It’s a cold and rainy Sunday morning and time for another copycat blog from Sobering Thoughts. What am I reading these days? I dusted off The Trivium–The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric. (Be prepared for these blog posts to be logical, grammatical and reasonable like never before.) Then there’s Fatal Misconception–a book about “the quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people.” Finally, more Edith Wharton, this time, A Mother’s Recompense. I love Edith and when I tire of The Trivium, it’s nice to pick up a book written by someone who already knows that stuff–for example, how to write, and come to think of it, doesn’t use the word “stuff.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I note Paul Tuns of Sobering Thoughts has a post called “Stuff” for July 25. Stuff–it’s what’s going on, it’s what I’m reading, it’s the work I’m doing, the things I’m buying, it’s what I’m worrying about… You know, stuff. Nice.)
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Brigitte would like to play, too: Among the books in my current “pretending to read” pile is Anne Hendershott’s The Politics of Abortion. I like this longish quotation from pages 16-17:
A few dissident voices on the left stubbornly continued to argue the pro-life position throughout the 1980s. Rosemary Bottcher, a columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat in the 1980s, drew a parallel between abortion and discrimination against women: “Pro abortion feminists resent the discrimination against a whole class of humans because they happen to be female, yet they themselves discriminate against a whole class of humans because they happen to be very young. They resent the fact that the value of a woman is determined by whether some man wants her, yet they declare that the value of an unborn child is determined by whether some woman wants him. They resent that women have been ‘owned’ by their husbands, yet insist that the unborn are ‘owned’ by their mothers.” Bottcher decried the inconsistencies in the liberal position: “The same people who organized a boycott of the Nestle Company for its marketing of infant formula in underdeveloped lands would have approved of the killing of those exploited infants only a few months before. The same people who talk incessantly of human rights are willing to deny the most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings the most important right of all.”
Zing!
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Véronique adds: Is it too late to play too? My night stand these days features nothing remotely related to abortion, bioethics or family life: The End of Overeating by Dr David Kessler, on how we became a culture of over-eaters; Sugar: A bittersweet history http by Elizabeth Abbott, likely to make you look at your morning cuppa in a whole new way; and I just finished Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller by Jeff Rubin, which definitely made me reconsider my Costco bought, Argentinian-grown while in-season in Ontario, bag of green beans.