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

[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.