Humanism Is As Humanists Do.

Many of the people I interact

with on Twitter rightly address issues of accountability and lack of it within institutions and especially within the NHS.



Last week I shared a small amount of information about what happened to me when I gave birth to my youngest daughter, who was born as an extreme premie at 24 weeks seven years ago.

I don't normally post much personal stuff on Twitter, but on the occasion of my daughter's seventh birthday, on Halloween, I decided to risk it.

Why is it a risk for me to post personal stuff?  Because a certain group of people who call themselves variously skeptics and humanists have got very confused indeed about the boundaries between the personal and the political.

They have entirely confused the act of:

1. evidentially questioning those on a platform of evidence, concern for children and rationality

with

2. simply personally smearing people because you are spitting tacks and you don't like them.

It's a risk for me because this group of humanists and skeptics are so angry with me for not doing what they want (going away and shutting up) that they are likely to actually attack me even for having been the mum of an extreme premie.

And they certainly did not disappoint on this occasion, following my tweets explaining the facts, which are:

that I was on medication to keep the baby in, which an overconscientious nurse flagged up to a junior doctor as being an odd dose (the medicine was normally not for this job anyway but the dose had been considered by a higher-up, and was certainly just about working), and the doctor change the dose resulting in almost immediate contractions leading straight to birth.

I then simply recounted the fact that once in labour, I was ordered to sit in a wheelchair to be taken to a delivery room.  But I couldn't sit down because the baby was already halfway into the birth canal, and so I was made to walk, which was difficult enough but all the way a nurse was shouting at me that I was making a huge fuss, that I wasn't in labour and that there were actual seriously ill women who needed attention much more than me.

My daughter was born almost straight away on reaching the room, luckily Steve arrived moments before and we waited breathlessly as she was put on a trolley and 'worked on'.  We both thought she was dead, but then heard a tiny high pitched cry, and then she was whisked off to NICU, where the whole family spent the next 12 weeks in varying degrees of trauma along with all the other families doing the same.

The last fact I shared was simply that the notes of the birth and what had preceded it, were "lost".

After all that, I stated how lucky we were, despite all that, with the outcome and with our daughter.

These is the tweet I received from a "humanist" (who I've blocked for being unable to approach me without this kind of attacking from her very first tweet to me) for sharing these simple facts about my daughter's birth.

This was followed by a second person a @WHAW_2012 who, when I shared the tweet above, asked me when I was going to answer the "question".

Call me old fashioned, but I didn't see an actual question in that tweet at all and said so, to which s/he replied:

Presume away, that's not really a question either, is it?

I'd like to identify these kinds of communications as 100% victim blaming.  These are simply personal attacks by people I don't know, and with whom I share no common interests as far as I know.

The first tweeter, in referring to "torture" may be referring to my evidential questioning of those on a platform of rationality, who have been unfortunately swayed by emotion into behaving less than honestly.  That's just a guess, because I can't respond to attacks like that, and neither should I.

I bear these people no ill-will, but I think they are confused about what constitutes compassion, humanism, skepticism, and simple good manners.

And if they don't know these fairly basic things, I know I'm not going to be able to help them.

If this humanist is treating me the way she would like to be treated herself, according to the "Golden Rule" cited in the picture at the top, that's telling me something quite disturbing, and if she seriously believes that her treatment of me equates to tolerance, consideration or compassion, whereas being evidentially questioned is actually torture for a skeptic, oh dear.

If this is humanism, or skepticism, we're in big trouble.
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Comments:  Polite comments which engage evidentially are welcomed.  No comment containing aggression of the type the post is about will be posted, so please don't bother.