Eileen wrote:
I also note the use of "birth canal" to
describe the vagina as if a woman
had an exit chute on her baby factory; and the use of "womb" in place of
'uterus'. Both these terms, and the misstatement of the time the procedure is
performed, lead me to believe the article was mainly written by somebody opposed
to abortion who was more interested in getting a subtle message out then
actually providing honest information. Since we are describing a medical
procedure appropriate medical/biological terminology which is well understood by the
general population is the appropriate vocabulary.
May I suggest reading this article before using the term "PBA" as loosely as
it is used in your current entry.
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/499/
In both these cases, the problem is that there is no entirely neutral
terminology. Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the
anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral
issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is
seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community. My preferred
solution would be to use both sets of terms interchangeably--both "womb"
and "uterus" and both "birth canal" and
"vagina/cervix/vulva"). In
particular I don't really see anything wrong with "birth canal", and
have seen it used in pro-abortion literature as well as anti-abortion
literature.
As for the term "Partial Birth Abortion" itself, there's no good
solution to that either that I can see. Certainly there some be some
discussion about the controversy over terminology, but simply adopting
an alternate term would be biased as well. The only other term in
reasonably widespread use is "late term abortion", but as you pointed
out some of these procedures do not actually occur in the last
trimester, so can't really fall under that heading. So I'd say keeping
the term PBA with the qualification that some abortion supporters object
to the term is the best solution.
I have linked Dr. Haskell's paper on my web site.
To the best of my
knowledge since this was presented at a public forum and also was presented into
evidence at a Senate hearing it would be considered "public domain' so there
really is no reason you may not add it to your papers if you so desire.
I don't think this particular claim is true. Plenty of copyright papers
are presented at public fora and remain copyrighted (Martin Luther
King's "I Have A Dream" speech is probably the most well-known). I
don't think things entered into evidence at Senate hearings are
automatically stripped of copyright either, but someone more familiar
with copyright law would have to comment on that.
As a general comment, while I think it is a good thing to make medical
articles more precise, Wikipedia is also not a medical encyclopedia, so
articles should be written in a general context and for a general
audience. Taking a strictly clinical view of some of these
controversial issues would itself be adopting a point of view, and we
don't wish to endorse any particular point of view. I'll also note that
there's a ton of propaganda on both sides of the issue here:
anti-abortionists try to make their descriptions of "PBA" as gruesome as
possible, while abortion supporters try to make their descriptions of
"PBA" sound as much like a "normal" surgical procedure as possible, to
emphasize the "move along, nothing to see here" POV (or, alternately, so
jargon-filled and obtuse as to be incomprehensible to a general
audience). I don't think either is a good solution, which is why I
object somewhat to your suggestion that we should adopt more clinical
terminology in the article (I'd similarly object to suggestions from the
other side that we adopt particularly gruesome terminology). You do
seem aware that there is propaganda surrounding this issue, but you seem
much more aware of propaganda on one side of the issue than on the other
side.
-Mark