Sign This Email, Stop an Abortion |
Email text contributed by Susan Farmer, 26 Sept. 2000:
|
hey
everyone, one of my friends is pregnant and her boyfriend won't let her
have the baby, I already told him and her that it is wrong to have an
abortion cause you should not kill a live human being. Then I said get
500 people to sign a paper that says its wrong to have an abortion then
would you let her have the baby and he said yes. So I'm asking you
please sign this that says an abortion is wrong and to let her have the
baby. if you are the 500th person please forward this back to:
cutiegirl52@hotmail.com thanks. |
Comments by Peter Kohler: To abort or not to abort? Let's let a chain letter decide! Needless to say, this is at the very least a wacky notion. It would be the height of foolishness for a person to base any important decision in life on the results of an email petition, given how unreliable and unverifiable such results would be. Personally, I'd even be disinclined to let any such thing decide what I'm going to have for breakfast in the morning.
But petitions are used all the time in politics and business, you might point out. Yes they are, but on paper – and paper is even mentioned in the missive above – and with ink, not in the form of email. Allow me to illustrate why.
Just as an example, say that I were to send out a petition request like this:
Hi good folks. I am trying to decide whether or not to dip a banana in my coffee at breakfast tomorrow morning and I really need the etiquette advice of savvy folks such as yourselves. If YOU think I ought to dip a banana in my coffee please add your name to the list and forward it on. If you are the fifth person to receive this please send it back to me, as I will dip in the morning if just five people say so.
Then first thing in the morning I check my email and find a forward of the petition (or maybe a thousand of them) with something like the following added:
>> >Yes, we strongly believe you should dip a banana in your coffee!>> >Alfred_E_Newman@mad.nut
>> >Bugsbunny@whatsup.doc
>> >gumbyandpokey@animation.tv
>> >SantaClaus@northpole.magnet
>> >Bill Gates
Well now, would I proceed to dip a banana in my coffee? Probably not, for the point is that I just now typed that up in about a minute, and anybody could do the same thing using real or fake names and then forward it along. The results of even a modest list such as this: impossible to verify.
I don't know for certain whether the Cutiegirl52 petition made its maiden voyage onto the Internet in all seriousness or not, but it doesn't seem very likely. Regardless of that, here is the message supplied by my email server after my attempt to send a query to that hotmail address: "Delivery to the following recipients failed: Cutiegirl52@hotmail.com."
The petition is dead in the water and has been since September 2000. Don't try to keep it afloat any longer.
