Trying not to think too much about the VA Tech thing. I've looked at some pictures of some of the kids and profs and I've been sittin here crying.

So I'll post a little more about that other blog and what has irritated me about it. CF, I saw your comment on the quarantine post. Some things are just no-brainers, you'd think, and then you run across people who appear to have no brains.

So I saw an argument put forth by a person who is getting her master's in bioethics. The conversation was about abortion. After careful thought and consideration, I have determined that I am pro-life. I realize that some people will not agree with me, and that's cool. They don't have to. I don't have to agree with them, either. But some arguments are just dumb. Here's one: "We have de-linked sex and procreation."

Okay, it's true that with adequate birth control scrupulously applied, it's (mostly) possible to have sex without getting pregnant. It's also possible with IVF to get pregnant without having sex, although as many women know it's not always easy or ultimately possible for them. But the vast, overwhelming majority of people on this planet were conceived and gestated the old-fashioned way. The exceptions are a vanishingly small fraction of the population. And this will be true for the foreseeable future. If we had to depend on IVF and cloning to continue the species, we might as well just lie down and let the bears take over.

So you'd think that a person would realize the absurdity of that statement before it left her fingertips. I try not to talk down to people. It's rude and disrespectful, and it doesn't get me anywhere. But I would like to tell this person she needs to ramp up her BS detector so that when she hears claptrap like this in her bioethics classes she can recognize it for what it is.

Another person told me that the sex-love link is stronger than the sex-procreation link. Uh, try again.

The actual fact is that some of us (I don't want to say "we" because I hate those broad-brush mea culpas) have elevated the sex-gratification link over everything. And some of us think that we should be able to do whatever we want with no consequences - to us, at least; if there are consequences to other people - unborn people, for instance, or people who innocently go to the store and don't expect to be coughed on by an XDR-TB patient - well, that's their problem. It's usually children and immature teenagers that one would expect to think that they need to be able to do whatever they want, and that unwanted consequences are just not fair. Yet you see grown people saying that opposition to abortion is sexist because men don't get pregnant. Eventually most of us internalize the fact that we have to live in the world as it is.

Last week I read about a new strain of gonorrhea that is multiple-drug-resistant and that the doctors are having trouble figuring out how to treat. So the sex-STD link is strong and getting stronger.