[extropy-chat] Famous author self destructs in public! Filmateleven.

[Olga Bourlin]

From: "Samantha Atkins" <sjatkins at mac.com>

> Yep.  I keep experiencing people attributing all sorts of things to  me 
> given my stand on the subject of abortion.  I am amazed and often 
> blind-sided by this so you are doubtless right.

I have had the same experience, yup.

> Sounds good to me.  Of course the rub is in the question of what is 
> allowable to simulate or correct toward the ideal goal state in the 
> meantime.    I think you can work backward from the goal of total  control 
> over when a pregnancy occurs to it being permissible to end  an unwanted 
> pregnancy that escaped one's currently imperfect  control.  Others of 
> course disagree.

My grandmother - who got married in 1915 in Russia, at the dawn of that 
revolution ... and who had given birth to two children by the time she 
settled in White-Russian-China in the early 1920s, got pregnant accidentally 
when she was in her early 40s and things were getting ugly in China - that 
was in 1939.  She did not philosophize about it much - she did what she 
thought she needed to do to keep herself and her family safe and "packable" 
(as the White Russians often needed to suddenly move from one 
hot-and-dangerous area - to another less dangerous area ... until they 
eventually got to the promised land of the USA, which sometimes took years, 
if not decades).  I am not 100% certain what my grandmother did - but she 
either took something or did something to herself to cause an abortion (or 
both?) - and I always thought it was very brave or her.  She never talked 
about it (I overheard things here and there), and she definitely never 
played "victim."  Even in light of some danger to her own life, it was just 
a practical thing she felt she needed to do - to get some back some control 
she needed in the out-of-control world of the immigrant-in-a-strange-land.

I am constantly amazed - looking back - at how strong some of the women with 
whom I grew up were.  And they cooked like you wouldn't believe, to boot.

And I think my grandmother would have tried to eat Mike Lorrey alive, if she 
got the chance.

Olga