SAWB

Once upon a time Atlanta's mayor, Andrew Young, explained why the Mondale presidential campaign was not going very well.  It was because, he said, it was run by a bunch of "smart-ass white boys."  The Late, Great Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution adopted the phrase to introduce himself to audiences.  "Finally, I know what I am!" he said, in that early day for affirmative action.  "I'm a smart-ass white boy!"

Naturally, I thought of that this weekend.



The thing is, Tucker Carlson is wrong.  So is she, though, and just where she apparently doesn't see it.

The United Nations this weekend was talking about how the USA needs to give some land back to the Native Americans.  It's easy to mock the UN here, but let's look at the substance of the complaint.

Close to a million people live on the US's 310 Native American reservations. Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos on reservations but most have not. 

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years. 

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country's poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

This is the reason why Native Americans are granted affirmative action benefits.  If someone fights out of Pine Ridge and makes it to college, they've already overcome a massive burden.  The whole point of the practice is to correctly judge just how much harder it was for them to get there than it was for those who had an easier road.  We ought to want this.  That's where Tucker is wrong:  the system isn't unjust by nature.  For them, we ought to want it.

"I should in that case hold you," replied the yeoman, "a friend to the weaker party."

 "Such is the duty of a true knight at least," replied the Black Champion; "and I would not willingly that there were reason to think otherwise of me."

The problem with what Warren did was that she made a mockery out of the system.  This is where Greene was wrong.  The question isn't whether she was qualified -- even well-qualified professors, when they are looking for a job at Harvard, are looking for any advantage that may come to hand.  That she is already a strong candidate is just the point.  This is not a system for the strong to use to tilt things even further in their favor.  It is a system that is meant to uphold the weak against the strong.

I'm just as Cherokee as Elizabeth Warren -- to judge by "blood quanta," which is apparently the standard that we're now supposed to apply.  Apparently the currently serving Cherokee Nation Chief is no more than that.  In my case it comes even further back in the family history, when this was frontier country and white women were very rare (a constant in the story of the American frontier is that women move to the frontier, wherever it is in any generation, rather more slowly).  A couple of my frontiersman ancestors took Cherokee brides.  It works out to the same percentage.  It also means my family is American since the mid-1700s, which counts for... exactly nothing, in determining who is a "real American," according to what I'm given to understand is the acceptable standard.

Never once in my life did I think of marking myself as "Native American" for some advantage.  It would be a positive insult to those people on Pine Ridge if I did.  I've suffered nothing for it; everyone whose family has been in the South for two generations, black or white or otherwise, has that much Native American "blood quanta" if they care to track it down.  For the people of Pine Ridge, it's everything; for us, it's a very minor part of the story of what it means to be American.

Most of us would be called "white boys" by our FOX News commentator; and why not?  I have no reason to buck the term if Lewis Grizzard wouldn't.  Nevertheless I'll bet if you looked, he was at least 1/32nd Native American.  All of us are, and that means nothing at all.  It's wrong to help yourself by taking from the weak and the poor.  If law or custom make it easy to do so, we are wrong if we take advantage -- and if the law backs us in our wrongness, then the law is just as wrong as we are.  Everyone knows that.

Grim, last winter.

Innies and outies

I enjoyed this short article about tips for managing an introverted nature, especially the spirited discussion in the comments section from introverts insisting "I just want to be me."  Like many of them, I'm a bit baffled by why our extroverted brethren enjoy the gatherings of strangers that constitute their mysterious social life.  If I'm going to hang out with people (especially people I don't know well), I want to have an agenda:  to play music together, to paint the house, or at least to cook or share a meal.  Failing that, we'd better have extremely strong ties and shared interests in order to prevent the conversation from flagging.

But as I'm a bit cold-natured and socially clueless, in recent years I've made an effort to mingle.  I always hang out in the parish hall after Sunday services, for instance, and since that's not a social convention that does anything for me naturally, I concentrate on practicing listening skills.  (Left to my own instincts, I'd babble nervously and become a bore.)  After a few years of this, I can't say it's grown on me much.  Every so often it leads to a new friendship -- that spark you both feel when you realize you'd rather talk to each other than mingle -- and it always leads to a greater awareness of the situation and needs of those around me, which is good regardless of whether it's fun.  Nevertheless, it retains an ersatz quality that reminds me I'm in alien territory.

I'll always prefer a few intense relationships to a large number of friendly ones, and focused conversations to casual interaction, not to mention (usually) solitude to groups.  It will always be easier to get me to come to a party if its purpose is to pick up trash and then enjoy a picnic than if the agenda is to stand around with mixed drinks.  As you can imagine, I was just about the world's worst networker as a law partner, a real stinker in that department.  I was a lot more useful as the person you could tell to stay up three nights in a row in order to produce an outstanding chapter 11 plan on brutally short notice that would stand up on appeal.  That kind of thing is hard work, but it doesn't hold a candle to the drain I experienced from having to attend cocktail parties.  Oh, how glad I am to leave behind any professional obligation to attend cocktail parties.  In a sane world I'd have found a way to get double my usual hourly rate for that chore, instead of having to pretend it was so much fun that I'd happily give up my nights and weekends to endure it.

The fact remains that we all have to mingle from time to time, and it's nice for us introverts to have a few tricks to make it less excruciating for ourselves and those around us.  It's not like the extroverts have any plans to return the favor by learning how to structure social activities to our satisfaction, but that's OK.  The extroverts will be happier with each other's company, anyway.  They would hate our idea of parties and probably can't think of a good reason to learn otherwise.

Cheaper medicine

I've never yet failed to enjoy a TED lecture.  I have to ration myself, because my satellite internet connection won't permit me to stream video for very many minutes in any one day.  This lecture is about using off-the-shelf video game units to build for about $100 the kind of eyeball-controlled electronic devices that, up to now, paralyzed patients have had to pay $50,000 or even $200,000 for.

Patients with severe skeletal-muscular problems such as spinal injury or neurological disease tend to preserve their ability to control their eyes.  Not only the optical nerve, but also the other eye-related nerves, are more like an extension of the brain itself, in contrast with your other bodily movements, which are mediated through the spine.  When you add this ability to cunning little devices that track and respond to eye movements, it means that profoundly disabled people not only can web-surf but also can communicate and even drive mechanisms like wheelchairs.  The lecturer in this video has figured out ways to make these devices so cheap that they're reasonably available to just about anyone.

The price of cure

A history of surgery in the New England Journal of Medicine paints a vivid picture of why healthcare is such a large part of the modern budget, while at the same time being such a new part that its cost continues to outrage our feelings and expectations.  Only a little over a century and a half ago, surgery was confined almost exclusively to the kind of interventions that could be completed so superficially and rapidly that they were somewhat likely to do more good than harm.  Live-saving amputations were the earliest examples.  Lacking anesthesia, surgeons put all their emphasis on brute speed.  With the discovery of ether, they slowly realized they could afford to take their time and refine their techniques.  With the further discovery of hand-washing and sterilization of equipment, surgeons found themselves able and justified in expanding their repertoires to more challenging areas, such as the torso, and to less emergent medical conditions.  Today, medical science acknowledges more than 2,500 standard surgical procedures, often performed with minimal invasiveness, and with a success rate undreamed of in the mid-19th century.

We no longer expect to die of such common troubles as appendicitis.  We don't yet, however, quite expect to pay for their cure.  Unlike food, shelter, and clothing, the provision of which has been an expected economic burden on individuals and families since the dawn of history, medicine still somehow strikes us as a miracle cure that some kindly wizard should bring to the door in a diamond phial.

I'll have another

Always fun to see a horse come from behind, especially when the jockey is a long-shot youngster.  For most of this clip, I'll Have Another is way back in the middle.  It's only in the last 300 yards or so that he explodes.  The announcers said as a yearling colt he could have been had for $11,000.

Super duper

The full moon will be will be about 221,802 miles from Earth tonight, which is about 15,300 miles (roughly 7%) closer than average, and therefore is making its way into the popular consciousness as a "supermoon."  Wikipedia sniffs that it's really called a perigee-syzygy, and that indeed all full moons are really just plain old syzygys.  ("Syzygies," which probably is more correct, lacks orthographical style and balance.)  I don't think the snooty name is going to catch on; it's hard to rhyme and it doesn't scan worth a hoot. Although "perigee" and "syzygy" aren't bad dactylic oblique rhymes for each other, they wouldn't make a satisfying limerick.

There's been some crazy talk lately about how much stronger the tidal forces will be, or how big and bright the moon is going to look, or even what social paroxysms may be observed.  Newspapers tend to say it will be "14% bigger and brighter," whatever that means.  A disk area of 14% greater size, I suppose?  That sounds bigger than it looks to the naked eye.  Here's what a 12% increase looks like, from 2011's perigee-syzygy-superdupermegamoon:

As for tides, the effect hasn't been that great in the past.  Supermoons happen pretty often, about once a year.  The variation results from our satellite's elliptical orbit.  Although the moon's orbit has a period (obviously) of one month, the "bump" of the ellipse is out of synch with the full-new-moon-phase cycle by a couple of days, so it takes a little over a year to repeat a line-up of the full moon with the short end of the ellipse.  Solar eclipses (not to be confused with ellipses) also are affected by how close the moon is to the Earth, as well as how close the Earth is to the sun; that can make the difference between a really dark eclipse and one with a bright ring of sun peeking out all around the dark moon.  Eclipses, however, exhibit much longer cycles than supermoons, because eclipses also are affected by the fact that the moon's orbit around the earth is about 5 degrees off of the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, a retrogressing wobble that makes the plane of the moon's orbit cross the plane of the Earth's orbit in a direct line between Earth and sun only every 18 years or so.

It's been so cloudy here that I'm not sure we're going to see the supermoon at all, but we'll make sure the guns are loaded anyway, in case of a zombie apocalypse.

Sears, Roebuck, and the Blues...

The claim here is that the Sears Catalog was midwife to the blues.

You know what?  Tell me what you think of the argument.  Let's take it from the top.

Rethinking the Crusades

Jonah Goldberg's new book is not of any more interest to me than was his last book, but I saw via Instapundit that he had posted an excerpt on the Crusades.  That is a subject that interests me, so I read through what he had to say.

His general point is that the Crusades should be thought of as a kind of defensive war, rather than a kind of proto-imperialism.  Further, he adds, rather than an affront to Islam they represent one of Islam's minor victories.

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about the Crusades.

Most of what you'll see written on the subject in popular sources will focus on either the First Crusade (characterized by its mystical vision of St. George, and apparently miraculous success in recapturing Jerusalem), or the Third Crusade (with the irresistible characters of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin).  What we call "the First Crusade," though, wasn't really the first one at all.

If by "Crusade" we mean a war undertaken by Western fighting men who fought to capture land from Muslims in return for a spiritual promise from the Church that their sins would be expiated by the violence, we should look to 1063.  The Pope at that time was Alexander II, who sent a bull to clerics in France to encourage French knights to join in fighting against the Muslims in what is now Spain.  This is thirty years before the "First Crusade," but it was followed by several more.

The Papacy held that the Iberian peninsula was the actual property of St. Peter, and therefore belonged to the Church:  a series of Popes from Alexander to the famous Urban encouraged one crusade after another to recapture the land and restore it to the dominion of the Pope.  The kings of the Spanish kingdoms began to enjoy significant success, but of course they didn't wish to accept the domination of the Pope once they had captured the land.  The Church eventually settled its claims in return for properties, chiefly granted to the new Crusader orders -- the Templars and the Hospitallers, that is.  Less well known, though, were a whole series of Crusader knightly orders that were particular to the Spanish crusades, set up by the kings along the same lines as the more famous orders to fight in Spain.

The popes even went so far as to issue an order forbidding Spanish knights from going to the Crusades in the east, because they were needed to fight at home.

Now, if you factor in the Spanish crusade with the Eastern ones, the question of whether 'the Crusades' represent an Islamic victory looks a bit different.  The Muslims eventually recaptured Jerusalem, and indeed Constantinople; however, they lost Spain entirely.  Furthermore, the structures set up to conquer in Spain were largely transferable to the New World in 1492 -- that is, the year when the last Islamic lands fell in Spain, while Columbus opened the way west.  The effect of the Spanish crusades was thus the conquest and conversion of the entire population of South and Central America; it would have been the conversion of the whole of the Americas if not for the religious wars that split the Christian faith.

In addition, to get a full appreciation of the Crusades you have to look at the ones internal to Europe, where they were about enforcing discipline and putting down dangerous heresies.  The success of these was mixed -- indeed, the religious wars just mentioned could be seen as the final failure -- but they are also an important part of the picture.

Seen as a whole, the Crusades become a different picture.  They were far more than an attempt to recapture lands from Islam, and far more successful than at first may appear.  They didn't win everywhere, or for all time, but the strength and size of Christianity even today is directly related to their prosecution.

By the way, if you want to read a book on the Spanish Crusades, an excellent one is Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain by Joseph F. O'Callaghan.  His writing on medieval military organization and financing is somewhat general, but he puts together the history of events very well.

Croatia

Now here's a video that's probably worth your time.  It's an adaptation of the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th to a tourism video for Croatia.  The result is, for the most part, remarkable.

Of course, the architecture and a few cultural icons aside, what really carries it is Beethoven.  And that reminds me, again, of a problem we have often considered.  The beauty of the music that came out of Europe from the 1700s to the late 1800s was unrivaled in human history; Croatia has a claim to it because Croatia is European, and indeed a central part of the same romantic movement in Europe that inspired Beethoven.

If the music of that era is unequaled, though, it is we ourselves who fail to equal it.  The lady who performs here is a fine cellist; she replicates her part well.  Who writes for her now, as once he did?

Practicing chaos

H/t Ace.  Naturally I can't find confirmation of any of these quotations, but I did find another unprovable one:  Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is said to have tried to get a rise out of Winston Churchill before WWII by predicting that, if it came to war, the Italians would side with Germany.  Churchill replied, "It seems only fair.  We had them last time."

Cradle To Grave

Wow.

Give the man credit:  he's standing up for cradle-to-grave government support, at least for women.  The focus on how women benefit from cradle-to-grave government wardship is an interesting one.

To some degree this is a practical fact of the kind of welfare state we've put together.  We tend to make transfer payments to the poor and the old.  Women make up the bulk of the one category because they tend to be the child-rearing parent in divorced families.  They make up the bulk of the other category because they live substantially longer.

Thus the split is an organic one, sort of:  it grows naturally out of supporting the poor and the old through government transfer payments.  The Obama administration is just doubling down on it, and trying to think of many ways to craft additional woman-specific payments and benefits.

Still, time was that accusing someone of being in favor of "cradle-to-grave" government involvement in our lives was a pretty serious charge.  Apparently the Obama administration thinks that, at least for women, the time has come to embrace it.

"Composite" Girlfriends & Literary Allusions

There seems to be a lot of talk today about the President's admission that the girlfriend in one of his autobiographies is a "composite."  That's an interesting thing to have done.

On the one hand, I can appreciate how it would be a decent act to keep the real girlfriends of one's past out of the glare of the public eye.  If you were writing an autobiography for the purpose of presenting yourself as a public figure, with the intent of trying to push yourself off in politics, it might be kind to leave real names out -- especially when you were talking about sensitive matters of the heart.

On the other hand, a "composite"?  Could you make a composite of two or three people you cared about deeply?  Wouldn't it rather be the case that you can't help but see such people as the individuals that they are?

Consider the letter making the rounds today:

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — [T.S.] Eliot is of this type,” Obama wrote in one letter to McNear. “Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

This indicates that the speaker thinks of himself as outside "the western tradition," which ought to be problematic enough for the President's defenders.  What strikes me, though, is the way that the literary figures are completely interwoven with the thoughts.  This is common among people who have spent their lives immersed in literature.

I cannot recall ever hearing the President speak this way, though.  He's given a lot of speeches, but literary references are rare within them, and essentially absent from his off-the-cuff remarks.

Now it could be that the private, girlfriend-seeking Barack Obama is just a very different man from the public speaker; apparently Nixon was that way (as Cassandra recently pointed out).  Still, Nixon was also a lot less public as a public figure:  the times allowed a President to be different in private than in public in a way that they don't seem to do now.

So it strikes me as odd.  Either the literature is deeply embedded in the thought process, or it is not.  I've seen no evidence of it outside the book.  What to make of that?

What Do You Mean By "Compassion"?

So, there's this study that says that atheists are more motivated by compassion than believers.  Now, if you are like me, you read this and you think, "Wow -- that's surprising.  So, if you're a random guy who needs help, you're better off looking for help with atheists than with nuns?  That's not what I'd have expected."

It's also not what the study proves, as it turns out.

"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."

So, in other words, religion performs the expected function after all:  it drives people to help out that random guy.  Without it, you're likely to help if and only if you have an existing emotional connection with the individual who wants help.

That's not shocking at all.  It's just what you'd expect.

Outlaws!

I have to say I find this really, really funny.

Some black bloc man bigger than me with bandana tried to take my camera from me violently fuck that! Smash the state not my camera
Stephanie Keith (@Steffikeith) May 1, 2012
Source: @Steffikeith

It's one thing to be an outlaw if you're prepared to live outside the law.  But if you smash the state, dear lady, who's going to protect your camera?  Twitter?

Eastward, ho

The problem with federalism is that sometimes the states run experiments whose results are hard to discount.  This week has seen a flood of California-is-boned articles, summed up for us in a handy way here, but this short set of statistics stood out for me:

From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California also ranked in the top five or ten in a number of troubling contests, from most-taxed to most-regulated. It typically shares honors with New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.

Rationalizing markets

A healthcare blog makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we treat legal fees like medical costs:

It makes one think: If the lawyers are designing the health-care system, shouldn’t they be forced to operate under regulations similar to those they’re imposing? How, for example, do lawyers get paid? Today, they negotiate fees with clients. That hardly seems fair. In health care, doctors don’t negotiate fees with patients, they get paid according to an opaque schedule determined by health plans. Lawyers should do the same. The solution is “legal insurance.” After all, who amongst us knows when we’ll need a lawyer? It is often an unpredictable expense, and yet the “market” seems to have failed to provide such insurance. Government must intervene.

The sad truth, of course, is that we do something very much like this in all fee-shifting cases in the legal field, and it works about as well there as is does in the healthcare field.  It's a good point, though.  Why don't we imagine that we can apply the lessons of healthcare to every critical need in life?  Why do we trust people to supply themselves with their own food and shelter, for instance?  It's true that healthcare often demands more foresight than our other daily needs.  There aren't many people who are so disorganized that they can't be trusted to plan for satisfying their daily hunger, but many people will fail to plan now for a statistically likely medical bill in ten or twenty years.  Similarly, some people make a concerted effort to save up for their children's college tuition well ahead of time, while others look around one day in shock and realize their eldest is 18 and needs to do something about it next month.  Now where is that student loan application?  And by the way, I'm 55 and would like to retire soon.  Who's been saving up for me?

Nevertheless, it puzzles me why people imagine the government can substitute for their own role in virtually all long-term planning.  As Glenn Reynolds said recently, liberalism includes the belief that the voters aren't capable of planning for their own retirement, but they're capable of planning for mine.

May Day

Today we enter the Cathedral of May, that month when the fullest beauty of spring gives way to the richness of summer.

Though the whitest branches of Georgia's spring come earlier in the year, the mountain laurel are like this now.  Here is a branch from the shoulders of the Oconee.

The greenwood in May always brings to my mind the old stories of Robin Hood, who was always happiest in the Maytime.  Eight years ago I quoted part of a ballad of Robin Hood in May:  today I realize that ballad can be sung to the tune of the May Day Carol, given above.  Here's the first few lines:  try it and see!


But how many months be in the year?   There are thirteen, I say; The midsummer moon is the merryest of all   Next to the merry month of May.
I
IN summer time, when leaves grow green,      
  And flowers are fresh and gay, Robin Hood and his merry men   Were [all] disposed to play.
II
Then some would leap, and some would run,   And some use artillery:      
‘Which of you can a good bow draw,   A good archer to be?
III
‘Which of you can kill a buck?   Or who can kill a doe? Or who can kill a hart of grease,      
  Five hundred foot him fro?’
IV
Will Scadlock he kill’d a buck,   And Midge he kill’d a doe, And Little John kill’d a hart of grease,   Five hundred foot him fro.

The Elizabeth Warren Affirmative Action Dust-Up

Pictured: a wild-eyed savage delighting in the destruction of the civilization of the West; and a Cherokee warrior, ca. 1836

AceOfSpadesHQ is having fun with Harvard's alleged use of Elizabeth Warren's citing of perhaps spurious Cherokee ancestry to demonstrate its commitment to minority hiring. As usual, the humorous point wins me over completely, but Ace loses me when he suggests that Warren might not have landed her cushy job at Harvard without this maneuver. Warren was my bankruptcy law professor when she was but a professor at the lowly University of Houston law school, back in the Pleistocene. She was a fine teacher and a very, very bright woman with an organized mind, not at all given to partisan harangues. In the decades since, she's remained in the public eye -- public in the context of bankruptcy lawyers -- publishing a number of quantitative papers about the results of real bankruptcy cases. She seems a perfect match for the Harvard Law milieu.  I don't agree with her politics, but there's nothing wrong with her professional achievements.

The perils of brunch

"No, I don't want a bloody mary with pickled brussels sprouts and beets.  I'm not interested in octopus salad with pearl onions.  I'm a prey animal.  I just want to freeze."

A Question of Scale, and a Question of Proportion

So Dan Rather has a report today -- I had thought he was retired -- on the horror of how our grandparents used to deal with unwanted pregnancy.

In the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, being an unwed mother carried a significant stigma in America. It’s now called the “baby scoop” era and during this time young women -- usually in their teens -- were either hidden at home, sent to live with distant relatives or quietly dispatched to maternity homes to give birth. 

Estimates are as many as 1.5 million young mothers who say they were forced -- some just minutes after delivery -- to hand over their babies for adoption during this period.  It was a decision that they seldom made on their own.

It's easy to sympathize with the mothers here, for whom this must have been a traumatic and upsetting experience.  However, note the scale:  1.5 million over a period of thirty years.

The CDC estimates that the number of abortions in America since 1973 is about 50 million.

Even allowing for the existence of a certain number of illegal abortions in the 50s-1973, it's clear that the loss of the social stigma has vastly increased the scale of the problem.  Unintended pregnancies are now much more common than they were.

That's the question of scale; but there's also a question of proportion.  Is it proportionate to traumatize a young woman with social stigma when she has done something so reckless as to create a life she cannot support?  Possibly; it's harsh, but it need not be cruel.  Sometimes a harsh solution is necessary, though cruelty never is.

Is it proportionate to kill a child for the crime of being unwanted?  Of course it is not.

Likewise, there's a question of proportion in terms of addressing the injustice that results.  Insofar as it was wrong to force these young women to give up their children, many of these children can now be located in time for them to share a part of their lives with the mothers who now wish to contact them.  Some will have lived and died, but most should be able to connect even now.  A child killed in the womb, by contrast, can never be recovered:  the injustice to the child cannot even be ameliorated, let alone put right.  Should the mother change her mind, years later, she will find no recourse in the courts.

It appears, then, that our new solution has (a) made the problem far more common and also (b) morally worse.  Our grandparents, so often mocked as oppressive haters of women, may have had the better solution.

Yet if our way is practically worse, and also morally worse, it is superior in one respect:  it takes better care of the feelings of the adults involved.  The women who make the choice feel that at least society respects them enough not to interfere, however much they may still regret the choice they make; and the rest of us are never forced to deal with anyone who is aggrieved, as these mothers were by the forced adoptions, because the aggrieved party is helpfully dead.  If the standard for judging the policy is how careful it is of the feelings of everyone within our social circle, then this policy is a far better.