The Social Construction of Babies

 

Christ in Limbo, by an unnamed follower of Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1575. Via Wikipedia.

I think the really important thing about the "frozen embryos are babies" fiasco is the way it revealed that everybody actually knows they are not, right down to Nikki Haley and Donald J. Trump. This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while, not really reducing it to writing beyond the occasional Twitter thread, and I thought I might make it an occasion for laying my argument out at some length.

I mean, the Alabama case makes it especially clear. Haley and Trump really aren't aware that they know it, and if you ask the Republicans in a given sample straight out, "Are frozen embryos babies?", they may well give you the pious, but senseless, answer that Haley and Trump initially did, but if you make them think a bit about it instead, they'll realize easily enough that there's nothing morally wrong with throwing unneeded embryos in the garbage (if probably not getting that it's really better to donate them to scientific research). They'll just have an awfully hard time explaining why.

Because practically everybody knows that blastocysts are not children, and for that matter (in my opinion) that embryos and fetuses are not in and of themselves persons in anything like the legal sense either, though we may not realize we know it, or be able, if we do, to give it a philosophical explanation. Almost everybody sees one contradiction or another in the idea that every abortion is a murder. Almost nobody thinks a ten-year-old girl should be forced to carry a child begotten by a rapist uncle or father, almost nobody thinks a woman with a tubal pregnancy should have to let it kill her, and it's forbidden by Jewish law as well.

It's only maniacs like that Alabama chief justice who will stick to the original story; Trump got an adviser to come up with an alternative cliché, while Haley had to grasp at the straw of her own personal reality, even if it meant quietly acknowledging that Major Haley has in the course of his life jerked off for medical purposes into a plastic cup, probably at least twice, first testing the sperm count, then supplying the sperm (reader, there's no shame in that—I've done the test myself, though in our case IVF turned out not to be necessary):

Javi and Chita

 

You know how I've been screaming at the political punditry for a few years now over their theory of the Latin voting bloc becoming more Republican over time as the community's inherent conservatism asserts itself, because

1. It's not a bloc, and
2. that's hiding what's happening

—and hiding from it, of course—it's about race. As with Allan Sherman's upwardly mobile young Jews in the early 1960s who

Traded their used MG
for a new XKE
switched to the GOP
that's the way things go

it's about the social construction of whiteness.

But I didn't really have any data for it, or know how to find it or whether it could possibly exist, until I saw this message from Jonathan Chait: 

The Brooksy Awards 2015. III: High-Class Savagery

The problem of the middle class savagery: Dear Readers, Across the country, drunken teacher, menedzhershi staff, nurses and young mothers are of serious concern to their behavior. Each night they get drunk to swinish state, have sex with unfamiliar men in the back of stores, dirty curse word and celebrate the natural needs of the street. A home at the time they are waiting for their husbands and children… The above realities — not domestic. They are taken from Special report British newspaper "Daily Mail" on October 9, 2011 with the title "Why intelligent nurses, teachers and mothers across Britain to get drunk every night out?" (Clearly a Google translation, via Survincity. Menedzher is Russian for "person who orders you around".) 

OK, so maybe this one'll turn out funny:

Writing “The Meaning of Sex” in The Weekly Standard, the anthropologist Peter Wood describes the damage done when natural and social constructs like virginity, fatherhood, intimacy and romance are done away with or watered down. The result can be a sort of high-class savagery leading to brutal pain and victimization.

I like the deconstructionist sound of "writing the meaning of sex", and the adventure of trying to find out what David Brooks imagines "social construct" means, which might be pretty wacky, and how you do away with virginity and fatherhood or water them down. And what kind of anthropologist writes for the Weekly Standard?