Humans are too much like dogs.

Hot-headed. Instinctive rather than thinking. Blindly aggressive rather than rational.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article the other day on fetal pain, coming to the conclusion that a fetus can't feel pain until the hard-wiring progresses far enough - around the 29th week. This bothers those who are urging legislation requiring physicians to notify women requesting abortions that the fetus feels pain after 20 weeks.

So what happens?

Journal editor receives hate mail after fetal-pain article published

I understand writing to express concern about the motives of a couple of the authors, and their potential bias. But "horrible, vindictive" emails? What do those actually accomplish?

(1) They generate yet another news story about the study, exposing even more people to the results.

(2) They actually get me to blog about it, exposing two or three more.

In my very first post, I told you that Alpha and Beta had me fixed when I was barely a year old (I'm not going tell the "tutored" joke), and that I'd like to see abortion go the way of bleeding as a medical treatment. Writing hate-mail won't accomplish that.