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Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
Beaumarchais and <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>
The addition to Electronic Enlightenment (EE) of nearly 500 letters from the Beaumarchais correspondence is a significant event in eighteenth-century studies. Drawn from the second volume of Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz’s edited collection, Beaumarchais and the “Courrier de lÉurope”, first published thirty years ago in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, these letters join with 175 letters from the first volume (previously included in EE). The total of 660 letters in this collection include a combination of letters printed in that periodical and letters from public and private collections. (In 2005, von Proschwitz published a selection of 107 of these in a French edition, entitled Lettres de Combat.)
Collectively the letters being published by EE represent the largest tranche of Beaumarchais letters available for online research; moreover, they constitute approximately one third of Beaumarchais letters published to date and over one sixth of all known Beaumarchais letters in existence.
In the context of eighteenth-century correspondences, the Beaumarchais archive stands out for several reasons. The first is the volume of the archive. The known portion of the Beaumarchais papers is over 4,500 documents, constituting one of the largest corpora of eighteenth-century papers known. The full archive, if ever fully inventoried and edited, would run somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 documents. At the upper range it would become among the largest known archives of personal papers of the period.
The second is geographical breadth—from Vienna to Madrid to the Netherlands to England and North America, the Beaumarchais correspondence is important because it shows how actually we limit our understanding if we focus on solely “French” or “Francophone” correspondence networks.
The third is sociological breadth—Beaumarchais as an historical figure offers us insights into the eighteenth century that stand apart from the major figures whose correspondence has been edited and studied. He was an artisan, a musician, a financier, commercial entrepreneur, printer, investor, politician, judge, diplomat, spy, litigant, criminal (he was imprisoned in at least four capitals), husband, lover, brother, father and, of course, a playwright. His correspondence, and thus the network of correspondents connected him to a wider swath of eighteenth-century European and North American society than almost all personal correspondences studied to date, rivaling and perhaps exceeding the Franklin and Jefferson papers in this respect.
The editorial history of the Beaumarchais correspondence extends over two centuries of literary and political history. Since 1809, when the first edition of Beaumarchais’s Oeuvres was published, over 1,500 letters have been edited—though most of them not with the critical apparatus of the Proschwitz letters published by EE—over the course of more than two centuries.
Nearly 500 letters were printed in partial editions of Beamarchais’ work or correspondence, from 1809 to 1929. The first edition of his complete works edited by his amanuensis, Gudin de la Brenellerie (seven volumes, 1809), included 55 letters that Gudin had transcribed. A second edition, by the journalist, historian and politician Saint-Marc de Girardin in 1837 included 53 additional letters. A collection of 29 letters from the Comedie Francaise archives were published in the Revue Retrospective (1836). In his two-volume biography, Beaumarchais et son temps (1858), Louis de Loménie, referenced and included partial transcripts of hundreds of letters, but included in the appendix only 35 complete texts of previously unedited letters. A second biographer, Eugène Lentilhac, in his Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres (1887), included 12 partially transcribed letters not previously published. In 1890, Louis Bonneville de Marsagny published a biography of Beaumarchais’s third (and longest lasting) wife, Marie Thérèse Willermalauz, and claimed to have consulted “sa correspondance inédite” though no letters are reproduced or directly referenced.
In the early twentieth century, the first effort to produce a complete edition of the correspondence was made by Louis Thomas; however, as he explains in the preface to his edition entitled Lettres de Jeunesse (1923), his military service during the Great War put an end to his research; so in 1923 he published 167 letters from the first two decades of Beaumarchais’ adult life, some of which had been previously published. Several years later, in 1929, the eminent French literature scholar in the United States of the day, Gilbert Chinard, edited a collection of Lettres inédites de Beaumarchais consisting of 109 letters acquired by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; these consisted of letters to his wife and daughter.
In more recent decades, over 1,000 additional items have been published, between the edition launched by Brian Morton in 1968, continued by Donald Spinelli, which added an additional 300 previously unpublished letters over four volumes of Correspondence, and then in 1990, the Proschwitz edition.
Proschwitz, a noted philologist, added to these letters the most extensive critical apparatus associated with any edition of Beaumarchais letters. He did not seek to produce a critical edition or a material bibliography of these letters, approaches that are difficult to apply to eighteenth-century correspondence in general and to the Beaumarchais archive in particular. Rather, Proschwitz in his notes emphasized the significance of these documents for our understanding of Beaumarcahis’ life and of the eighteenth century. In these letters, we see Beaumarchais not only as a playwright seeking to circumvent censorship to have Marriage de Figaro finally staged, but also as an entrepreneur, a printer, an urban property owner, an emissary, and a transatlantic merchant. Through this window we have a window on the eighteenth century that is geographically, socially, and culturally much broader and more diverse than what we generally encounter through the correspondences previously published in EE.
With the appearance of these letters and the launching of the first new projects on Beaumarchais’s correspondence in 50 years, including the effort spearheaded by Linda Gil to produce a definitive inventory with a material bibliography, and my own work to analyze the network of correspondents from the known correspondence, this publication in EE offers eighteenth-century scholars new reason to consider a longstanding, but still little understood, figure of the age.
A version of this blog post was first published on Electronic Enlightenment.
Featured image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash (public domain)
Charity and solidarity! What responsibilities do nonprofits have towards Ukraine?
In a speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2022, President Biden called on the UN to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. At least 1,000 companies have left Russia because of Putin’s brutal unprovoked war on Ukraine. Some companies left because of sanctions. Others left for moral reasons, often under pressure from investors, consumers, and out of empathy with their employees in Ukraine. But companies also have human rights responsibilities. Whether they stay or leave Russia will impact the war and human rights of the people of Ukraine. When companies leave en masse, Russia faces the possibility of economic oblivion.
Nonprofits can also impact the war. Russian oligarchs have donated lots of money to cultural organizations, universities, and think tanks, such as Harvard, MOMA, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Many of these donations are tainted by corruption and the close ties oligarchs have with Putin.
Philanthropy is a common way for oligarchs to launder their reputations, sometimes with an eye to future wrongdoing, what social psychologists call moral licensing. Studies show that people often follow their good acts with bad acts as a way to balance out the good with the bad. In the end, whatever good oligarchs do through their giving may be outweighed by the bad they’ve done in the past or will do in the future. But oligarchs are only part of the problem. Nonprofits that solicit and accept their donations are complicit in those harms, too.
What are the responsibilities of nonprofits? How should they meet their moral and human rights responsibilities during Russia’s war on Ukraine? What should we expect from museums, universities, and cultural organizations? If anything, they should be held to a higher standard than for-profit enterprises. After all, nonprofits serve the public good. They may not have had a physical presence in Russia, the way Starbucks and Levi Strauss did, but many of them are connected to Putin by way of Russian oligarchs.
“Philanthropy is a common way for oligarchs to launder their reputations, sometimes with an eye to future wrongdoing.”
Consider Viktor Vekselberg, a prominent Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin and head of the Skolkovo Foundation. Like many Russian oligarchs, he made his money with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Skolkovo Foundation donated over $300 million to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to support Skoltech, a program aimed at developing Russia’s tech sector. Vekselberg also sat on MIT’s Board of Trustees. It was only in 2018, after the US Treasury sanctioned him for “malign activities,” that MIT found the wherewithal to remove him from the Board. And, it was not until Russia invaded Ukraine that MIT ended the Skoltech Program, explaining, “this step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.” MIT finally got it right. Donors, such as Vekselberg, implicate nonprofits in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But had MIT done its due diligence from the outset, it would not have accepted Vekselberg’s donation in the first place. Boycotting oligarchs shows solidarity with the people of Ukraine, while doing nothing renders nonprofits complicit in the human rights violations suffered in Ukraine.
Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest oligarch, has supported the Kennedy Center and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. Until recently, he sat on the Board of Trustees at the Guggenheim, and on the Advisory Board of the Council of Foreign Relations. Potanin resigned from both in April 2022. Although not a Russian citizen, Len Blavatnik is a Russian insider who donated millions of dollars to Oxford, the Tate Modern, Yale, Harvard Medical School, and the Council of Foreign Affairs, to name a few of the elite recipients of his philanthropy. Aaron Ring, a Yale professor who received support from the Blavatnik Fund, called on Yale to suspend the Program. He was concerned that Yale was endorsing the donor. Yale maintained that since Blavatnik had not been sanctioned, his donation could be accepted. During Russia’s war on Ukraine, stakeholders like Aaron Ring don’t want to benefit from Russia’s oligarchs. They want to stand in solidarity with Ukraine.
The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. They hold that enterprises are responsible not only for their direct human rights violations, but also for their indirect ones. So, what counts as an indirect violation in the nonprofit sector? When a nonprofit benefits from donors who are implicated in human rights violations, the nonprofit is complicit in the wrongs of the donors. Many Russian oligarchs are tied to Putin, have profited from their relationship with him, and stand to benefit from his war on Ukraine.
“Boycotting oligarchs shows solidarity with the people of Ukraine, while doing nothing renders nonprofits complicit in the human rights violations suffered in Ukraine.”
When nonprofits refuse to accept donations from oligarchs, they stand in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia. Given the tendency of oligarchs to donate to elite and high-profile organizations, boycotting them may create a bandwagon effect, or a little philanthropy warfare!
Russia has a long record of human rights violations. Freedom of expression is one. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirmed that 82 journalists and media workers were killed in Russia between 1992 and 2022. In 2020, Russia adopted a law banning so called “disrespect” to authorities. Its violation of the fundamental rights of LGBTQ people is longstanding. In 2013, it penalized so called “propaganda” about homosexuality. Activists and celebrities faced fines for supporting the LGBTQ community in Russia.
Now, Russia is under investigation for war crimes such as rape, torture, and execution style murders of civilians. As of 2022, the UN General Assembly resolved that Russia should withdraw its military forces from Ukraine. This came amidst reports of Russian attacks on residences, schools, hospitals, and on civilians, including women, people with disabilities, and children.
Have nonprofits done enough for human rights? No, not when it comes to Russian oligarchs. By laundering the reputations of oligarchs, nonprofits have enabled Putin’s war on Ukraine and the horrific suffering it has brought. The Guiding Principles can help nonprofits identify their human rights responsibilities and ensure that they are not complicit in Russia’s human rights violations. All enterprises should practice due diligence, a mechanism that prevents human rights violations and complicity in them. Refusing donations from Russian oligarchs is the very least nonprofits can do.
Transparency is at the heart of due diligence. Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has tracked which companies left Russia and which have stayed, providing much-needed transparency on the operations of for-profit enterprises. Not only does Sonnenfeld’s list incentivize companies to pull out of Russia, those that left have outperformed those that remained. Unfortunately, no such list exists for nonprofits. Tracking nonprofits with respect to Russian oligarchs, knowing and showing, would go a long way toward ensuring that they meet their human rights responsibilities.
To be sure, there is a risk that nonprofits will receive less money if they boycott Russian oligarchs. But it is also possible that they will be rewarded for doing the right thing, as Hands on Hartford was when it refused donations from the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group. Generous donors may come forward when they learn that nonprofits stand in solidarity with Ukraine. Granted, the impact nonprofits can have on the war in Ukraine is not as great as for-profit companies, if only because of scale. But keep in mind that nonprofits serve the public good, which if anything enhances their human rights responsibilities. In the long run, when nonprofits stand in solidarity with Ukraine, they serve the public good.
Featured image by Elena Mozhilov via Unsplash (publish domain)
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