Thirty years ago was the milestone

Tomorrow we will all take note of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Some people suggest that we lost something profound that day, that fear changed our outlook, and it hasn't recovered since. This perplexes me. If so, it's been primarily a fabulous public relations coup by radical Islamic groups.

From the very beginning I feared the public reaction to the 9/11 attacks far more than any current or future damage. This public overreaction led to the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

What really changed the world was something that happened ten years earlier -- not to the day, but a mere 20 days before an exact decade. August 21, 1991 was the day that the attempted coup to preserve a hard-line government of the USSR failed. That was the day we knew the Cold War was over. From roughly 1950 to that day in 1991, the US and USSR led coalitions of nations in a global competition, where each side had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. Huge budgets supported the military on each side. Small nations suffered as the two superpowers vied for influence or control. Perhaps the nuclear weapons kept American and Soviet forces from engaging each other directly in any military action, but the price was the uncertainty of nuclear war.

As of 1988, most people saw no end in sight to that Cold War -- we judged that we were nearly 40 years into a standoff that could continue for another 100 years. In hindsight, we can see that it would be over in three years, but that was not our mindset at the time. This was an unprecedented standoff. How could anyone dare to overthrow a government with nuclear weapons at its disposal?

After that date in 1991, the danger of nuclear war decreased dramatically. Military budgets were cut, former Soviet republics declared independence. It's not as if all is well. Russia has considerable power, but it is unable to seriously consider conquering Ukraine, the second-largest of the former Soviet Republics. NATO is watching closely and has offered Ukraine a measure of protection, and Russia knows it.

What has happened in the 20 years since 9/11? Here's a list of Islamic terrorist incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

They are tragic in their own way, of course. But they do not threaten the stability of our world. The casualty figures are nothing compared to the deaths in the wars in Vietnam or Korea, or any number of other civil wars throughout the world that were fueled by superpower confrontation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a reaction to 9/11, but they were very much wars of choice. The US could have stayed home. We bear the primary responsibility for both wars and the resulting death and destruction.

The world improved dramatically for the better 30 years ago. If Islamic terrorists have made us feel profoundly unsafe in the past 20 years, it's a dramatic public relations coup on their part. The images of the twin towers falling are dramatic and stay seared in memory, but the real significance of that and every terrorist attack since has been minor. Public relations.

Profound change happened 30 years ago, not 20 years ago, but that anniversary was not marked, at least not to anywhere near the same extent.

Insurance

 

It's a sensible idea, insurance is. When a group of people is faced with the small chance of a future loss that would be catastrophic, each one puts in a small amount, and the unlucky individual gets paid from that fund and their loss is largely compensated.

However, one constant in the situation is that someone is making money by selling insurance. On average, you will lose money, so there's good reason to avoid it if you can cover the loss yourself.

One supposed benefit to whole-life insurance is that it builds a cash value over time. Yet you can build cash over time without those by simply saving some of your money. Perhaps it helps build value by fighting against the natural human tendency to spend what you have, and not save unless you are forced to do so.

My father bought for me at age 13 a whole-life insurance policy. I believed he waited until I was 21 to tell me about it and hand it over to me. I debated what to do with it, looking at various upsides and downsides. There were a couple years when I could borrow its cash value at the guaranteed 5% rate and invest it in the money market to earn 14%, but those days didn't last long.

When I had children, I needed insurance with a much higher death benefit than that policy provided, ($15,000?) and got some term insurance (was it for $250,000? I don't remember). After debating another year or two, I just cashed out the old policy. The main benefit was that I would no longer wonder what to do with it. The decision was made. Life was a little bit simpler.

I held the term insurance until my daughters grew up, then canceled it. I got the term insurance through Amica, a company my family had used for auto insurance, based on a sense of good customer service and loyalty. I later was told that if I had known how to shop around, I could have gotten the term insurance for half the price. Well, I didn't know how to do that.

A few years ago all my peers were considering long-term care insurance, and a fair number bought it. My instinct said not to. I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, but news stories recently tell of troubles in the marketplace. There is always fine print... my memory now is that when I checked, I found it would not cover care provided outside of the US or care needed due to self-inflicted injury. I believe that without insurance, if a person of modest means needs expensive long-term care, they spend down their assets to $2,000 and then they are covered by Medicaid, as they are then poor enough to qualify. They are not put out on the street. That seemed like a reasonable fallback position.

I owned a house jointly with my then-wife for 9 years, and of course insurance is required, and I don't recall having much choice about it. It was the only time in my life that I have been in debt.

Car loans require insurance on the car, but I have been fortunate enough to always be able to buy my (simple, no frills) cars with cash. I kept collision and comprehensive for the first year or two the one time I bought a new car, but I've mostly done without. I'm a good driver. In general, good driver discounts are not as much as they should be in a hard-nosed rational system. Even with the discounts, good drivers subsidize the drivers who would otherwise rapidly price themselves out of the ability to get any insurance at all after a few accidents. Being a good driver who avoids extreme conditions and rarely parks in hazardous places, I'm less of a risk than the actuarial tables would suggest.

With Amica, my current annual auto premium is $409. That puts an upper limit on what I could save if I shopped around.

I recall hearing a few years back that air bags did not actually reduce fatalities from auto accidents. Knowing the air bag was there reduced the caution of some drivers. Less caution combined with air bags led to a constant death rate. I suspect that my knowledge that I don't have collision insurance makes me a little bit more cautious as I drive.

Insurance always comes with hitches, or so it seems. There's a deductible. For minor accidents, the advice is to pay to repair collision damage yourself, or else the increase in your premium will outweigh any benefit you received.

For a couple years towards the end of their lives, I was managing my parents' finances. They owned a house near the beach on Cape Cod, and insurance was considerable. The house was considered a "tear down" -- anyone who bought it would tear down the modest house and build a bigger one on the lot. Sentiment about keeping the house versus selling it was divided in the family, and any sort of major damage would push us over the line into selling. I had the brilliant idea of canceling the insurance. There would be no point in rebuilding a house if it was to be torn down. A smoldering cellar hole was no less valuable than a house that was to be torn down. The other purpose of the policy was liability. I inquired if we could get a cheaper policy that covered only liability, but was told that a custom policy would in fact be more expensive. Given the incredibly low chance of liability for a simple house that was vacant most of the time, I suspect we would have been better off without the policy. But as an agent for my parents, prudence dictated we keep it.

I mentioned that part of my judgment on not getting collision or comprehensive was comparing myself to the pool of people who would pay similar rates. You may have reason to think you are at a higher risk than the pool, in which case insurance becomes attractive. Apparently there was a period in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people understood the symptoms that implied imminent death, but the insurance companies did not have the mechanism to take AIDS into account in setting policy premiums. Some of the AIDS victims bought very expensive life insurance policies, and surely their heirs benefited greatly.

When I bought my current car, a used Toyota Yaris, the seller looked at me like I was crazy when I said I would not be getting collision or comprehensive. Reaching the conclusions I have about insurance seems to be rare. I wonder if others have different perspectives.

As for health insurance (shudder)... That's a topic for another day.

The state of the world is awful

 This is an emotional judgment. I feel things are really bad, and getting worse. The situation is very discouraging.

Most of my blog posts have been from the realm of thinking, and how thinking should often correct our feelings about things.

I have often argued that in many ways, things are better now than they have ever been before in the US, for instance in terms of health care, women's rights, and the availability of knowledge and entertainment to all. They say extreme poverty is overall falling (even though sub-Saharan Africa is an exception). Here's one reference (chosen almost haphazardly) supporting that idea: http://www.fao.org/3/i2280e/i2280e04.pdf.

Those promising facts are background just as climage change is really beginning to show what it has in store for us. I like to think that Covid-19, though a real nuisance, is only a temporary blip. But it is a reminder that if the next pandemic is high-mortality and highly contagious, it is one significant threat to the world order as we know it.

Donald Trump is out of office, but the forces that put him there are still very much alive and well. In the wake of the 2020 election, there were enough Republican elected officials with the backbone to say, "No, sorry, the numbers don't lie, and Trump lost." If he had had another 4 years to work with, it's less clear how things would have developed. And the prospect of him and a successor regaining power for 8 or more years in 2024 is quite real. I have just been reading William Shirer's "Berlin Diary", and am somewhat reassured that Hitler's control of Germany even before the war was much more overt and draconian than anything in the US in the Trump years.

Forces of intolerance and fascism are at large throughout the world.

Prospects in the US of something as simple as a long-overdue $350 billion infrastructure package are still very iffy. The debacle in Afghanistan was due to a non-partisan intelligence failure, and it was going to hurt no matter when the withdrawal happened, but Biden will lose political capital from it. (Could we basically buy the lives of the people we want to protect, by quietly making a certain amount of transitional financial assistance dependent on getting some out and letting the others continue to live in safety?)

The US will continue to see its influence decline. China is a rising power, but so far comparatively benevolent as rising powers go. It seems unlikely this will change the status quo of there being no threats of rich nations fighting full scale wars against each other.

But the emotional truth is that climate change is here for the long run, it is irreversible, and the only question is just how bad it will be. I think we as a species simply lacked the ability to prevent it, which is a dim reflection on our species. Perhaps a conjunction of radical green dictatorships over much of the world could have done something. It would have been highly unlikely, but I can't think of a more realistic scenario.

Aside from climate change, we can imagine all of these things coming and going in the decades and centuries to come. But substituting climate change for assassination, "But other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" rings bitterly true.

I can say comforting things on an intellectual level about every aspect of the world situation except climate change. But all the rest feels bad too.

This comes as I have re-established a level of stability in my personal life. I was forced to move this summer, a lurking possibility for a few years, but landed in a very nice one-bedroom apartment in Watlham (10 Middle Street Court, Apartment 4, Waltham, 02451). It has central A/C, an elevator if I need it, and laundry in-unit. It costs a bit more, but I've decided I can afford it. And above all, all of my medical problems seem to be stable for the moment.

Even so, the world feels awful.

World War II Surprises

 

There is a great deal of information on the web. In such matters as "what happened in World War II?" (in contrast to current events) you can hope it is mostly accurate. Studs Terkel wrote a book called "The Good War", about World War II. It qualified for that status because the US achieved complete victory over evil foes. I suppose that's one reason I focus on it rather than later conflicts. Militarily, it was also the last war between more or less symmetrical forces. Since then it's been almost entirely a large, rich nation against insurgents or a much weaker foe.

A few things I think I've learned -- at least strong possibilities to consider.

1. The German invasion of France in 1940 was rapidly successful. But commentators now suggest this was not a predestined outcome due to a fool-proof superior German strategy. Some commentators have said that the Germans got insanely lucky. Hitler, in launching the invasion, did not expect quick victory, but a war that would cost millions of German lives. It was not a planned Blitzkrieg invasion, they say, but rather the success of the invasion in the way it unfolded led the Germans to think such a strategy might work elsewhere too. One French problem that might have been hard to foresee, for instance, was that they had committed their troops in a forward position, but could not bring them back effectively when required because the roads were clogged with civilians fleeing the Germans.

2. The German invasion of the USSR did not come close to defeating them. While the Germans made large territorial gains in 1941, they did so at enormous cost to their own forces. The Soviet military (and the economy to support it) was much larger than the Germans had thought, and that was what ultimately made the difference.

3. There were several assassination attempts against Hitler, and he seemed quite lucky in dodging all of them. There was a speculation that if the Army had succeeded in killing him in the best known of these (the briefcase that got moved), the coup by the professional army would have quickly failed. Nazi forces would very soon have regained control of the country. Goring would be the supreme leader. However, it is possible that Goring would have understood the hopelessness of the German position much sooner than Hitler did, and for instance surrendered a year earlier, saving a great deal of destruction.

4. Now, to Japan. The story I had always heard was that Emperor Hirohito was merely a puppet, and all power lay with the cabinet. The latest is that this was normally true, but when it came time to decide whether to surrender around August 10th, 1945, the cabinet was evenly split, 3 to 3, and in that environment he did cast the deciding vote in favor of surrender. There was not some large peace faction. The Japanese decision was not determined primarily by the atomic bombs. It was far more influenced by the Soviet entry into the war and their potential to quickly invade and occupy Japan's holdings on the Asian mainland and the northern island of Hokkaido. Their defenses were geared to combat a US invasion from the south, not a Soviet invasion from the west.

5. Japan was not a force of pure evil leading up to 1941. Seeking to be a great power, they invaded China and increased their holdings there gradually. The French had previously done that in Indochina, the British in India and Malaysia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the US in the Philippines. While the Japanese occupation of China was brutal, so was the US occupation of the Philippines. I am still looking for references on how the atrocities compared across these various colonial conquests.

The impetus for war came with the Japanese occupation of Indochina. The French gave permission for this -- the Vichy government, a puppet state of Germany, which was Japan's ally. The US and other western powers didn't demanded that they withdraw, and the US immediately froze all Japanese assets in the US and imposed an oil embargo, cutting off 80% of Japan's oil supply and a great of its other trade. That was a huge disruption to Japan's economy. A US ultimatum demanded Japan's withdrawal from not just Indochina but from all of China. There was some evidence that the US was trying to goad the Japanese into war, so the US could enter the war to help Germany and also deal with Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor served that purpose quite nicely.

Pearl Harbor was a strategic miscalculation by a great power. The US economy was roughly five times the size of Japan's in 1941, and when the US responded with all-out war to that attack, their fate was sealed. But none of that really adds up to Japanese evil.

A grave moral question hovers over the extensive bombing of German and Japanese cities by the US and Britain. They knew they were killing large numbers of civilians with many of their attacks, even if a few military targets were included. If we're thinking about "evil", that US policy must be weighed against Japanese atrocities in China, for instance.

Along with information, another lesson of the internet age is that any of it might be false. I welcome corrections to any of what I have written.

Telephones

 A few of my (few) readers are older than I am, and can easily "one-up" me when I speak of "the old days", but I'll set that aside and be happy to hear of your own experiences. To set the stage, I am 66 years old.

Phones already existed in my youth. In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, you could dial anyone else in town with 4 digits. The exchange was 868 and I believe all the 4-digit numbers began with 2. There were party lines. One ring for one party, and two rings for the other. You could eavesdrop on your neighbor's calls by simply picking up the phone to listen. A private line cost more. I believe I heard of 8-party lines. Even they made sense if you saw the phone as a way to convey very brief messages of a factual and time-sensitive nature, such as when your train would be arriving. They were an add-on to a way of life that was pretty good as it was, without the telephone.

The rule when making a call was to let the phone ring ten times before deciding the person you called was not home. That was a full minute. You can imagine the recipient finishing the paragraph they were reading in the newspaper, folding it and standing, stretching, and then walking down one corridor and another before arriving at the single phone in the house and answering. A different pace of life. Phones very rarely just ring these days without someone picking up, but if you waited a full minute, someone on the other end who was deliberately not answering their phone would think you were... emotional, in some way or other.

My grandfather knew his phone exchange as 'Bigelow 4". On the keypad "BI" mapped to "24" and thus the entire thing to "244". Perhaps that was supposed to be easier to remember. The phones only had 24 letters on them -- Q and Z were missing. Around 1980 a friend told another friend that if she dialed 800-POLISHQ she could hear a Polish joke. She took the bait and when she reached the end, she laughed, getting the joke, sensitive to the fact that there was no Q on the phone. The idea that it was just implicitly between P and R wouldn't have occurred to us.

Most phones were comfortingly heavy things that you leased from AT&T. No need to hold onto the base when dialing -- the weight was enough to keep the phone in place. Phones were all dial phones. In the same mind-set that expected you to wait a minute for someone to answer, the time it took you to dial 999-9099 was of no concern. I believe it was 1970 when I saw my first push-button phone, at a friend's house. I don't know how much thought went into the design, but it does intrigue that I do not believe that keypad design has changed in the 50 years since.

Then there came the message machine. After some number of rings (I don't think it was 10 -- more like 5, perhaps?) the machine came on with a prerecorded greeting and you could leave your message. First they were a novelty, then they were common, and there came a point where someone was strange if they didn't have one. When I was in France on a brief visit and heard a message machine come on, I briefly thought, "Wow, they work in French too!" before realizing how silly that was.

And then there is the Business Phone. I have few memories of the early days, probably because I didn't have much occasion to call businesses when I was young. As late as 1972, at a summer job right out of high school, I was tasked with calling ten textbook publishers to ask for what books they had in some specific field. A long-distance call was a Big Deal. And I was supposed to make ten of them in a row! Even though it wasn't my family's money, I was very sensitive to spending somebody's $2.00 a minute, no small sum in 1972 dollars. Perhaps my long-term anxiety was a bit less after I had made those ten calls.

Businesses developed phones with rows of transparent cubical buttons on the bottom to deal with multiple lines. The concept arose of putting someone on hold, of seeing which of several lines might be free. The job of "secretary" was still going strong, and that was part of the job. The human secretary took the messages, often on small pink pads of paper.

This and message machines jointly created "telephone tag", where parties would call each other back and forth and leave messages, neither making it a high priority to actually answer calls.

A friend had worked as a secretary at the Pentagon, and she noted that when officers called each other by way of their secretaries, the lower-ranking officer was obliged to come on the phone first. If the two were of the same rank, the one who achieved that rank first was higher in the pecking order, and tables were available to the secretaries to look this information up.

I don't know when it began... I would have guessed 1984 or so, as it impacted my life? The dreaded development was the business where an automated system answered your call, and after describing several options you were to press one key on your keypad. Businesses are always trying to save money, and it's easy to see how this could save them some secretarial time. If all you did want to know was the store hours, the street address, or the fax number, an automated system could give you that information. It might take you ten times as long as if you could simply ask a human who answered for that information, but that time was your time, not the time of an employee of the company. Soon there came to be one button press leading to a litany of further choices. Sometimes, after all that, you were actually directed to a human. However, you might be "waiting for the next available agent". In the old days, you had no idea how long you might be waiting. In more recent years, the company will often give you some estimate. In either case, this provided a very good justification for "speaker phone" mode.

I remember being annoyed when I first heard "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Surely they would give me the date on which they last changed so I could tell if I had to listen or not? No way. It just became a piece of boilerplate.

There came a time when after making a choice the phone might emit a couple tones at a volume to wake the dead, part of their internal signaling system where one electronic agent conveyed information to another, at the expense of your eardrums.

I have had the experience a few times recently, after some elaborate maze of choices and holds, a voice finally came on the line, and, it was -- a real human! It was almost startling.

Of course there was another way the companies came to be saving money besides handling as many calls with automated messages as possible. The expected delays were sufficiently burdensome that you might often just not make your call, deciding you could live without that information.

To my awareness, Google was the first company that simply dispensed with customer service entirely, at least for ordinary users. It surely saved Google a LOT of money. The theory was that the information was available online somewhere, or you could find a forum and ask your question and perhaps find an answer. I think companies also stopped trying to write user-friendly documentation. Some enterprising geeks would have written their own versions, and quite likely at least one of them was better than anything the company would write (and they could avoid time-consuming reviews for accuracy and completeness).

The one place where the trend seems to be slower than elsewhere is the health care sector. I find I can often get a human being pretty quickly at the doctor's or dentist's office. I speculate this is because those businesses are not under the same cut-throat competition as others.

But I do really long for the days when after you bought a product from XYZ Corporation, if you had a problem you could dial a number, and immediately talk with a knowledgeable person who could solve your problem!

Review of the movie 'Ponette'

 

Just last night I saw "Ponette", a 1996 French movie. It had been on my list for some time, but it just made its way into Netflix's DVD collection. It is about a 4-year-old girl (Ponette) whose mother dies in a car crash, and her efforts to come to terms with the loss, including being unclear on whether her mother might come back, or at least speak to her. Emotional intelligence suggests she could use some patient listening and affection from the adults around her, but they instead are annoyed with her for not accepting her mother's death.

Most of the characters are children around her age. Ponette (and the other children too) are doing a terrific job acting -- not just saying lines. And it is not just a few lines here and there. It is a full movie's worth. That acting is extraordinary in it own right. Ponette is not helped by having an atheist father (who can only visit briefly now and then) but an aunt and other adults who give different versions of Catholic theology, garbled by the other children's questionable interpretations as well. My enthusiasm was tempered a bit when I had to remind myself that it was the director who wrote the lines the children say. It is a tribute to their acting ability that I was so easily taken in to think that was what they were saying and thinking in the moment. The director has picked a movie's worth of entirely plausible lines.

This aspect reminds me a bit of <this stunning piece>  where a mother has her small daughter say things the daughter has said to her over time. There is no pretense that she is saying them in the moment, but her voice in restating them makes them more compelling.

Is her mother to be resurrected now, or later? Jesus was resurrected, but that is different. God is listening to our prayers and answers them (Ponette's skepticism on this point arises earlier in life than most people's). Her mother is at the right hand of God. Ponette would like to die so she can join her mother in heaven. One boy cruelly tells her that her mother's death is her fault, and only very bad children make their mothers die. Her mother comes to her in a dream, but dreams are not real. One girl says she herself is a child of God but to get to be one you have to pass a series of tests. You could imagine a Unitarian-Universalist mini-course on the theology Ponette struggles with (just kidding).

The one problem with the movie (and on searching I found that Roger Ebert agreed with me) is that Ponette's mother makes an appearance in the flesh at the very end. I initially thought this might be some aunt who was taking the role of her mother in an effort to help her, but it becomes clear that it is magical realism instead. Ponette has been dealing with a confusing and harsh reality up to that point, and the movie betrays us (and Ponette) by giving it up. But the movie stands on its own without that ending.

Evidence-Based Abortion

 

This post is inspired by "The Last Children of Down Syndrome", by Sarah Zhang, in the December 2020 issue of "The Atlantic". The starting point of the article is how few children with Down syndrome are being born in Denmark, a country which offers to all women free genetic testing. Abortion is not just legal, but socially accepted and even expected in cases where Down syndrome is detected. The article raises many issues, but my main reaction is that it is examining a subject that is "tame" in many respects, and more interesting questions arise if we let the wild beasts loose and discuss those issues.

Zhang tells us that when people do have a Down Syndrome child, they typically love him or her and feel glad they did not abort him or her. By extension, those who are considering an abortion also realize they would likely feel the same way if they let the pregnancy continue. Going beyond the premise of the article, this is surely the case for the far more common situation where a woman aborts because she does not want any child at that time. Some women regret that choice, but a great many do not. For those women, a fetus is not a child with the rights of a child, but just a potential child.

As an aside, I join most people in feeling that a woman has an inalienable right to bring to term any pregnancy she has, regardless of what she knows about it.

One of the key elements is information. In the old days, pregnant women knew only that they were going to bear a child (or perhaps two) and knew nothing about them. With prenatal screening, there is some information, and an ability to choose. When is there too much information?

I read an intriguing short story not long ago about a society where they could determine the exact genetic sequence that a woman or man would contribute to a baby if they were to have intercourse right then. This doesn't require much fiction for women, where the identity of the egg and its genetic make-up are in fact determined, and the only scientific problem is how to detect it. It is less plausible for men, but you could imagine technology that would somehow identify the one sperm that would do the fertilizing. The story continues to include an app on each person's phone that would automatically be loaded with that genetic sequence, and an app that can combine them so it knows the genome of the baby that would result if the two of them had sex. Technology had also advanced to the point where they could "age-progress" this genetic sequence forward and get a good indication of what the child would look like, its IQ, its likes and dislikes, and its mannerisms. You could look at a little video of the child you could make with this person you're with. Faced with shrinking populations, governments might subsidize the program!

I expect this is a world that would drive people crazy with anxiety and grief. There is no physical embryo whose rights a person might want to protect, but there is an "informational baby". If you're sitting next to someone at a concert, or waiting in some line, or in your aerobics class, the two of you looking at your phones can see a potential baby. But if you don't have intercourse with that person, such a baby will never exist. If a woman turns to the man on the other side of her, the profile of a different baby will appear. The failure to have intercourse with each of these other people is killing a baby whose properties you can identify. TMI today stands "too much information" and is used today in a lighthearted way, but in this imaginary but possible world it would apply with full force.

One aspect that is absent from most debates about abortion is what the economists would dryly call "opportunity cost". If you live in a world where pregnancies are planned, terminating one baby likely results in the creation of another one. On its more ominous side, carrying the one baby to term precludes life of another baby, even if we in fact don't know anything about its properties.

As for knowing you will love any baby you get, consider this case. A woman who would never have an abortion gets pregnant by a brutal rape. Chances are that the resulting baby will be as delightful and charming as any other baby. Beholding her delightful 3-year-old, can the woman say she is glad she was raped, since otherwise she wouldn't have the baby? She might say that, but surely no one wants to work backwards and offer it as an excuse for rape. Imagine a rapist in our science fiction world showing his victim the baby that would be born if he follows through with his rape, and telling the woman that unless he rapes her she is denying that baby a chance at life. We are in the territory of moral nightmare.

As a result of all those considerations, I feel like a woman should choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, armed with whatever information she has, without any moral qualms. Sarah Zhang is shocked by a parent of a Down syndrome baby saying, "we would have asked for abortion if we knew". She shouldn't be shocked. A mother after a bitter divorce can say, "I wish I hadn't married him" without betraying her children by that marriage. Telling your child, "I wish you had never been born!" is typically a very bad thing, said in the heat of anger about one's current feelings. But if in a calm and loving moment, as a result of questioning and honest conversation, you admit to your child that they were the result of an unplanned pregnancy that upset you a great deal, that is just telling the truth.

An issue that the article touches on is that of removing heritable genes from the gene pool. Down syndrome is not caused by the allele of a particular gene, and in fact those with Down syndrome very rarely have children themselves in any case. If the genes for Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis plummet in the population, few people will mourn. There are other genes that we will identify that tend to make a person dumber, less attractive, less athletic, less outgoing... and we will argue about those. But, to get whimsical for a moment, suppose there were a detectable gene that strongly predisposes a person to become a Republican. That would invite a field day of comment and argument.

A far more consequential form of screening is the abortion of girl fetuses, notably in India. Here the undesirable trait to be eliminated is in fact a necessary trait of one of the two parents. How do Indian women feel about having their girl babies aborted? Perhaps the same culture that allows such a practice enforces silence on women about such issues. Perhaps there are such articles that I do not know about. Or perhaps the women share the same set of beliefs. I have heard of Jewish mothers who are elated to find they have given birth to a son, since the life of a woman is so hard in Judaism (as they see it).

My conclusion that people should choose whether to abort fetuses given what they know does not address this case in India. My view does not allow for moral outrage at the termination of any particular girl fetus. If a family from any culture has three girls and chooses to abort female fetuses until they get a son, my principles don't object to that, and similarly a family of three boys can abort male fetuses until they get a daughter.

To the extent I deplore society-wide selective girl abortion (and I do) it has to be on other grounds. A topic for another day.