An American Engineer

Practical Solutions

Engineers get a bad name. Geek, propeller head, nerd, the popular image of us is either a middle aged, pocket protected, horn-rimmed bespeckled 1950's throwback or a google eyed, skinny assed, pastyfaced hacker kid cooped up in his mom's basement surfing porn and cracking email accounts of girls that would never give him the time of day. Management sees us as "cost", marketing sees us as "road block", and the greatest nightmare of any salesman is that we might just talk to a customer alone and unsupervised.

That, and it seems that we are completely outsourceable.

Yet, our entire technical civilization is built on engineers. We are the solution guys, the ones who have to take all these half baked theories and ideas that flow from the imaginations of artists and the dreams of scientists and craft them into cold hard reality. We are the guys tasked with making the tradeoffs that must be made when wants and desires make their inevitable head on crash in to the laws of physics and nature, and the need to do something in a time frame smaller than the age of the planet.

Engineers argue, they disagree, but in the end they understand how to make compromises, work from data and facts, and get on with the job at hand.

Data and Logic and reasoned Compromise, my DLC principle of good engineering.

It bugs me that we are under-represented in legislature and the executive branch. We have instead, it seems, lawyers, ideologes, professional agitators and "do gooders" from the left and the right. Lawyers love to argue, are by nature and training hyper-adversarial. The do-gooders (an old term, but a good one) are focused on absolutes, completely up in their heads and disconnected from reality. From where I sit, your garden variety Focus on the Family Christian Rightest is pretty much the same as your dyed in the wool far left Julia Butterfly Sierra Club Member. Both would rather see the country go up in flames in righteous revolution that even consider that the other side might have a point.

Put these two groups together and you have a lot of people that would rather posture and argue and bombast than find real solutions. Case in point.

Abortion and family planning.

On the right, you have people that truly believe that abortion is a sin, and also believe that contraception is a sin. Pretty much they think that sex is a sin, but carefully avoid saying that in public. The only answer they have is for everyone to wait until marriage and then have sex that only produces kids. Till then, teach abstinence. Well, that does not work, and any one with a lick of sense and a smidgen of history will tell you that humans as a group no more practice abstinence than Christian monks recite the Quran. What we really did before the sexual revolution of the 60's was for men to practice hypocrisy around sex and for society to practice repression and coercion on women. To think that would work today (or to think that it ever really worked) is akin to saying that the Iraqis were going to welcome us with open arms and flowers.

On the left, we have a rabid movement that:

1. Includes in the set of contraceptive choices a late term abortion procedure that requires the doctor to crush the head of a viable fetus, killing it, before removing the child from the mother's womb.

2. Seeks to legally exclude the parents of a pregnant child from any decision concerning abortion or contraception.

3. As an added bonus, pursues policies that have as their basis the concept that all men by nature are rapists, murders and abusers.

Take these two groups, add lawyers and some cynical special interest groups and a large dose of bombast and shake well. What comes out is the current abortion fiasco that has already helped to distort and inflame American politics to the point where it is practically impossible to speak to each other, much less get anything done.

So how would it be different if engineers were running the show?

First, we would get our assumptions:

1. Having kids is a big responsibility. People should be able to choose parenthood, not have it thrust upon them.

2. People have sex. Designed that way. Nothing will change that. Just ask Jim West.

3. Leave God out of this. Nobody has a direct line to the big guy/gal, anybody who tells you differently is selling something. God may protect children and fools, but we do not rely on that principle when designing child car seats.

4. We can argue all day, but it is pretty clear that a fetus that could survive out of the womb, even as a preme, is a person.

5. Parents have a right to raise their kids at least until they are 18.

So the engineering tradeoff would look like this.

Contraception remains legal and available to every one. Kids below the age of 16 need permission to purchase contraceptives.
Abortion is legal in the first trimester.
Abortion after the first trimester is restricted to saving the health or life of the mother.
Kids below 18 need to notify their parents, and below the age of 16, need consent.

Now we might extend the time to include the point where testing for birth defects can be done. Sorry, but as a society we cannot dictate to someone that they must devote their lives to a child with serious defects. As a tradeoff, if we decide require the parent to have the child, then we need to agree as a society to bear the cost of maintaining that child.

See, tradeoffs. Women get to control their bodies, but they must be responsible. Parents get to have control and influence over their kids proportionate to the age of the child. Nobody gets every thing they want, but everyone gets something.

And most of all, we as a people settle this question once and for all. We stop wasting hours of Supreme Court confirmation hearings listening to partisan grandstanding and spend more time addressing the real issues facing the republic.

posted by Maurice_Basilius @ 12:14 PM