A Small Victory

I had to give a presentation in my Applied Ethics class tonight. I was one of five presenters, and we were each given five minutes for a question, fifteen minutes for presentation, and ten minutes for Q & A. The topic was Bioethics in Medicine: Abortion, and we were supposed to provide a case study and apply an ethical framework to it. Long story short: I fairly well rocked my presentation. I was talking about abortion in the context of early-pregnancy prenatal genetic diagnosis and how such decisions articulate with a particular feminist argument for the morality of abortion. (The feminist theory was from the article, "Embodiment and Abortion" by Catriona Mackenzie; it's a fantastic article both in terms of argument and in terms of "this is how one should write a paper." It's just exquisitely clear, interesting, and a real attempt to re-orient the abortion debates away from a clash of rights and toward responsibility and ways of being. Just fantastic, and I can share a copy if you're at all interested). Anyways, my talk went *really* well, was well-received, and I came home psyched after finally having something resembling a real adult style conversation in the class. So good feelings all around.

Of course, my talk probably seemed that much better because of the goofiness that preceded it. I started to try to type out one of the arguments just to give a flavor, but it's making me cringe too much. The gist - fetuses are just like slaves, and since we think slaves were human when we used to not think that, we should think fetuses are human. That apparently is a "historical argument" featuring "clear and logical thinking" and one that "cannot be contested." Even better is that apparently all fetuses have an inalienable right to life by virtue of their full human status, but she still wants to permit abortion in cases of rape. By what rationale? Women's autonomy. Maybe I do not understand the word, but that right sounds like it just got pretty alienable to me. Total disaster, she couldn't even comprehend the objections let alone address them; it was embarrassing for everyone. The other presentations tonight were not very good, but that one in particular encouraged a particular line of "WTF are you even talking about?" questioning from the crowd. Exciting times.

Anyways, I'm just glad that I came home on a Wednesday night feeling okay about the academic world, and that maybe just maybe I helped it a little bit this evening. I'm still somewhat infuriated by this class - tonight was, in the end, 2 hours of wackness for a half hour of good discussion - but at least during my presentation, several people got really engaged and made some progress. And that's just good for a change!