After last week’s slight letdown, Heroes was back in tip-top shape this week.

Claire confronts her father after her mother is hospitalized. Peter and Claude continue training until an apparent betrayal puts them both at risk. Matt deals with the aftermath of his failure as a bodyguard, and is finds a new mission with Ted and Hana. Hiro tries to find and save Ando, who disappeared with Hope. Mohinder and “Zane” (Sylar) meet a woman with super-hearing.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment I got on my earlier post about the governor of Texas deciding, unilaterally, to require all young girls to get vaccinated against HPV. A commenter calling herself “Womans Health Advocate” commented by explaining the health benefits (which, oddly, all seemed to center around the US saving money, which is an odd way of benefiting health, I think) and then informing me that sex was no longer taboo. She did a remarkable job of arguing against points I never made while managing to miss every single one of the points I actually mentioned.

Anyway, that’s not what I’ve been thinking about. Most articles about Rick Perry’s executive order that I’ve read (Dr. DeSoto’s commentary, which I quoted in the last post, was a notable exception, though it was focusing on the potential for a similar law here, not the Texas debacle) have mentioned that opponents “fear such a requirement would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way Texans raise their children.” (For example…) The implication here is that mandating this vaccine is opposed primarily by conservatives, who oppose it primarily on the grounds that it violates their moral code to act as though society simply accepts teenage sex as an inevitable fact of life.

From that, I am going to make something of a leap. I readily acknowledge that I do not have any concrete evidence to back this up, and that I am extrapolating more than I can prove. I conclude that a significant number of those people who support mandatory HPV vaccinations support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she chooses to do so. I am guessing that “Womans Health Advocate” falls into this group that supports both, but I cannot say for certain (and will make it clear that she does not fall into that group if she asks me to do so).

With that in mind, I have a question. How does one reconcile the belief that a woman has a right to choose whether or not she has an abortion (thus telling her that her right to choose what is done to her body is of utmost importance) with the belief that the government has the right to force a woman to get a vaccine (for a disease to which she could significantly reduce her chances of being exposed simply by choosing to exert discretion with respect to who she sleeps with*), when there are a large number of people who have significant concerns about the side effects?

Again, I may be wrong about whether “Womans Health Advocate” shares this cognitive dissonance, but where are the women’s rights advocates (such as NARAL) on this? Are there articles out there describing their massive efforts to have this overturned, or am I right that they are being conspicuously silent in supporting a woman’s right to choose in this matter?

* Yes, I know, you can’t ever be completely sure of your partners and their sexual history, but I’d think you can be mostly sure of them, which would at least help reduce your exposure.

Update: Since writing this (but before I posted it, as I was giving a few people, like “Womans Health Advocate” time to e-mail me back), I came across a link or two that implied that NARAL was not only not standing up for the right to choose in this case, they were actively opposing it. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the links, and I have not received any response to my e-mails to NARAL about this issue.

In this episode, Matt Parkman takes a job as a bodyguard, and finds himself facing off with Jessica/Niki. Claire realizes she can’t deal with what she knows about her adopted father and attempts to get her biological mother to tell her about her real father. Hiro and Ando help a Vegas showgirl who claims she can get them an introduction to Linderman, and Mohinder and Sylar are both looking for more superpowered individuals.

All in all, I’d hoped that, with a name like “Run!”, we’d get a more exciting episode. This one wasn’t bad, mind. It set up some interesting plot ideas, but it just lacked the punch that the last episode had. The problem with ensemble shows this big is that it becomes impossible to feature every character in every episode, especially when the characters aren’t interacting with one another much yet, and occasionally you end up with an episode where the stories being told don’t focus on characters you really like.

Oddly, this episode wasn’t one of those (I usually really enjoy both Hiro and Matt), and it still seemed much less entertaining to me than the last episode.

Anyway, there are spoilers in the comments below.

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In her editorial in the Boston Globe, Ellen Goodman complains about the lack of change in the “political climate” with respect to global warming. Dafydd ab Hugh comments on most of her points better than I could, but there was one quote that caught my eye:

One reason is that while poles are melting and polar bears are swimming between ice floes, American politics has remained polarized. There are astonishing gaps between Republican science and Democratic science. Try these numbers: Only 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it.

I read that, and I can’t help thinking that that tells me absolutely nothing. First of all, it’s hardly surprising that, on an issue where the correct answer isn’t yet known (see Dafydd’s post — there are many variables not at all under human control that could be influencing the global climate, and regardless of what some people want you to believe, we don’t know exactly what’s causing it), it is hardly surprising that people tend to believe the possible answer that fulfills their worldview. If I told you that 70% of college-educated Democrats believed that gun control laws reduce violent crime, and 30% of college-educated Republicans believed that gun control laws increase violent crime, would you be surprised?

Second of all, what the heck does “college-educated” mean in this context? Appeals to Authority are logically questionable in any case, and in this particular case, the authorities in question may or may not have any specialized knowledge about the topic being discussed — someone with a doctorate in literature is college educated, but they’re hardly someone I’d go to for an expert opinion on global warming.

Though, that did raise an interesting question for me — I can’t help wondering if there is any correlation between a person’s field of study in college and their political affiliations. I would imagine that, say, social workers are primarily Democratic, but I don’t know of any way to be sure.

Finally, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that among climatologists who had personally looked at and analyzed the data, the split was more or less the same as the one among college educated individuals in general. What would that tell us? It would certainly raise an eyebrow, and would lead me to believe that one side or the other (or possibly both) was being influenced more by their beliefs than by the actual scientific evidence. But while Ellen Goodman obviously believes that it would be the “Republican” scientists’ agnosticism that is being influenced by factors other than evidence, I remain unconvinced. I simply haven’t seen enough of the evidence, and the “We’re not sure” camp seems a lot more willing to share actual evidence than the “if you argue with us, you’re just like a holocaust denier” camp.

Consider this a response to Raging Red’s ‘Why Are You Pro-Choice?’ post.

I’m pro-life because I am absolutely certain that, fifteen minutes before birth, an unborn baby is a baby, and, therefore, a human life. On the other hand, I am almost absolutely certain that a fertilized egg is not a human life yet, and since, in that case, the only person concerned is the mother, I’m pro-choice.

The problem is, I can divide that nine month period into lots of small chunks, and I am absolutely incapable of telling you when that living blob of flesh that is not-a-human-life becomes a human life. I’m mostly certain that we don’t have a human life within the first week. I’m reasonably certain that we don’t have human life three weeks into the pregnancy. Three weeks before birth, probably a human life. A handful of days before, almost certainly a human life.

But where’s the cut-off? I can’t say. It’s a philosophical and medical question that I’m not sure we can answer definitively; we have a hard enough time defining what life is at all.

So, how do I then decide what I believe in terms of whether we should allow abortions? I look at the costs of being wrong.

It gets to the point where I cannot bring myself to say “That is not a child” because the cost of being wrong is so much higher than the cost of being wrong if I say “That is a child”. [Added after the fact: This is not to say that I don't hold anyone's rights to control their own property (including their bodies) in high regard; just that I consider the death of an innocent to be a higher concern.]

Of course, that only works in the ideal case. We can confuse the question even more by adding other variables. For example, if the woman’s physical or mental health is in serious jeopardy or if the pregnancy is the result of rape, the cost of being wrong by not allowing the abortion if the woman chooses to pursue it rises to the point where it makes the costs much closer to even. If I consider both the costs and my level of certainty, I can accept (though very warily) the idea that we should allow abortions in the earliest stages of a pregnancy, though my acceptance of that lowers sharply beyond the first trimester.

In the end, I really just wish we could get past the name-calling nonsense and stop throwing so much vitriol around. The pro-life folks aren’t (for the most part) simply trying to impose their will on women; they honestly believe this is a child’s life we’re dealing with, and they quite rightly want to protect that child. On the other hand, The Witches is fiction. The pro-choice folks (again, for the most part) aren’t anti-children. They aren’t revelling in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of babies. They believe these aren’t children, and simply want to protect the rights of a woman to control her own body. I wish people would understand that and try to reach a compromise that disappoints everyone minimally (I realize that no compromise will make everyone happy).