Sunday, May 24, 2009

Pro What Now?

You'll remember those polls a few weeks (The Whack Right went whack over them*) that seemed to show the country had suddenly experienced a radical shift and decided it was Pro-Life after all?

I did not comment then, because I reckoned they were flawed polls (Nate Silver's blog analyzed them as likely to be so) and what else was there to say?

But yes, obviously they were: here's another poll, less mendaciously constructed, showing no such shift at all.  Imagine that. 

Turns out the first poll was, apparently, slanted: pollsters asking only if people were pro-life.  No clarification given, no attempt was made to allow for situations in which people might be saying, well, yes, in theory I'm pro-life, but if the woman's life is in danger; or, yes, I'm pro-life myself, but really, isn't that up to the individual woman?  Or, I'm pro-life, except when it's a nine-year-old and she's pregnant with twins and her step-daddy has been raping her since she was six and she weighs 66 pounds and she'll die if she gives birth.  Or, I'm pro-life, but what if the fetus is doomed anyway and the woman's life is at risk if she proceeds with the pregnancy?

Or -- and frankly, this is my position -- I'm pro-how-is-this-the-state's-fucking-business, again?  Last time I checked, this was the woman's body, she owned it, she gets to decide what to do with it.  How about we keep the state and your church out of my uterus?  How would that be?

Not that any of this will stop the Whackawits.  Little bits like making their datastreams match up to reality never mattered to them anyway -- how else could they believe in a 6000 year old planet in a world that has pottery older than that?



*If you want to be made ill, read the comments at the second post.

1 comment:

web said...

A few weeks ago, I was called by a computer for a survey that was very clearly biased towards the pro-life position. And the only possible answers were "yes" or "no" - no, "I'm not sure" or "I need more information." I'm pretty sure at one point I said yes to "I approve of killing innocent babies" because there was no other way not to place myself in the pro-life camp.