My porn name would be Peanut Lincoln. That is my first pet and the street I grew up on. I think I’ll stick with the porn name I was given by my parents, Cliff Dix.
Love to hear Amanda on the show. Hi, Amanda.

I’d be “Peppie Elm”. Probably wouldn’t sell many porno’s with that name.

Wait a second, PEANUT LINCOLN is not your favorite snack + conservative politician? Although I fail to see the reason why modern-day Republicans would want to associate themselves with that iconic President.

Marcel Proust had a lot of health problems, but I’m glad he wasn’t aborted. A lot of people have expensive health problems, but we don’t wish they were dead instead of being a financial burden on our health care system. It’s a lot easier to think about killing someone when he or she is at the very beginning of his or her life… but why would you kill someone because they are sick? (Don’t flame me! I’m pro-abortion. Just also pro-rights for sick people.) If this kid’s parents pay their health insurance premiums, they deserve to collect on their policy — that’s what health insurance is for: you pay into the system, knowing that you will be able to get health care, even expensive health care, when you need it.

Who is draining the system more? Newborns requiring admittedly rare procedures? People suffering from cancer, disabilities, and chronic illnesses? OR… millionaire CEOs, lobbyists, and the politicians they pay off? Who is getting “more than they deserve” out of this pie?

I agree with Amanda that it’s annoying to read stupid news articles lionizing people who were dealt a shitty hand and are being held up as heroes because they are living with the consequences of their own decisions. And it’s annoying to hear anti-abortionists poo-poo the option of abortion. But the pro-choice movement is ABOUT giving women the right to choose, and then not denigrating the woman for making her choice. And this woman chose to carry her baby to term, and now is raising a child with severe health problems. I’m not sure what’s making you mad… I guess the fact that the state is helping pay for the baby’s care, and she could have saved us taxpayers this expense by choosing to abort her baby. But, like Marc said, how much is a life worth? I don’t think we can make that decision for other people… (especially when it starts to sound like eugenics… this podcast really gave me the heebie-jeebies)

There’s a philosopher at Princeton named Peter Singer that Amanda might like to check out. He argues that people with disabilities should be killed, preferably before they are born, because they are a drain on society. Imagine the expense of paying for all the medical procedures and care-giving they require — plus, they take all the good parking spaces! Whenever he makes a public appearance, the activist group Not Dead Yet usually makes an appearance, in their wheelchairs and all… and they make the claim that they are just as entitled to their lives as he is to his.

So, Amanda, you definitely have an ethical foundation for your argument. I just opt to politely disagree…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia_and_infanticide

Pollo Campero is awesome. I ate it all the time when I spent the summer in Guatemala.

RcktMan, if I had to pick a later pet and an apartment street my porn name would be Grandpa Rockland. LOL! My roommate and I had a pet ferret he had named Grandpa and we lived on Rockland Ave. LOL!

Fausto, you just made one of my biggest pet peeves. Debbie Harry’s name is not Blondie. Blondie was a band made up of one female and several males. Collectively, they were known as Blondie but the lead singer was Debbie (sometimes Deborah) Harry. So many people made this mistake in the early days that they actually had T-shirts made that said “Blondie is a Band”.

That incident where the dog sodomized the 2-year-old happened near where I live, in the next town over! To give a little more detail that you guys didn’t have at the time you recorded this show, the mother told the police she was in the process of changing her son’s diaper. She took the old one off & sent the kid into the other room to bring her a clean one [???], and that’s how the dog had the opportunity to do what he did. Also, the dog had never been neutered; if he had, this probably wouldn’t have happened. The dog is currently being held at the local SPCA where a behavior specialist is trying to determine why exactly the dog mounted the child; presumably, they’re trying to determine whether the dog was trained to do things like that or not.

To be honest, when I first heard about this, I wasn’t surprised it happened in Lockport. That whole city’s full of brain-dead rednecks.

great show guys!

im australia my generation tends to say “defs” alot, as a slang for deffinately :]

would they ban me from catholic school because my last name backwards is “sinned”? haha

xoxox

Okay. I live in the suburbs of Dallas and all my friends and neighbors are straight. Not against gays, just not comfortable when they are flamboyant. However, I am happily married to my butch husband. We have a wonderful home life. This is my first comment on anything gay. But somehow I got addicted to this show. I listen to you when I do my cardio. You are doing great and I applaud your efforts. I wish you the very best and my husband and I will buy shirts soon. We want to support your show. Thank you for being our voice.

By the way, my husband wrote in to you. He wrote about advise on the “mile-high club”. You answered it and I’ve been hooked since.

p.s. my porn name is Bruno Chapel - too cool

Proust was “sickly” and didn’t have his first asthma attack til he was 9. That’s a far cry from the doctors telling the parents that your son has a rare condition that will suffocate him moments after he is born. I’m hardly advocating eugenics in this case. Even if the technology had existed for the doctors to tell Proust’s parents that little Marcel would be a little weak but would grow up with some care, I doubt they would have aborted based on that info.

The Boyces decision was difficult. And yes, I realize that my position is somewhat contradictory to the position of “choice.” I said as much on the show. Obviously there is a sliding scale of how sick is sick enough to give up on a fetus…only no one would ever dare mark the point on that scale of where giving up is the “right” option, there are only “recommended options.” Fetus with from severe arthrogryposis syndrome and microcephalia? Inoperable, no chance of living outside the womb? No one would bring that child to term if they knew. Call that a 10 on the scale. Call asthma a 1 on the scale. I call CHAOS (what they’re kid has) about an eight on the scale.

For the record, I’m also in favor of mandatory (if temporary) sterilization for men and women in certain situations…such as if you have more than two kids and you’re already on state or federal assistance. Enough! Or if you’ve ever left your baby in a hot car to die…no more babies for you.

Once again, there would be a sliding scale…and no governing body in their right mind would try to enforce it. I’ve said this for years: It should be at least as hard to HAVE a baby as it is to ADOPT one.

In the case of the Boyces, my reasoning is 98% financial. There are women who know they can’t afford to keep a child and can’t even afford an abortion, but they go through every channel available to get an abortion. Sometimes she has coverage, but many states and insurance companies won’t pay, so there are private groups that raise and distribute money to those women. And then there are women who make the decision themselves and pay for it themselves.

And then there’s this mom, whose choice forces ME as an Illinois taxpayer (and probably a lot of you) to pay for her stubborn insistence that all life is precious. Yes, I would like the same tax money to go to women who want and can’t afford an abortion, and anti-abortion people would have the same argument as me (”Why do I have to pay for YOUR choice?”) On this we agree. However, the ratio of what we all contribute to an abortion vs. what we all contribute to keeping this poor damaged child alive…more than 1000 to one already, and the kid isn’t even a year old. In a state that can barely keep schools open or trains running, that HAS to count for something.

How does this compare to a person who can’t afford a costly operation to live? For one thing, an insurance company might decide the person isn’t worth it. Too old, too sick, not enough coverage. The person doesn’t have the money, the person dies. How come that doesn’t apply to this kid? Why doesn’t the state just say no? It’s called cutting your losses. For another thing, the fetus isn’t a person. It. Just. Isn’t. You can line up all the woulda-coulda-shouldas in the world, but in the end, if you haven’t breathed air, you are not a person.

The other 2%, by the way, is that these parents brought a kid in to the world KNOWING how much he would suffer. KNOWING he would not be able to EAT OR BREATHE, MAYBE NOT EVER. Sure, they can say he’s a happy kid, he smiles a lot, he can signal when he needs to be suctioned, but they can’t say the boy isn’t suffering. That has got to be some kind of child abuse.

Babies aren’t miracles. Intelligent people are.

But there’s a difference between “they wish they themselves were dead” and “WE wish they were dead.”

The chronically ill people seeking assisted suicide made the decision, themselves, to end their own lives. Mrs. Boyce’s fetus couldn’t give a thumbs up or thumbs down. This creates a problem: the to-be child, who will have to bear the consequences of that life-or-death decision, does not get to make the decision. It’s an interesting question… who should get to decide what is best for the future of the fetus? The parents, the state, the taxpayers? You’re right, these are all interested parties, since they will all be paying in one way or another for that decision… I don’t really know the answer, but I think it’s an interesting question. (I would lean toward a woman’s right to choose, under the advice of her doctor, because I’m a dyed-in-the-wool pro-choicer.)

I don’t know any more about CHAOS than what was explained on the podcast, but it sounds like this kid is learning to communicate via signing? My idea of what is a worthwhile and valuable life has been considerably expanded over the past couple of years, as a close friend of mine is a teacher for severely impaired high school kids. I’m talking “special needs” to the nth degree. Her students have very limited communication; many of them don’t have the use of all their senses, and it’s very hard to get through to them. For one of her students, her goal for the end of the semester was to have him raise a spoonful of food to his mouth and eat it. My friend (who is very intelligent and not a sentimentalist — she’s Texan through and through) gets a real kick out of these kids, and has bonded with them. She tells me that they have bonded with her. She sees them experience anguish and joy. Hearing her stories really makes me reconsider my assumptions about what it means to have a good life, even what it means to be a human being.

Her stories make me question Peter Singer’s assumptions about where we draw the line between worthwhile and worthless (or not worthy enough) life. But he is a very rigorous academic, and he has valid arguments, as do you. I would just err on the opposite side of the line than he would.

I guess that only addresses the 2%. (I’ll admit, I’m not as interested in the financial problematics of the situation.) Thank you for bringing me back to my college days of spending too much time thinking and parrying, Amanda! It’s a welcome break from the 9-to-5.

Well, I’m glad you don’t think I’m an asshole! (I’m not trying to be, but it’s hard to express nuance and inflection in this medium.) I’m enjoying the dialogue, too… Sorry you were late to work, though.

There is a line, I agree. It just has been drawn in some SCARY places before when the state got involved in reproductive rights, so it’s a delicate subject. Have you read Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks? This was the first Oliver Sacks book I ever read, and it’s still my favorite. It isn’t a collection of short stories about different case studies, like some of his other books. Instead, it’s an in-depth delving into a single subject: the history of the deaf community in America. It’s a wonderful book. Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell advocated for state-sponsored sterilization of deaf people? He considered deaf people “a defective variety of the human race.”

Sacks, being the neurobiologist, explains how learning and speaking in sign language activates different neural pathways in the brain, than speaking vocally does. It’s really fascinating — sign language operates in 3 dimensions, whereas our sentences progress from start to finish, in a 2-dimensional line.

Anyway, he sees deafness as just one example of differentiation within the human species, enriching the species as a whole. But no one draws the line to exclude deaf people anymore, so why bring it up? Well, I think that as we become more educated and empathetic as a society, we draw the line in a wider and wider circle… come on in, deaf people! Join us, people with Downs syndrome! (I think disabled rights will be the next civil rights movement…)

But I agree that a woman should consider whether she will be able to provide for her child (whether by herself, with the support of family, or by placing it for adoption) before she carries a pregnancy to term. So I think we’re on common ground there. If she has no way of providing for her child, then she faces the same situation that a lot of single moms with no resources face, and she needs to make a choice to have an abortion or find a home for the child. — I just wouldn’t want this policy to have the consequence of preventing the birth of anyone with a disability that falls in the mid-range of your 1-to-10 scale, Amanda… Like you said, there needs to be a line drawn… (I just get scared when lines get drawn, because as soon as 100 years later, old Alexander Graham, who was completely in line with mainstream society opinion at the time, is sounding like a Nazi nutball!)

Oh, and to change the subject a bit to forced sterilization for people who are on welfare — I think a better (though longer-term) solution would be to improve education for the lower & working class. I’ve read that level of education is inversely proportional to level of reproduction. This would be a systemic solution, improve a lot of people’s lives, AND it would keep the state out of our reproductive rights. (I know I’m pollyanna, but a girl’s gotta dream…)

Back to you, Amanda… or we could just call it a day and go get ice cream.

ok just wanted to say Ashley, Maia and Amanda all rock (for various reasons, but in this thread especially). Lovely show.

Hello,

Pansy Caroní here. (More drag than porn, n’est-ce pas?)

And actually, Amanda, Fausto pronounced it right -

To Carol Channing it’s “Hello, Dolly”

To Salvador, it’s “Hello, Dalí” (with accent on the second syllable).

Yours,
Pansy

Do you want to know what’s sad? When Amanda said that a square was an equilateral parallelogram, I thought to myself “Well that isn’t enough to define a square. It also needs to have 90 degree angles.” And then Amanda corrected herself and said that same thing. This is why I love Amanda Steinstein so much (well, one of many reasons actually)! And this is why I’m such a big dork.

Amanda, I didn’t think that at all! Quite a heavy topic for our little forum here.

And Andrew, NERDS ARE SEXY!!!

I’d like to bury “decimate”!