Monday, December 13, 2010

GAP and I go to the Chicago Public Library

Sort of . . .
On Saturday I was poking around the internet and found my name listed on a table of contents in several places. A table of contents, alone. That was strange. Looking further I found the reason for the listing. Greenhaven Press and several related imprints publish educational resources for schools on a wide variety of science and social issues. Unknown to me, they used an article of mine in their book, Abortion, in their Opposing Issues Series. The book was published in February, 2010. Apparently the publisher reprinted an September 2007 editorial I wrote for the Sidelines, the student newspaper of Middle Tennessee State University. My article in the book was titled, “Abortion is a Form of Genocide.” The opposing side was taken by a law professor at Notre Dame. Except for mine, the essays were written by what I might call minor luminaries, like conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, or Michael New, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.
While the book may be found in five branches of the Chicago Public Library, and in libraries and schools around the country, unfortunately, it does not have photos of aborted children. And it does not contain my best and most elegant arguments, which are based on etymology of gens in Latin and genos in Greek. (i.e. Fetus means offspring, progeny means offspring. Abortion is progeny-cide.) Nor does it explain that our use of photographs of aborted babies serves the same educational purpose as using pictures from the Holocaust. The book is available at www.gale.cengage.com/greenhaven/, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. $39.70, hardbound. $27.50, paper. I will ask the publisher for a complimentary copy!

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