OPINION
FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2016
THE HOYA
A3
VIEWPOINT
The Choices We Carry
I
t has been eight months and 15 days since it happened and I still cannot say the word out loud. Even typing it out feels strange. Not because it is painful or difficult, but because I do not identify with it. To say “I had an abortion” would feel inaccurate because that word has been sanitized and repurposed to refer to a topic of discussion, not an action or a reality. For me, that word comes with a whole litany of images and connotations that simply do not apply to me when I think about my experience. That term feels political and what happened to me was not — and, yes, I use that wording deliberately. Both to myself, to the small number of people I have told and now, to you. What happened to me. I say “what happened to me” and not “what I did” because, to my own surprise, this entire process felt and still feels like a medical decision. Not an emotional or moral dilemma. As an enthusiastic Georgetown student, I write this for publication now so that more Georgetown students may be aware of the immediate relevancy of this situation for at least one, but likely many, of their peers. With the email recently sent out by the university about the event on “throwaway culture,” the impending lecture from Cecile Richards, the upcoming Philodemic Society debate entitled “Resolved: Pro-Choice is Pro-Women” and the many other topical and pertinent events surrounding this issue on this campus right now, I thought it was relevant to bring a level of immediacy to this topic for us as Hoyas. For me, this was the only road I was ever going to take if I got pregnant at this age and in this phase in my life. When I, like most women of college age, thought about what I would do in this situation before it actually happened, the idea felt very possible yet highly hypothetical and distant. And so, when I found myself sitting on my bathroom floor staring at three plastic sticks that were all screaming the same thing at me with their sober little plus sign faces, it surprisingly felt nothing like I had expected it would. I kept waiting for the emotional wave to crash down on me, for my hands to clench over my stomach and for my mind to be thrown into immediate turmoil. And while there were definite surges of confusing feelings and some tears that fell to the dingy tile, I never hesitated for a second to follow the path I knew would let me keep my body and my life as my own for the foresee-
able future. I absolutely respect the values of those who would choose a different path, because I fundamentally believe there are many valid ways to approach this situation. I also fundamentally believe that even if understanding those choices may be difficult or differ from your own, compassion is key. When I had to make the call, it was not a decision about politics or internal struggle. It was a medical decision and, for me, the only solution. In my case, I just found myself on the wrong side of the odds. The two of us did everything we were supposed to do as two consenting and educated adults in that situation: We did not forget to use protection and it did not break. This was not a random stranger I could not fully trust to be safe with me, but rather a good friend I had a history with and still spend time with to this day. I must also make it clear that this is the only facet of this experience in which I will use the term “we.” He and I were not, are not and never have been in a relationship; I never told him, and I never will. This is not because I thought he would try to tell me what to do with my body or because he had values that conflicted with the choice I knew I would make or because I did not think he had a right to know, but rather because I did not believe he played a part in this story. That may sound ridiculous to some, since he obviously played a biological role. But this was not something he did to me, it was just something that happened. The knowledge of this would have weighed on him, and I do not think he should have to carry that with him. Even if I could convince him that I have come to terms with what happened and do not regret my decision, it would not help wipe this from his conscience. This is how I feel about this particular person in this particular situation, and while I acknowledge that it might be different if you switched the players and the game, this entire chapter of my life felt like an independent en-
deavor. It was all an “I,” not a “we.” I just happened to come face to face with “guarantee’s” spiteful and ugly cousin, “effective 98 percent of the time.” Another week and a symphony of deep, calming breaths after that, I was alone in the lobby of the Falls Church, Va. Planned Parenthood with my eyes glazed over in the general direction of some vapid morning show on the waiting room television. They called me in. I answered their questions with an overly breezy voice that I used to poorly mask my nerves. I was told
what I already knew and politely denied the technician’s half-hearted offer to show me the sonogram photo. I went home and weighed the options that had been matter-of-factly and helpfully laid out for me at the clinic — I could not access the Planned Parenthood website after protests, which began that week, had shut it down. I had decided to opt for vacuum aspiration as opposed to the termination pill because I wanted to keep this compartmentalized. I wanted the physical portion of this to be something that began and ended in that clinic as a medical procedure, not something I had to bring home with me into my sanctuary of a room. I did not want memories of this chapter of my life associated with that particular
UNPOPULAR OPINION
space. One week after that initial visit, I sat shivering in the recovery room on that overly warm Friday in July after having, according to the kind woman who held my hand during the entire process, “as perfect and smooth of a procedure as it could have been.” I drank a cup of juice, got a prescription for extra-strength ibuprofen, exited to the waiting room where my best friend was waiting for me and went home carrying more with me than I had entered with. I left carrying a weight in the back of my brain that often makes me wonder if I could possibly be the only one here at Georgetown who has gone through this. The only one who has gone through what we, as sexually active women, always know is a possibility but never genuinely think will happen to us as young, full-of-life, safe and swaddled Georgetown students. Now I understand that I cannot possibly be alone. I wonder how many others avert their eyes from the stickers in the stall of every women’s bathroom that are meant to be a resource, but that scream “Pregnant?” in what now feel like accusatory bold letters. The stickers that have faded around the edges, been written on by some bored bathroomgoers and that still cause a bristle in the base of my diaphragm and down my spine every time I see them, though I did not give them a second glance before that July. While I was not raised in a religious household and do not hold strong personal spiritual ideologies, Georgetown’s Jesuit identity has touched me deeply during my time here. When I sat through “Pluralism in Action” my freshman year, I reveled in the inclusion and validation of a variety of stories. I believed that I had found a place that would serve as a home for those who came from a range of experiences and that this place would deeply invest in those stories to inform the whole self and community. While I still hold that thought, there are moments when I cannot help but harbor resentment and sadness at the hypocrisy. When the Office of
the President sent an email advertising for an event, called “Resisting the ‘Throwaway Culture,’” on April 5 calling for an end to violence and citing “the destruction of unborn children,” I recoiled. When I sat down to write this and realized it had been eight months and 15 days since a six-week pregnancy was terminated and what that timeline means for me now, I sat there looking at my calendar unable to comprehend how different my life could have been. This happened to me as an enthusiastic Georgetown student who has been chugging along diligently on the four-year plan my freshman dean set up. I sit next to you in sociology class or accidentally bump into you in the Lauinger Library stairwell because I am checking my GroupMe notifications. I get coffee in the morning from Uncommon Grounds. I sit on Healy Beach when it is warm. I suffer in the pasta line at O’Donovan Hall. I am no victim. I had the immense luxury of approaching this situation from a place of privilege: I was able to take two days off work without worrying about the financial hit I would take from lost wages. I have personal ideologies strong enough that I never had to fight an internal battle about my choice. I received a subsidy from Planned Parenthood to offset the cost of the procedure and was able to pay for the rest myself. I had a support system ready to talk about it when I emotionally registered what it meant for me personally. I recovered both physically and mentally and jumped right back into my bustling everyday life. Not everyone is so lucky. While I have only personally told a small handful of people, I believe that more of our community should be aware of my experience so it may inform theirs. While we embark on the famed “Georgetown dialogue” this week, we must remember that the things we debate and examine about are not just bullet points to be discussed, but realities for our peers. We are a community of storytellers, but not often a community of listeners. I offer my experience to the Georgetown community in the hopes that it can inspire an informed discussion, but even more importantly, a two-way conversation that is compassionate and aware of the fact that my reality is, in fact, a reality for others here, too.
The author is a senior in the College. Because of the sensitive nature of this piece, the author’s name has been withheld.
GREY MATTER
Promise in Pragmatism Seeing the Reality Beyond Our Senses A
n interesting quality about Georgetown students that I have noticed is our general tendency to favor normative reasoning over positive reasoning. The former centers on subjective, value-based judgments whereas the latter relies on objective facts. Essentially, the difference is whether one can prove or disprove the claims one makes. For example, when I say the government should increase health care spending, I am making an unprovable normative statement. On the other hand, if I say increased health care spending will increase the government deficit and/or raise tax rates, that is a positive statement economic theorists would seek to prove with statistics. Our unchecked reliance on normative reasoning — that is, opinions — frustrates me because it allows people to make arguments without any evidentiary standard, accountability or expectation of results. If you argue only on ethics, morals and what people ought to do, you never have to prove that your claims would necessarily hold true in the real world. Since no one can prove or refute subjective assertions, people do not need to bring data or logical proof to such debates. While normative arguments can be fun, the ivory tower of theoretical claims generally falls flat in the real world. Without objective support, even the best ideas can often prove incommensurable in reality. We might now consider a timely real-world example: Bernie Sanders. Heretofore, his argument has been that the country has reached an untenable level of inequality and that we should strive for a more egalitarian society. This is obviously an admirable goal. However, he often fails to provide factual data that supports the claims he makes about democratic socialism. We cannot simply make everything more equal because forcing an equality
of any one thing necessarily results in an inequality of some things. The pursuit of true equality has an almost irresistible tendency to exacerbate undesirable inequalities of other kinds. For example, if we try to make everyone equally healthy, we would spend different amounts of taxpayer money on each person because human beings cannot inherently be equally healthy, and thereby our public spending on healthcare will become unequally distributed.
Rahul Desai Conversely, rigorous planning motivated by facts — in short, practicality — achieves results where idealistically opining does not. A beautiful example of practical reason is the Golden State Warriors’ historic season last year. In 2010, the thennotoriously underperforming team was taken over by venture capital investors and corporate executives, who adopted skills such as “nimble management, open communication, integrating the wisdom of outside advisers and continuous re-evaluation of what companies do and how they do it,” according to an article in The New York Times Magazine. This sort of data-driven management forced the owners of the Warriors to actually determine substantive plans to pursue results, instead of making opinions, such as “I think we should change our lineup.” Pragmatic reasoning took six years to generate sufficient returns for the team, but eventually this strategy paved the way for huge victories. Clearly, I am more
intrigued by practical reason compared to ethical reason. This is why I am actually impressed by Mossack Fonseca & Co., the law firm exposed in the Panama Papers leak. It chose to live in a world of reality rather than a world of hypotheticals. The firm exploited legal loopholes to help its clientele avoid burdensome taxation. While the offshoring of wealth strikes some as unethical or corrupt, it seems perfectly pragmatic from the decision makers’ point of view. Objectively, the law firm used its command of the law to achieve successful results. Make no mistake — my argument is not that we should be unethical. Rather, I fundamentally believe that all of our decisions, moral or not, must be undergirded by a sense of the way the world really is. Unchecked idealism more often than not leads to inefficient allocations of resources, time and talent. I believe this is the point my colleague Deep Dheri (MSB ‘16) makes in his viewpoint on divestment (“No to Divestment and Meaningless Solutions,” THE HOYA, Nov. 10, 2016, page published). He points to the internal mechanics of the stock market to empirically show that divestment from fossil fuel companies would have little to no real-world impact on said firms. Ultimately, if we try to employ more practical reason, we will undoubtedly make more effective decisions in whatever domain we find ourselves in, whether that be increasing equality, playing basketball, avoiding taxes or protecting the environment. By simultaneously working our way backward from real consequences and forward from first principles, we can actually create the change we seek.
Rahul Desai is a senior in the McDonough School of Business. UNPOPULAR OPINION appears every other Friday.
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his world contains realities that need to be able to judge the position we were not born to perceive. For and speed of the car in relation to you. instance, the Earth’s magnetic However, consciousness sometimes field constantly passes through provides shortcuts, allowing us to each person, yet it passes unnoticed. work with the pertinent realities Students of biology know this is of the world without bogging us because magnetic fields are not a part down with unnecessary details. For of our umwelt, or the slice of physical instance, physicists tell us matter reality a particular organism can consists mostly of empty space and the sense. Members of different species real reason I cannot punch through a have different umwelts because a concrete wall is because the protons physical reality that matters for one in the wall repel the protons in my type of organism might not matter fist. But consciousness, to the contrary, for another. For instance, certain birds tells us simply that massive walls and sense the Earth’s magnetic field as a massive fists cannot occupy the same biological compass to help guide them space at the same time. during migration. How does Through inventions consciousness deceive us such as the compass, so? Well, while a third we have made use of of the neurons in your physical phenomena brain are dedicated to beyond our perception vision, only a fraction of to create technologies that third is dedicated that have rendered our to actually sensing light. lives more efficient. The rest is dedicated However, sometimes to perception, or to Ayan Mandal venturing into the reconstructing your unknown can lead us sensations to paint a to a world in which our coherent picture of intuition fails us. Quantum physics reality. Therefore, we are limited not only is perhaps the most famous example in our ability to sense our surroundings of such a failure. Books can and have — we lack the ability to sense magnetic been written about the peculiarities fields — but also in our interpretation of of quantum physics, but a quick the sensations we do have. highlight reel would include the role But why does any of this matter? Who of observation in altering phenomena, cares if our perceptions do not match the wave-particle duality of light, and reality? We all should care because the probabilistic nature of electron reality may have more to offer us than clouds. We continue to uphold these do our perceptions. The advancement tenets of quantum physics because of new technology will depend on our they lead to testable mathematical ability to harness the power of what lies models that have been confirmed via beyond our umwelt. For instance, the experimentation; yet, these tenets next generation may see a future run on utterly abandon our intuitions. quantum computers, systems that would What could account for the make use of the principles of quantum discrepancy between our intuitions physics to store and analyze massive and reality? Well, similar to how amounts of data. To prepare for such our senses did not evolve to detect a future, we need to be ready to accept, magnetic fields, our intuitions did trust and work with tools beyond our not evolve to comprehend quantum understanding. In fact, a stubborn physics. Rather than independent fixation on personal experiences observers, our minds can be seen as a typically characterizes a denier of part of nature, a biological byproduct science. Think about lawmakers in subject to natural selection like any Washington who deny climate change other aspect of life. Through natural on the basis of it not getting hotter where selection, we developed a conception they live. While we should challenge each of reality that optimized our chances idea presented to us before accepting it, at surviving and reproducing rather we should also not be afraid to reject our than the most true conception of presuppositions should we come across reality. evidence that contradicts them. Most of the time, survival depends on an accurate picture of the surrounding Ayan Mandal is a junior in the College. world. To avoid getting run over by GREY MATTER appears every other a car when crossing the street, you Friday.