NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/abortion/53266

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-29 | 5.1 KB

Xref: sparky talk.abortion:53266 alt.abortion.inequity:6208
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!nigel.msen.com!heifetz!rotag!kevin
From: [e-mail] (Kevin Darcy)
Subject: Re: Apologies to Garvin, Keegan, clueless newbies, and Regard
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: Who, me???
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 01:36:08 GMT
Lines: 97

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>
> [hack, slash, burn]
>
>Here I reproduce the post which set off the whole "attributions/forgery"
>flap that has been festering on talk.abortion and assorted other groups
>for almost two months.  I've set the Newsgroups line to the same two you
>see in the reproduced post below.
>It contains two errors.  See if you can spot them.  Solutions and apologies
>given after the reproduction:
>
>________________________Reproduced post_________________________________
>
>Date: 17 Oct 92 01:01:09 GMT
>Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
>Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
>Subject: Re: Let's Play StipUlations..
>Distribution: world
>References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
>
>In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>
>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Don Beaver) writes:
>>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>
>>>After sex, even if the man has never wanted to become a parent
>>>and used a condom and spermicide, he has no right to make decisions
>>>about his "personal or family privacy."  He cannot abort the child;
>
>Actually, he can, if he is strong enough.
>
>>From _Beyond Abortion_, by Suzanne Rini, p. 117:
>
>"In 1981 a man who wanted his wife to abort became incensed when
>she wouldn't.  He thrust his hand into her vagina and pushed
>upward, severing the uterine wall, causing the baby [sic] to
>pass into her abdominal cavity.  The baby [sic] died, and Robert
>Hollis was indcted for first-degree assault against his wife and
>first-degree murder of the fetus.  The state attorney sought the
>death penalty.
>
>"The state attorney general actually used _Roe v. Wade_ in his attempt
>to convict Hollis, begging to the decision's idea of state interest
>in the life of a fetus approaching viability.  Although the judge
>sympathized, he ruled for Hollis on the grounds that the existence
>of laws permitting abortions meant that fetuses not born were not
>`persons' and therefore Hollis had killed `no one'.  However, an
>appeals court reinstated the case and this judge reasoned that because
>science can now diagnose and treat the fetus in the womb, even before
>being close to viability, the traditional requirement that a fetal
>homicide victim be proven viable was now outmoded....
>
>"Eventually the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed the appellate court's
>conviction of Hollis for murder of the fetus and upheld only the
>conviction for first-degree assault on his wife."
>
>
>>Since a woman's right to terminate pregnancy is based upon the fact that
>>a pregnancy resides within her body,
>
>Newspeak.  A pregnancy is a property of the woman's body ("a pregnant
>woman") and not something contained in the body.
>
>What was it Holtsinger said about pro-choicers reducing women to
>containers?
>
>>Adrienne regard
>
>Peter Nyikos
>____________________________end of reproduced post_________________
>
>Give up?  In chronological order, the first error was to somehow neglect to
>delete the > in front of the Suzanne Rini reference, making it look like it
>had been made by Adrienne, even though the subsequent lines, clearly from
>the Rini book, have no > in front of them.

Hmmmm.... there is a possibility that it wasn't actually your mistake, Peter,
or, at least, it was a "mistake" that was extremely easy to make. In an email
message, a line such as the Suzanne Rini attribution, which starts with "From"
after a blank line, would be "escaped" as a matter of course by most Mail
Transport Agents. Why? Because some Mail User Agents (mailreaders) key on the
(<blank line> + "From") pair in order to delimit messages. Therefore, in order
to prevent a "breakage" of the message, the transport agent will throw a ">"
in front of the "From". Newer, evolving mail standards support the
"Content-Length" and "Content-Type" mail headers, which, in addition to making
message-delimiting easier for MUA's, can also be used to suppress this
"escaping" behavior for binary-encoded messages (where escaping an unlikely
occurrence of a "From" might completely corrupt the binary encoding).

I'm not saying that's what happened, but, depending on your posting software,
it's a possibility. If you had posted through a mail-to-news gateway, for
instance, there would be no doubt that this is what happened.

That "error" wasn't the main source of contention, anyway. The extra Adrienne
attribution line was what caused all the problems...

                                - Kevin