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