The Madness of Crowds

This is going to be mixed up, because I have a lot of mixing up in my head at the moment. I just finished listening to the audio version of The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny,* and this, along with the (very loud and frustrating) conversation on Roe v Wade has my head spinning.

So spoilers for the Louise Penny book - you've been warned. As for the rest, well, I like to use the word "fuck" a lot so you've been warned there, too.

In the book, Penny deals with life post-pandemic, but she takes on multiple heady topics, including, kind of, abortion.

The story is about a statistician who has determined that because of the decline in resources, statistics indicate that it should be mandatory to kill off the elderly at a certain age, and to kill off disabled people, including children. Only the healthy (whatever that is) should be allowed to live. 

The inspector is asked to protect the statistician when she has a talk near his home, someone tries to shoot her, someone else is murdered, he has to find the murderer, blah blah.

The underlining themes of this book are troubling and troublesome. We had people in the United States saying that grandmas should take one for the team and just die of Covid. These were Republican members of various state legislatures, if I remember correctly. I find the idea morally reprehensible, although I think if Grandma knows she has uncurable cancer and wants to take an early out, she should have the right to do that. But it shouldn't be forced on her.

This story is about the government forcing early death. That's the statistician's premise.

It gets mixed up even more because the inspector's second in command, Jean-Guy, has, in the previous book All the Devils Are Here, had a second child, one born with Down's Syndrome.

The reader (or listener, in my case), sees Jean-Guy's angst over his child in this latest book. At one point he calls her a burden and he is totally floored by his own words. He can't believe he called his daughter that. He loves his daughter - but.

There is talk about why Jean-Guy and Annie didn't abort early on when they learned the child had Down's Syndrome. He said he and his wife discussed it but decided against it. But, he also admits they weren't prepared for what raising a disabled child means. He questions the decision, but ultimately decides they made the choice appropriate for them, and he loves his daughter (without the "but"). He finds the statistician abhorrent because she would have his child "dismissed" from life.

So here we are with a fictional story that is hitting hard emotionally on all sorts of topics, from ridding the world of the elderly to disabled children and quality of life, and abortion. When is killing good? When is it bad? What constitutes a legitimate killing? Is a fetus a person?

And all around me I see fucking morons who have no idea what they're talking about trying to lay claim to the authority of women's bodies. Until a fetus is out of its mother's body, it's a parasite. It can't exist without the womb.

This is a decision that's nobody's business but the woman's and possibly the man she is involved with, but I have noticed men have simply taken three steps backwards and are out of this conversation, except for the big high-powered white assholes who are making the decisions for the little women anyway.

Over on Facebook, I'm involved in a discussion where two people who were unwanted wish they'd never been born, and being unwanted meant that they had severely crappy childhoods (sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, etc.), another who was adopted who thinks we're all saying she shouldn't have been born, when no one is saying that at all, another who survived an ectopic pregnancy thanks to Roe v Wade (I wrote about a similar situation for myself last week), and a lawyer who's chimed in about bodily autonomy and how forcing a woman into pregnancy is similar to slavery.

This is a group of well-educated highly informed women discussing a very emotional and highly complex topic. We are doing it without name-calling, without yelling, without calling one another names, or being overly upset (except for the adoptee, although I think she understands that we're all glad her mother chose to have her and give her up. We're glad she had that choice.). 

And the questions we're really asking are these: if Roe v Wade is abolished, who is going to take care of all of these unwanted children? Who is going to see that the mothers receive appropriate prenatal care? Are we going to revive orphanages? Are we going to throw more money at a foster care system that doesn't work? What about the children with disabilities? Who is going to care for them? The Republicans already are working to undo all the social networks we have in place to keep people from dying of starvation. What are they going to do for these children they want to force women to have?

Are we going to look at the racism that is really behind this? If one traces the issues of abortion and current discussion back to its beginnings, we find the KKK and white nationalism and racism behind it. Nobody cares if there are black babies being aborted. It's the white women they're after here, and everyone knows that. It really is The Handmaid's Tale. 

The poor and minorities are going to be the ones suffering because some powerful white male and his wife want to adopt a sweet little white kid and they can't get one from Ukraine at the moment, because, you know, fucking fascists are over there bombing the place while the fucking fascists here in the US are undermining the Constitution at every turn and have made a mockery out of what once was a legitimate government. (Thanks a lot, GQP.)

In the meantime, we have these anti-human fuckers who really wouldn't care if certain people already living died. They want a war and they want blood. They're ready to shoot me because they think I'm a Democrat (I'm not, really, I'm what a Republican used to be, a very long time ago). They're ready to shoot me because I couldn't have children. They'll shoot me because I'm fat. They'll shoot me because I'm old. They'll shoot me because I used to be a journalist. They'll shoot me because they can because we're too fucking stupid to understand what the Second Amendment of the Constitution really says, because the fucking Supreme Court conveniently overlooked the "well-armed militia" part of the amendment.

I have a niece and a great-niece. Roe v Wade doesn't affect me personally, but it affects young people I care about. I don't want my niece to have to have a child if she should become pregnant before she's ready to raise that baby. I don't want my tiny little great-niece growing up thinking she is a second-class citizen simply because she is a girl. I want her to grow up thinking she's Wonder Woman and she can do whatever the hell she wants with her life (within reason, of course). If she wants to wait until she's 40 years old to have her first child because she wants to build up a law career and be a partner in a law firm, then I want her to be able to do that. I sure don't want her to have to have a child because some asshole convinces her to have sex when she's 14.

Mostly I want people to stop and think, use logic, and take emotions out of the law. Law is about thinking and rationality. Rational people believe murdering the elderly or disabled children is wrong. That isn't a liberal point of view (as someone said in the reviews of Penny's book on Amazon). That's a humanistic point of view. That's a moral point of view.

And as for Roe v Wade, we're not gods, and if women have to give up the right to abortion and their bodily autonomy, then I want a chastity belt slapped around the pelvis of every man on this dying, decaying, morally bankrupt planet, and the keys left on the wall of some female judge who lives 500 miles away. Because without that damn penis, we wouldn't be having this discussion. That's where the problem lies, so let's fix the problem that way, instead of placing it all on the woman.

*Also, I did not like this book as well as the others in the Three Pines series.*