlate a pantheon of deities (with names, of course) to Furballism.

Again, this might sound practical, but the way in which it gets executed is horrendous. The tests, as mandated and planned by the institution (i.e. instructors are not supposed to go rogue and make their own examinations), really focus on how well a student can look up the information in their textbook. To suit this end, the institution has created the tests online in their learning management system (LMS) and indicated that these tests are open book and have a very generous time limit (roughly one hour for every twenty multiple choice answers). If an instructor wants to do these in-class (many of my students ask for this because they claim to not have time outside of class to do the tests outside of class), that’s one to two hours less of lecture material. When I have asked about the open book tests, the response from the administration has been that students really only need to learn how to look up information rather than waste their time learning Hamster Fur Weaving or Gerbil Literature (despite these being required general education courses). Oh, and I should not forget that many students arrive late — despite any penalties attached to it. An instructor might only have 30 minutes of good class time in a week if she were to follow the institutional requirements and wait for students to appear.

At the OAFPU, instructors are expected to be engaging and provide a good educational service to their students. This means that instructors should not lecture for more than fifteen minutes at a time, should incorporate ’30-minute documentaries’ (read that as ‘shows from Discovery and History channels’), lengthy group discussions about students’ opinions on the material, and anything else which might involve students. The rationale behind this is based on the theory that ‘adult learners’ are different from other learners and do not wish to ‘suffer through traditional lectures’ but rather want to add their own insight and discuss the material (the same material which they have not read). The institution uses the process of administrative observation to verify that instructors aren’t ‘boring the students with a lecture’. The wondrous observation occurs randomly and consists of the observer counting to see which students are concerned with the class session, regardless of content (i.e. even if the ‘presentation’ is ‘engaging’ according to their plan, students which can’t be bothered to be engaged count against the instructor).

Abused

I now wish to turn to the more important aspect of this post: the cycle of abuse. It is deeply connected to the OAFPU’s ‘commitment’ to educating the underprepared. For students to attend the great OAFPUs, they must, of course, spend money. Tuition at these institutions tend to run much higher than the local public/non-profit open access institutions. Places like the University of Phoenix charge around $10,500* a year for a full-time load over five years in a BA/BS program in business marketing (total is $53k provided that the student does not repeat any classes). In contrast, local open admissions schools cost a third of that price (even their out-of-state/non-resident costs are lower) despite these schools providing the same degree of education with the same schedule flexibility.

Instead, the primary site of financial abuse is through student loans. Like many universities, the OAFPU accepts federal financial aid (loans and grants) as well as other education benefits (e.g. GI Bill). Many students enroll at OAFPU because they will get a refund check from their financial aid. The attendance policy at an OAFPU is very liberal (a student is dropped only if she is marked absent for four consecutive weeks), and the academic integrity policy is a joke (the worst consequence listed is a F for the course in which the student was caught plagiarising — and that’s only if the student is a repeat offender with a major infraction). However, these two policies keep students enrolled so that the university gets profits. This is in addition to the OAFPU’s aggressive policy of getting students to enroll in future terms (regardless of academic standing) and to attend often enough to evade being dropped from their courses. Some of these activities include the administration phoning absent students weekly, the requirement that instructors are also to communicate with the absent student, and paid academic advisers who spend two-thirds of each term phoning students either to enroll or encourage students to communicate with their instructors and attend class.

The worst case of students are those who enroll and attend until they receive their financial aid check. Chances are, these students have no intention of paying back any loans. Rumours have circulated that there is a subset of students who transfer from OAFPU to OAFPU until they are expelled after the many generous probationary terms. However, the generous and liberal nature of university policies which allow these students to persist leads me to suspect that the primary purpose of these policies is so that the university can extract as much profit from these students rather than to attempt to educate them (or remove them if they are not interested in acquiring an education). I believe that is the danger and harm in corporatising education: the goal of profit will always supersede the goal of education often at the expense of education.

To take underprepared and uninterested people as students and cater to their desires (e.g. a degree without any difficult academic work) is a great recipe for profits. However, it is also a horrible recipe for a university; and this is where the corporatised university leads us: the decision to provide education as an institute of higher learning versus the decision to make profits as a ‘student-oriented’ corporation selling an ‘education product’ through ‘engaging lectures’.

 

*NB: Phoenix seems to have two different prices: a nationwide cost per credit hour for ‘lower-level’ courses and a regional cost per credit hour for ‘upper-level’ courses, so the price may fluctuate a bit. I compared the prices for New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Denver, CO; I used the least expensive of the three.

Hermeneutical Jujitsu

One of the intriguing aspects of Trayvon Martin’s death is the hermeneutics implicit in Zimmerman’s ‘self-defence’. For those unaware of the story, here is the oversimplified play-by-play: Trayvon Martin, a teenager, was walking from a convenience store through a neighbourhood in the rain wearing a hoodie. Zimmerman, a late-twentysomething civilian neighbourhood watchman, thought Martin was suspicious and phoned the police to report Martin. Zimmerman then, against the recommendations of the police, followed Martin. There was a confrontation which ended with Martin being shot by Zimmerman (who was armed) and Zimmerman having minor injuries. The case was not investigated at the time because Zimmerman claimed self-defence (he said that Martin, a hundred pounds lighter, knocked him to the ground with one punch then began bashing Zimmerman’s head against the pavement).

Florida has a ‘Stand Your Ground’ law which states that people who feel threatened and are not engaged in a criminal activity have the right to use as much force as necessary to protect life and property. This is what Zimmerman used. However, the theological importance here is hermeneutical. Such a law and application of it reflect the general American evangelical ethos of interpretation, namely that of radical subjectivity and situationalism (contrary to their claims to objective and/or absolute truth). Notice that the law is about how one feels — that is, how one interprets one’s situation — and then authorises the person to act as jury (of their interpretation) and executioner (of the offending object). The only objectivity allowed because of this law is how others would act in the same situation, devoid of any relationship to other laws and ethics. In other words, they argue that because representatives of the legal community (police, judges, etc) are unable to see the event unfold firsthand, those legal figures are also unable to reconstruct them accurately. Therefore, it is up to the individual who feels threatened and non-criminal to decide justice.

This is exactly how American evangelicals treat biblical interpretation: since no human living today was there to witness it, there is no way we can reconstruct reliably the biblical narratives and contexts. Therefore, it is up to the individual who feels spiritual to decide its meaning. This is exactly why beliefs such as premillenialism (e.g. Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth) persist despite scholarly work which has discounted (if not disproven) such. The proponents of these beliefs are, in effect, standing their ground against the threat of the scholarly community. Which is why the scholarly community as a whole is seen with contempt (e.g., they’re not real Christians) because their work which seeks to construct theology and biblical studies through less subjective (though not necessarily objective) means is seen as a threat to the evangelical belief in sola scriptura – radically interpreted to include individual, divergent interpretations — because it means interpretations can be measured and found wanting (we’ll ignore the fact that evangelicals already practise this, though with the understanding that their interpretation is always already ‘correct’). The real threat, perhaps now obvious, is the loss of individual absolute authority over one’s faith to some kind of communal faith (i.e. tradition).

To return to Trayvon Martin, the issue is the same: do individuals have absolute authority to determine that they are threatened and what amount of force is constituted as necessary? States like Florida have argued that individuals do have this authority* to both determine one’s situation as threatened and that no usage of force is too excessive even if the event can be reconstructed to show that both are demonstrably false. As long as Zimmerman remains free without scrutiny, the state of Florida, and perhaps the federal government, believe that individual absolute authority is more important than any kind of social whole such as the state or country which has been created to protect the life, liberty, and property of those who might otherwise be mistreated because of such individual absolute authority. In other words, ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws make it explicit that it is more important for one to feel threatened than for any threat to be proven. They imply that it is more important for one to react with any force necessary to erase such perceived threats than for authorities to protect people’s lives.  Or, in the frame of the Trayvon Martin case: it is more important for Zimmerman to be proven as the victim of a non-crime who acted in ‘self-defence’ than for the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law to be revealed for what it is: the authorisation of untrained individuals to perform the duties which were previously reserved for personnel trained in law enforcement.

 

*NB: Interestingly, police officers acting both on- and off- duty do not normally have this authority. If they shoot someone who they suspect of criminal activity, they are still investigated by other police officers to see if they used excessive force.

Becoming-person

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the politicised topic of abortion. More importantly, I was contemplating the idea of the person as a social construct. This is because, as some may already know, my partner is now pregnant and we are awaiting the birth of our first child. What really struck me is that, for the two of us, the embryo (well, foetus now) had already become a person for us. However, I was also thinking about women who choose abortion and I think that, for them, the embryo/foetus is not (and perhaps will never become) a person. If this is accurate, then this is a huge missing piece of the dialogue surrounding abortion. Basically, the general pro-life camp (and perhaps the pro-choice camp as well) focuses on the biological aspects (i.e. conception as the beginning of personhood) at the expense of the social aspects. However, I wish to look at few different areas which, I think, reconstruct the argument in terms which make most of the common arguments moot. These areas each highlight the ambiguities of the debate and show how the pro-life position is, at times, inconsistent and perhaps even harmful to its strictest proponents.

As I mentioned previously, there is a social process in which what a woman carries becomes a human person. It can be agreed upon that the medical/physical occurrence is no earlier than conception (if only because there is no physical thing to become human before conception). One should note, however, that conception does not usually occur immediately after sexual intercourse. Rather, it generally occurs one to six days later. Something like a ‘morning after’ pill works by preventing fertilisation in the first place and implantation in the second is not, in any legal or medical sense of the term, an abortion despite the pro-life camp’s choice word ‘abortifactant’. In fact, the GOP member of Congress and Presidential candidate hopeful Ron Paul has stated such during televised debates for the 2012 election. By painting emergency contraception (how the ‘morning after’ pill is classified) as early abortions, the pro-life camp not only shows that it does not understand the science behind the medicine, but they also contaminate discussions of ‘normal’ contraception (i.e. regular birth control pills and, to a lesser extent, even condoms). This is because the oral contraception pill does the exact same thing as the ‘morning after’ pill — if not more because it does not simply delay ovulation until fertilisation is less likely. The result here is that a truly consistent pro-life advocate must take the Roman Catholic Church’s official stance that all forms of ‘artificial’ birth control must be rejected. I don’t think the majority of evangelicals in the pro-life movement maintain such an extreme position (especially because oral contraception can be and is used for more than just birth control).

The greater issue, then, is when after conception does the fertilised embryo become a human person and at which point in that process is a safe bet that such is the case. The pro-life proponents tend to want to define this as close to conception as possible. Ignoring the ambiguity of defining exactly when conception occurs, there’s a second hypothetical scenario which makes this definition problematic. This is, of course, the case of a miscarriage. They happen on a frequent enough basis that they merit inclusion in this discussion. Why? Medically (and legally) speaking, every miscarriage* is an abortion (well, ‘clinical spontaneous abortion’). Interestingly, though, there is a difference between the embryo and the foetus. This difference is one of age: it is an embryo for the first eight weeks after fertilisation (or gestation up to the 10th week) before it becomes a foetus. During this transition is the first point a heartbeat can be detected and the embryo/foetus first becomes ‘alive’ and perhaps ‘human’ in the broadest sense of the term. Yet, if conception is used as the definition (even if to ‘err on the side of caution’), the legal implication is that every miscarriage can be interpreted as a criminal act (and worse: if it is defined as day one of gestation, than every menstrual cycle which does not result in pregnancy could also be interpreted as criminal acts). This stirs up many issues regarding women’s rights, but I do not have the time to address them at this time (another post in the future, perhaps?).

There is also a theological aspect. For example, Norman Geisler, the stalwart Christian conservative who has written about abortion for years, wrote as late as 1971 (in his Ethics: Alternatives and Issues) that ‘embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person’ and, for that reason, medically induced abortions should be permitted (source). Geisler was not a lone wolf here: both Christianity Today and Eternity magazines had special issues in the early 1970s which included evangelical Christian theologians arguing for abortion because the embryo (and sometimes even the foetus) was not yet a human person. Even as late as 1984, evangelical institutions had not yet solidified their participation in the pro-life movement. For example, Wheaton College’s student government was unable to make a public resolution advocating a strong pro-life perspective because of massive reactions in their own evangelical community (cf. Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, p 189ff).

The dominant issue, then, is what I have been implicating throughout this post: at which point does an embryo or foetus become a human person (and, theologically speaking, gain a ‘soul’)? It should be clear that it is some point after conception and before birth. Roe v Wade defines this point at viability (that is, around week 24 of gestation when the foetus becomes capable of surviving outside the womb), but the Partial-Birth Ban Act (passed in 2003) makes intact dilation and extraction, or ‘partial-birth abortion’, illegal even if performed before the 24th week. Legally speaking, this is a decent estimate because it disallows interpreting miscarriages as criminal and it serves as a bookend for the process of becoming-human. That is, after becoming viable, the foetus is definitely human. Yet it could be improved upon. Most abortions occur during the first trimester (roughly 87% according to this chart), so it would seem that pregnant women begin to see the foetus as a human person by the 12th week of gestation. If one incorporates the study in this chart (well, the second chart regarding late abortions), this age could be even earlier.

The more important law to consider, though, is the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (passed on 2004) and the 36 states which have similar laws. Why? The text of the law states that certain actions which cause the death of a foetus (e.g. an abortion) can be tried as a criminal act. This is important because it reinforces the social process of becoming-human. These laws imply that for the women who wish to bring their pregnancy to term as well as those who have not yet made that choice (or, in my language, women who reconstruct the foetus as a human person), their foetus is already a human person despite not being born.

The ambiguities continue to abound; however, this makes it possible to distinguish a few features which the arguments surrounding abortion have lacked. First, the foetus is definitely constructed as a human person by the 24th week of gestation. Secondly, pregnant women (and perhaps their partners) decide — often very quickly and much sooner — whether the embryo/foetus is a human person before then. Thirdly, considering that most women do not discover or confirm they are pregnant until the 4th week of gestation and that most abortions occur before the 12th week, it seems safe to say that by the time the embryo develops into a foetus, it has become a human person. With these in mind, I suggest that the embryo is socially transformed into a human person at the same moment it becomes a foetus in the beginning of the 12th gestational week. That is, unless the pregnant woman (and perhaps her partner) decides sooner (or, in my language, opts out of the social process of becoming-human which began at conception).

Lastly, it seems that the best way to encourage women to reconstruct the embryo/foetus as a human person is through encouraging proper birth control rather than insisting on defining the moment of conception as the legal point at which the embryo/foetus becomes a person. Proper birth control usage and family planning gives women (and their mates) the time and space to (1) settle into a partnership (i.e. ‘marry’ in a broad sense), (2) find when they are ready to have children, and (3) encourage them to treat pregnancy, birth, and life seriously through the process of transforming their future embryos and foetuses into human persons before they are conceived.

 

NB: This is after the fourth week of development. Before then, it is simply an ‘early pregnancy loss’.