Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[dcltdw]

I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.

Pattern recognition. I can't read Spanish or Russian or Arabic, but with enough exposure, I can probably tell if it's right-left mirrored. In the case of Spanish, it's probably very little exposure given my knowledge of English. Arabic... I have this vague idea that there tend to be swirls underneath letters that go from either L->R or R->L. So my pattern recognition is halfway there, at least in this regard. That, or I'm totally confused. :)

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case

*raises hand* I need to think this through (no morning coffee yet), but yeah, I think that's me. My victory condition is "people have complete ownership of their own bodies and nobody else's".

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

Wow, an intriguing theory. You're actually saying that there's nothing immoral about aborting an 8 3/4 months old fetus on a whim, because the mother "has complete ownership of her own body?"

[dcltdw]

Well, what are the tradeoffs?

1. Mother aborts nearly-born baby.
2. Someone other than a person gets a say in what that person does with their body.
3. Something I'm not imagining.

I'll take #1 over #2. I don't know what #3 (or #4) would be; do you? That's not a trap; rather, I'm suspicious when complicated situations get reduced into binary decisions, and thus, I'm suspicious of my own reduction here.

Also, I think your "on a whim" clause is derailing. I realize analogies are suspect, but you've basically said "Wow, you think breaking someone's arm on a whim is okay?", whereas I'm saying "I think there are times when it's okay to break someone's arm."

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

I think maybe we agree. I wasn't fully awake either.

Thinking about it more kirisutogomen has implied [while not quite setting up] a false dichotomy. I think unborn fetuses have more moral standings than lintballs, and the closer they are to viability, the more moral standing they have. I think it is sad when a fetus is aborted, and the longer the fetus has been gestating, the sadder it is. I would even say it was usually morally wrong to abort a late-term fetus. But that doesn't imply I want to use force to do anything about it. So legally, I think my "victory condition" is the government stays out of making rules about abortion.

Morally, I'd prefer to live in a world where abortion wasn't treated like a trip to the hair salon, but who I am to judge that that's really what's happening in China with these advertisements? I find them surprising, but I don't think they should be illegal.

All that said, I could imagine supporting a law against very late-term abortions. The real reason I don't is that it's not necessary --- basically nobody is aborting their perfectly healthy 8 1/2 month fetus --- and it's a slippery slope. But on the other hand, I don't blanket agree with your "what a person does with their body" approach either. What's the wedge that lets you accept quarantining people with infectious diseases but not accept preventing very late-term abortions? They are both instances of someone other than X having a say with what X does to their body with the purported goal of protecting Y.

[dcltdw]

What's the wedge that lets you accept quarantining people with infectious diseases but not accept preventing very late-term abortions? They are both instances of someone other than X having a say with what X does to their body with the purported goal of protecting Y.

Wow, great question! Well, let me work it through. My starting point is normally some variant of "what is good for society?". (Related tangent: I think a somewhat-confusing-the-issue #3 in my reply above is: the woman in the West Coast who had sextuplets via public healthcare. It's bad for society for a woman to have 6 kids when she has arguably limited means to support them, but I think it's better for society to accept that cost if everyone else gets better* healthcare. The devil is in the details of the asterisked "better", of course.) So quarantining someone isn't done for their benefit, it's done for the benefit of the people around them.

Nrgh, I'm going to be lazy and go into Analogy Land. (I consider analogies to be sloppy thinking; apologies for resorting to such, but I can't take too much time this morning.) I think it's okay for me to play my music at whatever volume I want; I think it's also okay to have noise nuisance statutes. I think it's okay to ingest a bottle of Instant Plague, so long as I quarantine myself beforehand. Cigarettes, alcohol, etc.

Aha, okay: so yes, the cost to me (and the rest of society) of someone having a baby who I (and miraculously, the rest of society agrees with me) think shouldn't have a baby is that now we have to bear the cost of raising that child. I'd rather have that cost, then open the possibility that I (or anyone else) gets to say whether or not she can elect to not have the child.

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

I don't understand your response at all.

In the last paragraph, it seems as if you're arguing against mythical eugenicist opponents who want to force abortions on young women to avoiding burdening society with the costs of their children? Most of the debate in the US today is over allowing abortions, not over whether to force abortions.

To rephrase a sentence from your first paragraph: "Preventing a woman from having a late-term abortion isn't done for her benefit, it's done for the benefit of the unborn baby." So no wedge there.

So I guess I don't understand your point. I think you could construct a coherent argument, but it will involve being more careful and probably accepting additional premises beyond "X always gets to decide what to do with X's body."

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I think that involuntary quarantine of people solely for having infectious diseases is a bad idea and violates constitutional due process to boot. We haven't done it for decades and that doesn't seem to have caused a problem. I do view holding people responsible for damages caused by not voluntarily quarantining themselves as perhaps ethically acceptable.

Quarantining of people at immigration is legally supportable, of course, just as customs inspections are.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

2. Someone other than a person gets a say in what that person does with their body.

So, I think this rule breaks down when you consider, say, teratogens. While I'm somewhat close to the "women should have a right to have an abortion on a whim" end of the spectrum (doesn't mean I approve of the choice, but I think they should have the right), I strongly disagree with "women should have a right to ingest teratogens while carrying a baby".

Generally, my theory is that humans are mainly valued above animals for the complexity of their thinkings, feelings, and connections to other humans*. I think it is fairly clear that for thinkings and feelings, an 8 month fetus is not superior to animals that we are willing to butcher for food. So, to the extent that an 8 month fetus should have rights under my philosophy, its rights derive from the attachment that others have to it. The mother is pretty clearly the most important person here... other family members have a lesser attachment, and society at large may also have weak attachments. So, for abortions, I weigh the "women should have control over their own body" against these secondary attachments, and find that it would be hard for me to see a case where it would be clear that the mother's rights to control her body should be over-ridden because someone else thinks she should be required to keep nurturing the fetus inside of her.**

However, if the woman is planning on carrying the baby to term, then we have to consider a future being with its own set of thinking, feeling, and societal attachments, and that being, in my thought system, should have some rights, and I think that it should have a right not to be born deformed which can, in some circumstances, be weighed against the woman's right to control her body. So I would argue that taking thalidomide for a sleeping problem (or other strongly teratogenic agents) should not be allowed for a pregnant woman.

*This can explain why smarter animals - dolphins and chimps - should have more rights than dumber animals, and why animals with more attachments to humans - eg, pets and charismatic megafauna - should have more rights than animals without those attachments...

**There is some room here to think that "a whim" shouldn't outweigh, say, the father's wishes: but, I don't see a practical way to test whether the woman's desire to abort is a "whim" or a "strongly felt desire", and so I would err on the side of a stronger right to abort.

(this philosophy can also be applied to cases like Terri Schiavo or assisted suicides... in the former, brain death means that the person's value rests in their attachments, in the latter, one is weighing the person's right to do what they want with their body against, again, the attachments to other humans)

[dcltdw]

*googles "teratogen"* Ah, wikipedia. Aha.

I don't think "drinking alcohol while pregnant" should be a criminal offense. Shunned, taboo? Sure. Criminal? No. ... Nrrr, I'm using "criminal" in the sense that there's a law against that; I may be using legal terminology incorrectly here.

See above reply to rif about "what is good for society". In that vein: I think smoking in the presence of non-smokers should be taboo, because second-hand smoking is a valid danger. I think no-smoking regs get it right: it's not that you can't smoke, it's that your smoking cannot impede others in certain areas.

So I would argue that taking thalidomide for a sleeping problem (or other strongly teratogenic agents) should not be allowed for a pregnant woman.

So I'll ask you to divide the question. There's a lot of perspectives here: should it be criminal for the doctor to prescribe thalidomide for a pregnant woman? Should it be illegal for a pregnant woman to ask for such? Or only if she ingests it? (My answers are Neglect, No, and No. The "neglect" answer is that if there's willful and repeated neglect, that's criminal behaviour, but if there's a lack of evidence to support that, then I think it's not criminal behaviour -- but the doc should probably lose their certification, which is a civil matter.)

Hmm. I wonder if I'm leaning too heavily on my smokers/second-hand smoke analogy too much.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

I think the reasoning with respect to teratogens is broken when you take abortions into account. Consider, for example, the woman whose abortions is scheduled for next tuesday going on an alcoholic binge the preceding weekend. No baby will exist to be harmed, so where is the justification for locking the woman up?

It seems to me that in principle, the more ethically sound solution is to accept that any baby subsequently born from the pregnancy may have a cause of action against its mother. The standards could be the same as for any normal civil suit.

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Just to muddy the waters even further here: I have the impression that if you're older than, say, 35 or so, there's a pretty good chance your mother smoked and/or consumed alcohol during pregnancy (assuming she did either of these things regularly beforehand).

[jmandresen.livejournal.com]

I tend to feel that a fetus at any stage has the moral status of a lint ball, but I feel the same way about a six-month-old infant. As early human brains (and skulls) grew bigger over hundreds of thousands of years, it was a selective advantage to be born before development is complete. (Big head through small pelvis equals dead baby and dead mother.) A six-month-old human infant is about as functional on most "human" traits as an eight-month-old fetus. Comparative animal studies also support this.

I'm not arguing for legalizing abortion on demand for six-month-old infants. I'm just pointing out that birth is not a watershed for moral standing. It's just a convenient place for a safe maximum upper bound to ensure society never allows termination of an individual with even the tiniest shred of moral standing. That's how I get around the seeming paradox of "sudden" moral standing for a newborn. We're just being conservative and generous by giving each newborn infant its own stylish carrying case.

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

The text has an obvious directional "flow". If you know that Chinese reads from left-to-right, the long tail under the third-character in the big yellow line and the ellipsis at the end of the text under the box are pretty strong cues. The separators in the line above the big yellow line are more plausibly slashes than backslashes.

I also want to say that I've seen a bunch of the glyphs enough time that they look wrong backward, but I might be fooling myself there. For instance, I think one year of Japanese classes is enough to say that the second character in the big line and the fourth character in the line below it look "wrong" mirror reversed; maybe that's enough that I don't count as totally illiterate.

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Also: backslashes. No one uses those.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

The mirror flip was most obvious to me because of the slant of the yellow italics. The swashes also looked wrong, but it might have taken me longer.

I think I share your squeamish feeling here, but thinking of it practically - I think our victory condition should have a component of "early is better than late", and if an abortion is as easy and acceptable as a trip to the hair salon, and is advertised with ads that suggest to me "stay young and fresh and pretty [not large and awkward]" then that seems more plausible. (I don't know if there's anything in the ad that suggests that they cater to late term - it does have to be a much more surgical procedure than early).

And sure, perhaps people should not treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon - but what are the alternatives? If you don't want to have kids, how much angst and soul-searching must I require of you before I approve of your choice? Can the angst be done before you get pregnant, or does it have to be after?

And...is it better if someone decides to have a kid with all the thought of deciding to have a haircut? Is choosing to be a parent lightly an improvement?

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

This.

[twe.livejournal.com]

Did you follow the link in the post? The one that talks about how ultrasound + availability of safe abortions is causing crazy gender imbalances? If over 1/3 of female fetuses are being aborted early rather than late, has that somehow improved the situation?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I do find the gender imbalance seriously troubling. But for my own moral qualms, yes, I think early abortion is an improvement over infanticide, and that does seem to be the other way of ensuring a son (especially under one child per family).

[twe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, though I gather infanticide is not actually all that common. Stealing of babies to be sold to westerners is possibly more common than infanticide. Also, apparently abortion for sex selection goes up with education and wealth, which I find even more troubling. (Sadly, much like vaccine refusal does.)

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

Infanticide in China was much more common before the widespread availability of abortions.

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

I think I cued off the formatting, rather than the characters. The text in the box turned into a "ragged left" margin with bullet points on the right, and the ellipses were at the beginning rather than the end of the line under the box. That seemed wrong for a left-to-right language.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether this is a completely personal thing, or comes from my Chinese cultural background, but I do not think it makes sense to have newborn babies instantly granted the moral standing of a full human. For entities with low self concept, like animals, human babies, or severely mentally handicapped humans, I think their moral standing should be based on the attachments that other people have (or potentially have) to them. Also, somewhat based on the fact that the more something seems human (even if they are not fully functionally human), the more the way society treat them will tend to color how all humans are treated.

So, in my opinion, there is a continuum even after birth. For example, I think it is wrong to be verbally cruel to a person who understands what you are saying because you are doing psychological harm to them. But if you said the same thing to a brain-dead person, it's not doing any harm to them. It would be wrong for a parent to physically restrain their 20 year old, normally functioning son and force him to get circumcised, because it would psychologically harm him to have his own determination of his body violated. It is not wrong for a parent to force their infant son to get circumcised, because the amount of harm to them is low. Similar with ear piercing for infant girls, versus forcing a normally functioning 20 year old to do it.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

Good examples.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

I don't think abortion on demand implies that the fetus has the moral standing of a lintball. In fact, the fetus can have the moral standing of a full adult and abortions can still be justified. Its similar to a case where someone who is dying is hooked up to your bloodstream, because a supply of your blood is the only way to save him. I don't think you're obligated to continue allowing him to live off your blood, and I think the choice is yours alone.

With respect to the ads, I agree with firstfrost: they are likely to encourage people to get abortions earlier rather than later, and I consider that a good thing, not a bad thing. For that matter, I would go further and say that anyone who can be enticed into an abortion by a pretty ad is probably not ready to be a parent.

[dpolicar]

Short answer: my ideal victory condition looks like people having the power to make the choices that affect them, and people using that power to make choices I endorse.

I don't expect that to happen, certainly no time soon, but that's my ideal victory condition.

Various real-world approximations of that ideal are possible, but you're right that at some point in any real-world approximation I will need to draw some more-or-less arbitrary thresholds to compensate for regions where the ideal function just ain't computable.

So, yes, in the real world choices arise between people not having the power to make the choices that affect them (on the one hand) and people using their power to make choices I decry (on the other).

My sensibilities mostly tell me that given that choice, I err strongly on the side of people having the power to make the choices that affect them. Whether those sensibilities count as "liberal" I really don't know, but I'm comfortable enough with that label if I have to pick a label.

That said, I'll admit that in the real world situations arise where the reason I decry person A's choice is precisely because it takes away person B's ability to make the choices that affect them. And yeah, as you suggest, those sorts of situations throw my sensibilities into a muddle. "Let people make their own choices" as a guiding principle has a way of short-circuiting when faced with people who make the choice to prevent other people from making their own choices.

With respect to abortion in particular, one can go down the rabbit hole at this point of "but there isn't a person B, there's just a fetus!" Which I mostly consider a distraction, since I tend to think one can always in principle evaluate the value of an existing system in terms of the expected value of the evolution of that system, even if one can't always actually compute the result. In other words, I would say that the value of a fetus is expressible in terms of the expected values of the people that fetus can become, so the personhood of the fetus doesn't really matter much -- whether the fetus is a person or not, the value of a person is relevant in determining the costs of terminating its development.

That said, it's a damned effective distraction, which is why abortion is so beloved as a topic of discussion among people who would rather confound their opposition than think clearly. But I digress.

Anyway, yes, examples like this are problematic for me. I don't feel too bad about that... I'm mostly a Godellian in such matters. That is, I believe that for any decision system powerful enough to make useful decisions at all, there will be decisions that system is incapable of making. And when it comes to those decisions, users of that system will have to do something annoyingly ad-hoc.

I'm not crazy about that fact, but I don't see any way around it.