Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Most right wingers think their views are legitimate because the right wing exists as the direct opposition to the left. But i think that view is warped.
We need to start considering right wingers as extremists and not the opposition. They should be outliers on a spectrum where the left is much more central and the right is much more to the extreme right
|----------------------------------------left wing----‐-----center----------------------------------------right wing--------|
Like that
They think their views are as right as ours are left. If they were, they would likely be welcome here.
I don’t really see what is wrong with authentically egalitarian politics, so I’m inclined to think the “center” is just a euphemism for right-wing.
If a left wing movement fails in its egalitarianism, like when the USSR had slave camps, then I think we should not think of that movement as left wing at all, it just fails the definition of being left wing.
The common response to this is that it is a form of no true scotsman fallacy, which I think could be a legitimate concern since you might define a left wing ideal as the definition and anything failing to live up to the perfection of that ideal is not “left”. But on the other hand, I don’t know how else to consider some politics authentically egalitarian and worth supporting and others inauthentic or corrupt and embodying hierarchical or right-wing tendencies. Maybe there is no bright line we can draw or reduce to a logical equation, but I would like to think there is still some value in evaluating which politics to support (i.e. which politics are furthering egalitarian means or ends).
Or, hear me out, discard the left-right metaphor for the nonsense that it is and refer to ideologies by their names. There is no left, there are communists/socialists and anarchists. There is no center, there are liberals and conservatives. There is no right, there are fascists and “libertarians.”
The left-right metaphor is a set of training wheels, and by continuing to use them you sabotage your own political understanding.