I wish to take the time to thank those who responded to my attempt at a neutral replacement page for the current one dealing with the D&X abortion procedure. The responses have made the methods and purpose of Wikipedia much clearer to me.
I was laboring under the false impression that the purpose of Wikipedia was to present factual information in an encyclopedic form. The answer I received from Delerium/Mark makes it abundantly clear that I was mistaken in this evaluation. These two paragraphs sum up his point succintly.
In both these cases, the problem is that there is no entirely neutral
terminology. Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community. My preferred solution would be to use both sets of terms interchangeably--both "womb" and "uterus" and both "birth canal" and "vagina/cervix/vulva"). In particular I don't really see anything wrong with "birth canal", and have seen it used in pro-abortion literature as well as anti-abortion literature.
As for the term "Partial Birth Abortion" itself, there's no good solution to that either that I can see. Certainly there some be some discussion about the controversy over terminology, but simply adopting an alternate term would be biased as well. The only other term in reasonably widespread use is "late term abortion", but as you pointed out some of these procedures do not actually occur in the last trimester, so can't really fall under that heading. So I'd say keeping the term PBA with the qualification that some abortion supporters object to the term is the best solution.<<
The medical terms I suggested (which were also linked) **ARE** neutral and are well understood by both the lay person and the medical professional. Your preferred choices are in fact **NOT** neutral terms but deliberately loaded terms intended to subtly present a particular POV.
Furthermore the propaganda term "Partial Birth Abortion" is not a medical term and ** HAS NO DEFINITION ** according to the rulings of a number of State Supreme Courts, the US Supreme Court, the ACOG who are most qualified to discuss abortion procedures, and the AMA representing in excess of 35,000 members of the US medical profession (Dec. 2002). It is neither a medical procedure NOR a lay term for any abortion procedure because it has no unequivocal description even in the current S3 bill.
So it has become obvious to me very quickly that the "edit" function on your articles in Wikipedia is open to exactly the same type of "stacking the deck" abuse that online internet polls are and thus the entries in Wilipedia are less than useless if the purpose is to find reliable information.
Fred Bauder suggested I just jump in and edit liberally but this, I have absolutely no doubt, would simply lead to a pissing contest between those who want the propaganda retained and those interested in factual information. I have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in such an exchange.
It is for these reasons that I will retain the answers I have recived to this query as background and support of my position and will simply refuse in the future to accept any citition from Wikipedia as a reference to a legitimate authority but will put it in the same class as a letter to the editor in a small local newspaper.
I appreciate the thought put into the responses by Jimmy Wales and Daniel Mayer also.
Thank you all for your responses,
Eileen.
Cada niño un niño querido. Chaque enfant un enfant voulu. Jedes Kind ein gewünschtes Kind. Cada criança uma criança querida Ogni bambino un bambino desiderato. Every child a wanted child.
PS - If anybody is interested in viewing the suggested D&X entry as I revised it I will leave it temporarily at http://eileen.undonet.com/Main/Wikipedia_Intact_dilation_and_extraction.html
Eileen wrote:
I wish to take the time to thank those who responded to my attempt at a neutral replacement page for the current one dealing with the D&X abortion procedure. The responses have made the methods and purpose of Wikipedia much clearer to me.
I was laboring under the false impression that the purpose of Wikipedia was to present factual information in an encyclopedic form. The answer I received from Delerium/Mark makes it abundantly clear that I was mistaken in this evaluation. These two paragraphs sum up his point succintly.
The point of Wikipedia is to present factual information both about medical procedures and about the controversy surrounding them. We are not going to "take the side", as it were, of either The Reverend Anti-Abortionist or Dr. Pro-Choice. The article, when it's done (if ever) should be factual but also readable by the average person. Your position seems to be that the point of view in the current medical literature is "factual information in an encyclopedic form" which I dispute--journal articles are rarely written in the manner we'd like our articles to be written.
The medical terms I suggested (which were also linked) **ARE** neutral and are well understood by both the lay person and the medical professional. Your preferred choices are in fact **NOT** neutral terms but deliberately loaded terms intended to subtly present a particular POV.
That's not true: the term "partial dilation and extraction" is not understood by the lay person.
Furthermore the propaganda term "Partial Birth Abortion" is not a medical term and ** HAS NO DEFINITION ** according to the rulings of a number of State Supreme Courts, the US Supreme Court, the ACOG who are most qualified to discuss abortion procedures, and the AMA representing in excess of 35,000 members of the US medical profession (Dec. 2002). It is neither a medical procedure NOR a lay term for any abortion procedure because it has no unequivocal description even in the current S3 bill.
Well, we still need to talk about it, because it is widely talked about, and the subject (as you mentioned) of several lawsuits and bills. As suggested by Ed Poor, however, perhaps we should move the medical discussion to [[Partial dilation and extraction]] and discuss only the legal issues at [[partial birth abortion]] (where it would be certainly desirable to mention the vagueness of its definition).
So it has become obvious to me very quickly that the "edit" function on your articles in Wikipedia is open to exactly the same type of "stacking the deck" abuse that online internet polls are and thus the entries in Wilipedia are less than useless if the purpose is to find reliable information.
Fred Bauder suggested I just jump in and edit liberally but this, I have absolutely no doubt, would simply lead to a pissing contest between those who want the propaganda retained and those interested in factual information. I have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in such an exchange.
Perhaps you should consider the issue a bit and realize that your point of view is itself propagandandistic. I personally am neither "pro-life" nor "pro-choice" (or "anti-life" or "anti-choice", if you prefer), and would like the article to reflect both points of view. Simply sanitizing it and making it read like a medical journal will certainly satisfy one side, but our job is not to satisfy one side, even if the one side holds academic degrees.
Frankly, I have neither the time nor inclination to further consider the viewpoints of those who wish to turn Wikipedia into a mouthpiece for their propaganda.
It is for these reasons that I will retain the answers I have recived to this query as background and support of my position and will simply refuse in the future to accept any citition from Wikipedia as a reference to a legitimate authority but will put it in the same class as a letter to the editor in a small local newspaper.
If you have factual errors that should be corrected, those will be corrected (at some point when I get time I'll go through your modified version and integrate all those changes to our current article--or someone else can feel free to do so first if they have time). If your dispute is merely over the fact that you consider "womb" to be "anti-choice" terminology, then I think your concern is rather trivial, as well as not really well-grounded (it seems in this discussion Vicki generally agrees with you, but she has no problem with the term "womb" either).
-Mark
If you have factual errors that should be corrected, those will be corrected (at some point when I get time I'll go through your modified version and integrate all those changes to our current article--or someone else can feel free to do so first if they have time). If your dispute is merely over the fact that you consider "womb" to be "anti-choice" terminology, then I think your concern is rather trivial, as well as not really well-grounded (it seems in this discussion Vicki generally agrees with you, but she has no problem with the term "womb" either).
-Mark
Our article is just not that bad. If anything is goes pretty easy on the horrific aspects of the procedure, which is all right, it it not quite Halloween yet.
Fred
The debate over the handling of abortion language largely boils down to the postmodern dispute over the nature of bias in scientific language and thought. That is: the practice of science includes only that which is (potentially) confirmable or repeatable, rather than that which is inherently subjective or unconfirmable.
Medical terminology falls under the scientific rubric in that the terms have a precise practical meaning. The terminology excludes moral and personal weightings.
"Uterus", for example, is a more precise term than "womb", in that "uterus" only refers to the female organ, whereas "womb" is regularly used metonymically.
One can argue that using medical terminology to discuss medical practices is biased, because the terminology avoids the moral questions. That is the argument used by those who say that we need to describe abortion issues using words such as "birth canal" or "partial-birth abortion", and who say that when we discuss medical practice the moral issues must be admixed.
Delirium wrote: " Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community."
From that he concludes that we need to somehow intermix the terminology
in order to construct a neutral article.
But that conclusion is fallacious, as the "moralist" and "medicalist" arguments are not equivalent ones that cancel each other out, leaving perfect neutrality. Medical terms have specific, objective meaning, but non-medical terms do not.
Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.) language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe) necessary.
If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors will not lead inexorably to one result.
Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures need to be mde distinct.
One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language expressly disallows such a distinction.
I think this is excellent.
The Cunctator wrote:
The debate over the handling of abortion language largely boils down to the postmodern dispute over the nature of bias in scientific language and thought. That is: the practice of science includes only that which is (potentially) confirmable or repeatable, rather than that which is inherently subjective or unconfirmable.
Medical terminology falls under the scientific rubric in that the terms have a precise practical meaning. The terminology excludes moral and personal weightings.
"Uterus", for example, is a more precise term than "womb", in that "uterus" only refers to the female organ, whereas "womb" is regularly used metonymically.
One can argue that using medical terminology to discuss medical practices is biased, because the terminology avoids the moral questions. That is the argument used by those who say that we need to describe abortion issues using words such as "birth canal" or "partial-birth abortion", and who say that when we discuss medical practice the moral issues must be admixed.
Delirium wrote: " Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community."
From that he concludes that we need to somehow intermix the terminology
in order to construct a neutral article.
But that conclusion is fallacious, as the "moralist" and "medicalist" arguments are not equivalent ones that cancel each other out, leaving perfect neutrality. Medical terms have specific, objective meaning, but non-medical terms do not.
Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.) language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe) necessary.
If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors will not lead inexorably to one result.
Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures need to be mde distinct.
One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language expressly disallows such a distinction.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
The Cunctator wrote:
Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.) language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe) necessary.
If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors will not lead inexorably to one result.
Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
I don't in general agree with this: there is very good reason Ethics journals do not use scientific terminology exclusively when discussion the abortion issue, because such terminology, while well-suited to discussing specific medical procedures, is ill-suited to discussing ethical issues. I think when discussing ethical issues we should make current accepted practice in the field of Ethics our model, not current accepted practice in the largely unrelated scientific fields. I've suggested the Journal of Applied Ethics as a good model, but I'm open to other suggestions as well.
A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures need to be mde distinct.
One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language expressly disallows such a distinction.
This I agree with. There should be a section (or separate article) that describes only the medical procedure, using medical terminology (but with an attempt to keep it from becoming dry and jargon-filled so that it's not comprehensible to a layperson).
-Mark
From: Delirium
The Cunctator wrote:
Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having
a
bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.) language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I
believe)
necessary.
If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple
authors
will not lead inexorably to one result.
Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
I don't in general agree with this: there is very good reason Ethics journals do not use scientific terminology exclusively when discussion the abortion issue, because such terminology, while well-suited to discussing specific medical procedures, is ill-suited to discussing ethical issues. I think when discussing ethical issues we should make current accepted practice in the field of Ethics our model, not
current
accepted practice in the largely unrelated scientific fields. I've suggested the Journal of Applied Ethics as a good model, but I'm open
to
other suggestions as well.
I'm including the social sciences in my definition of scientific language. I would argue that ethics journals *do* use scientific terminology exclusively when discussing the abortion issue. They do not use *medical* terminology exclusively.
That is to say, I agree with your recommendations. We just haven't found exactly the right language to establish our concordance. ("Scientific language" is not necessarily the best term to express my point.)
From: "Eileen" EileenE@gmx.net
Fred Bauder suggested I just jump in and edit liberally but this, I have absolutely no doubt, would simply lead to a pissing contest between those
who
want the propaganda retained and those interested in factual information.
I
have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in such an exchange.
I agree that partial birth abortion is a loaded term. Why are you just rejecting Wikipedia because you are not interested in discussing how to do this so that all points of view are presented? It seems to me that your off handed rejection of Wikipedia only shows that you are not serious in trying to get neutral information out to as many people as possible.
It seems that you want to present a point of view that is valid and part of the debate about PBA. OK. Using variations of terms is very common in encyclopedias. Sometimes someone looking up an entry only has one term, if they start reading one article the beauty of Wikipedia is that it will lead them to related articles or different terminologies.
It is for these reasons that I will retain the answers I have recived to this query as background and support of my position and will simply refuse
in
the future to accept any citition from Wikipedia as a reference to a
legitimate
authority but will put it in the same class as a letter to the editor in a small local newspaper.
No one is preventing you from putting such information on Wikipedia. If you do state that is what happened to you, you may in fact be libeling the good name of Wikipedia. Why would you want to do that I do not know. Perhaps your motives are not so neutral as you suggest and you have your own hidden agenda?
Alex756