Space Fleet Reports on Human Contact

Weirdly, commander, some members of this species try to make more of their species through some sort of dirty body hole

A quick illustration of the Red-Blue Chasm, the immensity of which can now only be estimated using theories borrowed from astrophysics.

An email message this morning from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a deep investigative dive into an obscure topic — in a message that barely fit on my screen, so the screenshot is cut off a bit at the top:

Figured that out, did they? Coming soon: “Pizza shops orbit college campuses. Scholars have determined that they offer a bread-like disc strewn with red liquid and white-colored molten coverings.”

The investigation of pregnancy centers proceeds on the kind of dark foreboding that a television show conveys with poor lighting and a low vibration on the soundtrack. Since the reporter didn’t manage to get a single pregnancy center advocate or volunteer on the record, despite sending some email messages, the whole investigation takes all criticism entirely at face value, uncontested and unexamined. That leads to framing like this:

Some centers target college students. Andrea Swartzendruber, an epidemiologist at the University of Georgia, analyzed the centers’ locations in Georgia and found that they were disproportionately clustered around the state’s colleges and high schools when compared with other health clinics. Swartzendruber and her colleague Danielle Lambert have mapped the locations of more than 2,500 crisis-pregnancy centers across the United States.

Yes, friends, I’m afraid this is the actual dark truth: Pregnancy centers target young women. They don’t target eight year-old boys or the elderly at all! nOw Do YoU SeE tHe hIddEn aGenDa!?!?!?!? THERE’S NOT A SINGLE CRISIS-PREGNANCY CENTER INSIDE A SINGLE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY!!!!!

Anyway, scholars were able to determine this, using sophisticated geospatial analysis.

The story also includes shock-quotes from an actual college student, Hana, who went to a crisis pregnancy center, like this one: “She kept referring to my pregnancy as a baby.”

And then, presumably, they invaded Poland.

The presumption running through the article — through the investigative story, supposedly written to help people understand a thing they might not know about — is that the normal and presumptive response to all pregnancy is always abortion, but that some extremists have a bizarre and pathological view that pregnancy may sometimes result in the eventual appearance of a, like, human baby thing, which is very dark and strange. Here’s the lede:

When Hana got pregnant as a college freshman this year, she worried about her health. She studies public health and knew ectopic pregnancy was a risk. She wanted to see a doctor quickly to make sure she didn’t have one. And she wanted an abortion.

Her provider couldn’t see her right away. She called the friend who had gotten her pregnant; he Googled “abortion services near me” and found a website for Worcester Women’s Clinic, in Massachusetts. The clinic could see Hana, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her privacy, in two days.

It wasn’t until Hana got there that she started noticing red flags. One was that the actual name of the clinic differed from what was on the website. She realized later that it was a crisis-pregnancy center.

There were red flags, because somebody talked to a pregnant woman about babies.

Note also the pathologizing of pregnancy, the assumption — because Hana studies public health, that highly credible field that specializes in carefully measured risk analysis — that there’s an enormous risk that a pregnancy may be ectopic. If you’re pregnant, there’s probably a death seed waiting to explode inside you, so if you don’t get it out immediately, you’ll almost certainly die right away. Pregnancy is never good, never pleasing; it’s always a form of likely ruin, and you have to RUN RUN RUN to the abortion center or die screaming right now.

The balance in this story, the consideration of an opposing viewpoint — it’s like putting a grape on a scale, having the scale say that the grape weighs 400 million tons, and nodding in affirmation. “It has been determined that this grape weighs 400 million tons.” Having babies is dark and cruel. Helping women to have babies is evil and strange. Some people who believe in this bizarre babies thing lurk near campuses! Beware!

How do we bridge ideological differences when people speak like they’re talking about a different species?