[WikiEN-l] Following up -

Fri Oct 31 01:01:40 UTC 2003

>
>Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>Ah, but "a woman's right to choose" makes a much more effective slogan
>>than "the right of a mother to kill her own baby".
>>
>>
>Tarquin wrote it's not a "baby" until it is born.

The only trouble, Tarquin, is that that is a point of view. Some people in 
their language distinguish between what the call an 'unborn baby' (or 
pre-birth baby) and 'post-birth baby'. Accepting the argument of /either/ 
side, that abortion is a right or abortion is wrong, that a woman has a 
right to choose or a foetus has a right to live, violates Wikipedia's NPOV 
policy.

The nightmare with the abortion debate is that right the way through it you 
have two diametrically opposed theories on rights, on life and on language. 
That divergence is implicit even in the two key words of the protagonists; 
'life' and 'choice', implying that the other side are 'anti-choice' or 
'anti-life'. The biggest problem of all is that /both/ sides imply the 
existence of absolutes where they don't exist. The 'right to life' isn't 
absolute; society accepts that sometimes the taking of life is acceptable in 
some extreme circumstances, (hence armies, executions, etc.) Nor is there 
simply a 'right to choose', as society operates on the principle of the 
right to restrict choice; libel and defamation laws deny the 'right to 
choose' to say what you want; laws deny a 'right to choose' to kill someone 
except in extreme cases; laws deny people the 'right to choose' to 
discriminate on the basis of gender, race, orientation etc etc. So both 
sides speak of absolute /rights/ in society that should be reflected in 
abortion, in a spin that deliberately hides the fact that even if one 
accepts that a foetus has a right to life, it doesn't mean an /absolute/ 
right to life, that even if women have a right to choose in many areas, it 
does not automatically mean a right to choose the continuation or 
termination of a pregnancy.

Society /chose/ to define a right of choice as applying in the area of 
pregnancy, a 'right' of choice denied in many other areas of society. Some 
believe in that instance it was a right that deserved to be awarded. Others 
argued that in that area, like others, no such right should exist.

Wikipedia has to be careful in dealing with a complex issue like abortion 
not to accept, in implicit or explicit language, that one or other side of 
the argument is /of course/ right and to understand the underlying 
principles and perspectives that shape both sides of this divisive and 
controversial debate. The only trouble is that if one takes out the loaded 
terminology of both sides, is there actually language that is 
agenda-neutral? Even the medical community, depending on its views on the 
issue, loads phrases with meanings to support their agenda, in the view of 
one side 'sanitising' the procedure, in the view of the other 'emotionally 
loading' the procedure, a case in point being whether one can use 'partial 
birth abortion' without appearing anti-abortion/pro-life. But as many 
wikipedians in the past experienced, any attempt to neutralise terminology 
in the abortion article can at best lead one to be attacked by whichever 
side feel the language being removed told the 'truth' (ie, /their/ side of 
the article, or at worst leading to attacks from both sides who revert any 
changes because the article isn't pro-choice/pro-life enough in a neutral 
form, if one could find a neutral form.

No wonder one of the first bits of advice I got when I joined wikipedia was 
to feel free to edit anything /but the abortion article/, the longstanding 
wikipedian telling me that touching that article was the ultimate nightmare, 
with "bigoted fanatics" (her words) standing guard like centurions over it, 
screaming 'right to life'/'right to choose' rants if a comma was out of 
place, lest a comma in some sentence be seen to be a 'pro-life' comma or a 
'pro-choice' comma, ie that one wrongly placed commas would lead the 
fanatics on both sides to see a hidden agenda in the edit and accuse you of 
'defending baby murdering' or 'attacking women's rights'.

While wikipedia has many strengths, I doubt if any open edit sourcebook 
/can/ achieve NPOV on this topic with so many people passionately biased on 
the topic, convinced that their side are /of course/ right, and determined 
to use abortion as a plank in a wider ideological debate, whether it is the 
'decline of the family' or the 'undermining of the liberation of women'.  
Abortion I fear is one topic that is beyond wikipedia, and has the potential 
to place rows of the name of Gdansk, Mother Teresa, anti-semitism, the 
Middle East and everything else in the halfpenny place, making them look 
like minor, easy to heal squabbles compared to the dreaded, divisive and 
daunting a-word, 'abortion'.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail