Category Archives: abortion

Late-Term Confusion

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From Wizbang, which is always a reliable source of examples of rightie stupidity:

Most Americans, even those who are pro-choice, understand how sick this procedure was. If a late term pregnancy was so harmful to the mother’s health, then the mother should just deliver the baby and give the baby a chance to survive. But this procedure wasn’t really about saving the life of the mother. It was about killing an unwanted baby.

I’m seeing many variations of this opinion drizzled around the Right Blogosphere, and it reveals that, once again, righties lack a grasp of basic facts.

Firat off, calling D&E procedures “late term” never was correct, because it’s a second trimester procedure performed before the fetus is developed enough to be viable. Roe v. Wade permits states to ban elective abortions by any means after viability as long as there is an exception for life and health of the mother, and it is very unusual to have to sacrifice a viable baby to save the mother. “Very unusual” is not the same thing as “never happens,” however. The point is that it’s illegal to abort a viable fetus without medical cause in most states already, and has been for years.

The Wizbang post continues —

Here’s a feminist whose first comment was “We’re f***ed.” Sure, lady, if you mean that you can’t go to an abortionist when you’re 6+ months pregnant and have your unborn baby almost completely delivered except for his head and have his brains sucked out while he’s still alive because you just don’t feel like being pregnant any longer, then yes, I suppose you’re f***ed.

And, in fact, what this guy is talking about has been illegal in most states all along, and is no more illegal today than it was yesterday. When you say 6+ months you’re talking about after the 24th week of gestation, and that’s clearly within the time that a fetus might be viable. Therefore, that procedure wasn’t protected by Roe v. Wade unless there was medical need. Also, my understanding is that what procedures are performed after the 18th week or so of gestation are done by another means than D&E anyway.

I’ve seen some arguments that today’s ruling might end up hurting the Right. That’s a complicated subject. I do suspect the Fetus People might be thrown into confusion when it finally dawns on them that second-trimester abortions are still being performed, but that depends on what happens in the states. As I wrote in the last post, I think we can count on conservative state legislators to use today’s ruling as an excuse to write abortion laws that are even more restrictive than the one covered in the case decided today. We can also expect that in some states the ruling will be used to intimidate abortion providers from performing second-trimester abortions by any means. It’s going to get interesting.

Update: Here’s another example of profound ignorance. The rightie assumes that “partial-birth abortion” is a catchall term for all abortions performed after the first trimester:

… after running through some of the reactions on the left, it is clear that many that write those blogs are men because they seem to have no understanding of the differences between an abortion performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and a partial birth abortion.

Unfortunately, as Kennedy pointed out, neither do some women. Then you have women that DO understand the differences between abotion and partial birth abortion and simply do not care. Some seem to feel that it doesn’t matter if the baby is alive or not ater 12 weeks or even after 6 months, they feel their rights should trump the rights of an unborn child, even if the child is already displaying a heartbeat, movement and other signs showing it is alive.

An embryo/fetus is just as “alive” in the first trimester as it is in the second. The writer confuses “alive” with “viable.” Recently an infant survived that was believed to have been born at 21 weeks gestation. This made international news because she was the first baby ever known to have survived after a gestation period of fewer than 23 weeks. That’s very late in the second trimester. About 10 percent of abortions are performed during the 13th to 20th weeks of gestation, and no fetus is viable in that period.

Do not let some of the over heated reactions confuse the two issues, women can still have abortions, that has not changed, they just need to make that decision in a timely manner before a fetus actually becomes a baby that is alive.

The only rights that have been harmed here is a womans right to have her doctor murder her child.

I’d encourage any woman who plans to have an elective abortion to do this as early as possible, for her own safety. But what this dimbulb doesn’t grasp is that many serious complications can occur in the second trimester that can put a woman’s life at risk, and if the pregnancy has to be terminated before 23 weeks gestation (with one exception) the infant is not going to survive no matter how it is delivered. For example, preeclampsia, or pregnancy induced hypertension, is a common complication that can put the mother at risk of convulsion and death. In extreme cases the only way to save the mother’s life is to terminate the pregnancy, and sometimes this must be done before the fetus is viable. Terminating a pregnancy to save her own life doesn’t make a woman a monster, in my opinion.

A great many severe birth anomalies cannot be diagnosed until the second trimester. These include anencephaly, Tay Sachs, and other conditions that will take the baby’s life, with no exceptions. I believe strongly that when these diagnoses are made it must be up to the mother, and preferably her husband or partner also, to decide whether to carry the pregnancy to term. Not the government.

Here’s a heartbreaking story in which one twin might have been saved by sacrificing the other, which had no realistic chance to survive. But this procedure violated the hospital’s abortion policy, so the laboring mother was transported to another hospital several miles away, and both twins were stillborn. The father of the twins writes,

But the greater tragedy here, to my mind, is the straitjacket that a religious worldview imposes on the complexity inherent within clinical medicine. Our world sometimes presents us with situations that cannot be simplistically categorized as pro-choice or pro-life, and other patients across the nation will be faced with decisions like the ones we made on that fateful day.

This is why hospital policies that originate in religion rather than science can be unhealthy and unsafe. Personal religious beliefs can and should guide the lives of clinicians of faith. The extent to which they guide a clinician’s professional life is the clinician’s personal matter, and I hope that clinicians will choose specialties and practice settings that ensure that patients receive needed care regardless of the clinician’s religious beliefs. However, the extent to which these beliefs guide hospital policy is a matter of concern to all of us, whether we are patients or clinicians. The extent to which the US medical establishment succeeds in circumscribing the circle of influence of religion-based medicine will determine the quality of health care that phsycians can offer their patients. Clearly, irrespective of what religion each of us belongs to, this is the very least that our patients deserve.

But no; this twit thinks that people like this father are heartless murderers who kill their babies just because they’re having a bad day.

Update 2: Scott Lemieux explains it all for you.

Pandora’s Box

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I’ve just learned that the Supreme Court upheld the national “partial birth” abortion ban passed by Congress in 2003. The five justice who made up the majority are Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy.

The repercussions of this ruling will depend a great deal on how the various states interpret the ban. Physicians have complained that the ban, as it is worded, could be interpreted to ban just about any type of abortion. If that’s the case, I think this will bring about a huge public backlash against the Fetus People, which is something I don’t think they realize.

On the other hand, if it is interpreted to ban only the dilatation and evacuation (D&E) procedure, which is commonly used in the second trimester, then nearly 90 percent of abortions, performed in the first trimester using other methods, would not be affected. And second trimester abortions would still be performed, but by other means that pose greater risk to women. Even so, abortions performed by physicians in sterile environments would not likely result in the carnage that a return to “back alley” abortions would cause. It’s hard to know if a ban on D&E only would create much of a public stir at all.

But I think we can count on conservative state legislators to go for the more expansive interpretation of the ruling. I’m sure that many Red State politicians are busily writing up new and more oppressive abortion laws that go beyond today’s ruling even as I keyboard, and I strongly suspect this ruling has just opened a big can of damn ugly worms.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) filed an amicus brief in support of the challenge to the ban. I’m going to paste an ACOG press release about the brief here, because I think it explains the issues clearly.

For Release: September 22, 2006

ACOG Files Amicus Brief in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. PPFA

Washington, DC — The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has filed an amicus brief in support of the challenges to the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on November 8, 2006, in two cases that dispute the constitutionality of the Act, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in November 2003. The ban has not taken effect because of the legal challenges.

Almost immediately after the Act was signed into law by President Bush, physicians and medical groups filed three separate lawsuits challenging it in federal courts in New York, Nebraska, and California. In each case, the court ruled the Act unconstitutional and the decision was upheld on appeal. The government subsequently sought review of two of the cases by the US Supreme Court: Gonzales v. Carhart (Nebraska) and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) (California). Any further appeals in the New York case would be initiated after the US Supreme Court rules on the Nebraska and California cases. [I assume this is moot now — maha]

“The courts were correct each time they struck down such ill-conceived and unconstitutional restrictions on physicians’ ability to provide patients with the safest possible medical care,” according to Douglas W. Laube, MD, MEd, president of ACOG.

The Act purports to ban so-called “partial-birth abortions;” however, “partial-birth abortion” is not a medical term and is not recognized in the field of medicine. The Act defines “partial-birth abortion” in a way that encompasses a variation of dilatation and evacuation (D&E), the most common method of second-trimester abortion, in which the fetus remains intact as it is removed from the woman’s uterus. The Act’s definition also encompasses some D&E procedures in which the fetus is not removed intact.

Over 95% of induced abortions in the second trimester are performed using the D&E method. The alternatives to D&E in the second trimester are abdominal surgery or induction abortion. Doctors rarely perform an abortion by abdominal surgery because doing so entails far greater risks to the woman. The induction method imposes serious risks to women with certain medical conditions and is entirely contraindicated for others.

The intact variant of D&E offers significant safety advantages over the non-intact method, including a reduced risk of catastrophic hemorrhage and life-threatening infection. These safety advantages are widely recognized by experts in the field of women’s health, authoritative medical texts, peer-reviewed studies, and the nation’s leading medical schools. ACOG has thus concluded that an intact D&E “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of the woman, and only the doctor in consultation with the patient, based on the woman’s particular circumstances can make that decision.” [ACOG Statement of Policy on Abortion (reaffirmed 2004)]

ACOG objects to the 2003 federal ban because it exposes women to serious, unnecessary health risks and does not include any exception to protect women’s health. In addition, ACOG objects to the Act’s vague and overly broad terms because doctors will be unable to determine whether their actions are prohibited by the Act. As a result, the Act will deter doctors from providing a wide range of procedures used to safely perform induced abortions.

“The term ‘partial-birth abortion’ was purposely contrived to be inflammatory,” said Dr. Laube. “While proponents of this law say that it addresses a particular procedure, it has been specifically written to describe and encompass elements of other procedures used in obstetrics and gynecology.”

In 2000, ACOG filed an amicus brief in Stenberg v. Carhart on behalf of the challengers to a Nebraska law that attempted to ban so-called “partial-birth abortions.” The US Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law, ruling that it violated the US Constitution by failing to provide any exception “for the preservation of the health of the mother” and being so broadly written that it could prohibit other types of abortion procedures such D&E, thereby unduly burdening a woman’s ability to choose to have an abortion.

“Decisions involving pregnancy termination are among the most serious and personal that a woman will make in her life. As the medical specialists in women’s reproductive health, we will continue to fight attempts to criminalize legitimate medical procedures,” said Dr. Laube.

# # #

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is the national medical organization representing over 51,000 members who provide health care for women.

Let’s hear from the only woman on the Court:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking in the courtroom for the dissenters, called the ruling “an alarming decision” that refuses “to take seriously” the Court’s 1992 decisions reaffirming most of Roe v. Wade and its 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart striking down a state partial-birth abortion law.

Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.” She said the federal ban “and the Court’s defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.”

That final comment, concluding remarks delivered without an open display of emotion, clearly was a suggestion that the ruling might not survive new appointments to the Court — just as the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and, especially, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. — had led to the switch she claimed had come about this time. Ginsburg pointedly noted that the Court is “differently imposed that it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion regulation” — in Stenberg in 2000.

In the course of her dissenting opinion, Ginsburg accused the majority of offering “flimsy and transparent justifications” for upholding the ban. She also denounced the Kennedy opinion for its use of “abortion doctor” to describe specialists who perform gynecological services, “unborn child” and “baby” to describe a fetus, and “preferences” based on “mere convenience” to describe the medical judgments of trained doctors. She also commented: “Ultimately, the Court admits that ‘moral concerns’ are at work, concerns that cdould yield prohibtions on any abortion.”

I have a lot of questions about today’s ruling. For example if the Court has affirmed an abortion law that doesn’t have a “life and health of the mother” clause, what does that do to Roe v. Wade?

And may I say that if even one woman dies or is needlessly impaired because the government has “tied the hands” of physicians, it’s an injustice.

Update: Interesting commentary at Hotline on Call.

Enabling

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E.J. Dionne writes about the hypocrisy of much public discourse on abortion:

Our political system has created strong incentives for candidates to be less than candid about what they really think.

To begin with, candidates are rarely willing to say outright what’s true for so many of them: that they do not consider abortion the most important issue in politics and that it is not the reason they entered public life. …

… Plenty of Democrats entered politics primarily because of a mix of commitments related to social justice, poverty, labor rights, health care, civil rights and the environment. Many equally principled Republicans were animated largely by skepticism of government interference in the marketplace, support for lower taxes and, in many cases, a belief in an assertive foreign policy.

Yet politicians who acknowledged that abortion was not one of their driving concerns would be denounced, oddly enough, as unprincipled.

From time to time liberal writers and bloggers break out in a rash of discussion about how to discuss abortion. Not what we think about it, as we pretty much settled that years ago. No, we ask ourselves how to talk about it, because the crims (e.g., people who want to criminalize abortion) are eternally carping on our alleged insensitivity to “life.” I take it the crims are not staying awake at night worrying about offending us, however.

Anyway, I take it we’re supposed to acknowledge that terminating a pregnancy is a bit sad when you think about it, but we can’t go too far in that direction because that would be admitting abortion is bad. Yet the crims are never put on the spot to consider the desperate measures women take to abort —

“Most commonly, they ingest a whole bottle of quinine pills, with castor oil…we try to get them to the ER before their cardiac rhythm is interrupted…Sometimes they douche with very caustic products like bleach. We had a patient, a teen, who burned herself so badly with bleach that we couldn’t even examine her, her vaginal tissue was so painful….”

“Our local hospital tells me they see 12-20 patients per year, who have already self-induced or had illegal abortions. Some make it, some don’t. They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families…”

I find that terribly sad. Yet it’s OK for crim activists to scream hatefulness at abortion clinic patients.

I’ve noticed over the years that one cannot interact directly with a psychologically challenged person. Instead, you interact with their disorder, whatever it is. A common example is the manager with an explosive temper; the employees quickly learn how not to set off that temper. People with behavioral or character disorders are difficult people, and when they can’t be avoided most of us almost instinctively cater to their craziness to keep them from getting even crazier. This is why enabling is so common. It’s a lot easier to tip-toe around Uncle Frank’s alcoholism than to try to get him to stop drinking.

Today there is much discussion all over the blogosphere about Amanda M.’s resignation from the Edwards campaign. Although there is much criticism flying in many directions, the bottom line is that Amanda was hounded out of the job by a bigoted whackjob, Bill Donohue. In a rational world, nobody would give a hoohaw what Donohue thinks.

Seems to me we’re all being held hostage by whackjobs. In spite of overwhelming public opinion against the war, too many Dems are tip-toeing around ending it because whackjobs will call them soft on national security. This is irrational, because the war in Iraq is hurting, not helping, national security. Yet craziness must be catered to. Bill Kristol comes to mind; the man is nuttier than a peanut farm, yet no one in professional media (except maybe Keith Olbermann) is willing to say so.

I don’t have a solution to this, except to suggest we all stop being enablers.

Blogging for Legality

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Even before the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down (34 years ago today), mass media was fond of presenting the abortion issue as a dichotomy of absolutes. For years the shtick was to present two (and only two) viewpoints from the opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. Editorial pages would “balance” an op ed calling for the criminalization of abortion against one advocating no legal restriction whatsoever, for example. On television and radio, advocates of criminalization (let’s call them “crims” for short) would be pitted against advocates of legalization and given eight minutes to shout each other down before the commercial break. [*] As a result, Americans have not had the rational and dispassionate debate we need to have if we’re ever going to reach a consensus.

But this picture is skewed, and it’s becoming more skewed every day. Increasingly, the real debate — not the debate staged by mass media, but the debate the rest of us are having on the web and among our acquaintances — is not between two groups of absolutists. It’s between rational people and fanatics.

Last week Ellen Goodman wrote,

We offer you advance word from the troops preparing for Monday’s annual March for Life marking the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The parade’s theme this year is “Thou Shalt Protect the Equal Right to Life of Each Innocent Human in Existence at Fertilization. No Exception! No Compromise!”

No exception! No compromise! Lots of exclamation points!

It’s true; it’s on their web site.

But gradually, from Terri Schiavo to Plan B to stem cell opposition, the right wing overreached. In that reddest of states, South Dakota, voters in November repealed an abortion ban that echoed the theme: No exception! No compromise!

Meanwhile, pro choice groups spent those same years with their ear to the middle ground, listening to the people who want to keep abortion legal but less numerous. If there are 3 million unplanned pregnancies and half of them end up in abortion, you do the math. The point on which most Americans agree is reducing unplanned pregnancies.

But when it comes to reducing unplanned pregnancies, crims are a tad wobbly.

According to Priya Jain (“The Battle to Ban Birth Control,” Salon, March 20, 2006), crim activists are increasingly opposed to birth control as well. They fight a host of standard birth control methods — including IUDs and the pill — as “abortifacients.” They fight against legislation to provide insurance coverage for contraception. They advocate laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. They spread propaganda about the “dangers” of condoms.

It’s easy to dismiss the anti-birth control activists as being from the deep end of the whackjob pool. But Cristina Page writes (“The War on Sex,” TomPaine.com, May 17, 2006),

The pro-life groups who are the most committed to ending legal abortion—and gotten the furthest in their goals—are also leading campaigns against the only proven ways to prevent abortion: contraception. Shocking as it may be, there is not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception. Instead the pro-life movement is the constant opponent of every single effort to provide Americans with the ability to prevent unwanted pregnancies. If the South Dakota ban is upheld and Roe v. Wade is toppled, it’s safe to say the pro-life movement is not going to send out a brigade to furnish Americans with the most effective contraceptives. In fact pro-life groups’ most recent activities suggest the exact opposite.

Not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception? If you cruise around their web sites, you see that even those groups that don’t explicitly oppose the use of birth control don’t support it, either. For example, you can search the National Right to Life web site for a kind word on the responsible use of birth control until you turn purple; it isn’t there. But as Cristina Page documents, many state chapters have taken firms stands in opposition to any form of birth control.

Is there a corresponding degree of fanaticism on the pro-legality side? Not that I have found. No pro-legality association suggests that abortions should be forced on women who don’t want them. No pro-legality group I know of advocates abandoning the gestational limits on elective abortion set by Roe v. Wade. Not NARAL, not Planned Parenthood, not any of their affiliates. Instead, “legals” work to preserve the legal rights outlined in Roe v. Wade. And Roe v. Wade allows states to ban late-term elective abortions and place some restrictions on mid-term abortions. The notion that Roe v. Wade allows a woman to waltz into an abortion clinic and terminate a third-trimester pregnancy just because she feels like it is not, and never has been, true. Yet pro-legality organizations often are accused of being just as absolutist and extremist as the crims.

Unfortunately, these days crims run the government — Stacy Schiff writes (“Sex and the Single-Minded,” The New York Times, January 20, 2007),

How to get a job in Washington, that balmy, bipartisan town: Direct an organization that opposes contraception on the grounds that it is “demeaning to women.” Compare premarital sex to heroin addiction. Advertise a link between breast cancer and abortion — a link that was refuted in 1997. Rant against sex ed. And hatch a loony theory about hormones.

You’re a shoo-in, and if your name is Eric Keroack you’re in your second month as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Keroack, a 46-year-old Massachusetts ob-gyn, today oversees the $280 million Title X program, the only federal program “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them, with priority given to low-income persons.”

The loony theory about hormones is Keroack’s contention that premarital sex suppresses a hormone necessary for long-term relationships. (How an endocrine system knows whether one is married or not seems, um, mysterious.)

Even before Roe v. Wade many crims claimed that rape can’t cause pregnancy, which would be a big surprise to the estimated 32,000 or so American women who annually become pregnant as a result of rape. More recently the crims have promoted a much-debunked claim that abortion causes breast cancer. And they’re fond of fudging the phrase “late-term abortion” so that it means second trimester abortions, which is really “mid-term” on most planets.

For years, crims have falsely claimed that abortion causes mental illness. Emily Bazelon writes (“Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, January 21, 2007) that crims have fabricated a connection between abortion and mental or emotional disturbance purely as a tactic to win sympathy for the cause of banning abortion. (See Ann at Feministing and Jill at Feministe for more discussion.)

Crim behavior at abortion clinics is an old story. On Kos Diaries today redmcclain writes in”Why I Escort” about how he handles the lunacy: “My past employment includes stints at a psychiatric hospital and correctional facilities so the verbal barrage bounces off of me.” See also “A History of (Pro Life) Violence” at AlterNet. Read “A Mother’s Story,” about a mother whose daughter died from a back-alley abortion because of parental notification laws, and what the crims did to her —

Bill and I decided to speak out; we thought we could prevent other girls from dying. We appeared on 60 Minutes. The anti-choice crowd came after us. They followed us. There would be crowds of people with their fetuses in a bottle, and some would say that Becky didn’t die the way we said she did. They loosened the lug nuts on our car. In Arkansas, they shot a hole in the building where we were speaking. They cared more about a fetus than about my daughter. I thought, “I’m not afraid of anybody, because my daughter is dead and you can’t hurt me anymore.”

And from this old Mahablog post, read about a woman who went to an abortion clinic —

As I exited the car like some kind of odd celebrity, I wasn’t prepared for the older woman who shoved her face an inch from mine and screamed that I was murdering my baby. I wasn’t prepared for the looks of pure hate, no, the looks that could kill. I seem to vaguely recall being warned not to make eye contact, but I did, and I saw what I thought was someone who would gladly murder me to keep me from entering the clinic.

For too long the “legals” have allowed crims to keep them on the defensive. We’re told we don’t know how to talk about abortion. We’re told we should be more sympathetic to the fetus or to whatever emotional repercussions a woman might experience. The fact is there is no way to talk about abortion without pushing somebody’s buttons, and crims have a lot of buttons. As long as we are supposed to tip-toe around the tender sensibilities of crims, we “legals” are going to look like losers.

Bleep that, I say. Crims are whackjobs, they are out of step with the enormous majority of Americans. From now on, whenever the clueless wonders in mass media talk about the “two sides” of the abortion debate being equally extreme or absolutist, slap them down. Because it’s not even close to being true.

And as far as talking about abortion is concerned, I say the pro-legality side has nothing to apologize for. To talk about any topic related to sexuality is to walk through a mindfield of Issues that will set off somebody. There is no way to avoid this. But we don’t have to be defensive; we’re the majority. 62 percent of Americans support Roe v. Wade. 53 percent of Americans call themselves “pro-choice” (as opposed to 39 percent who call themselves “pro-life”). From now on, let’s put the crims on the defensive. It shouldn’t be that hard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[*] Of course it’s highly inaccurate and inflammatory to frame the debate in terms of being pro-abortion and anti-abortion. The phrase “pro-choice” isn’t entirely accurate either, however, because where abortion is illegal women still choose to have them; they just have to go underground to have them. And underground abortions are far more dangerous to women. The real difference is whether one believes abortion, including abortion for medical cause, should be criminalized in all or most circumstances; or whether one believes elective abortion should remain legal for at least part of the pregnancy and abortion for medical cause through all of it. For that reason I’d rather talk about criminalization versus legality rather than pro- or anti-choice. But we should not forget that many people fall somewhere in between the two ends of the opinion scale.

Corrections

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I hate to break it to Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker, but an article in The New York Times that corrects an error in one previously published story does not equal “an exposé of the utter breakdown of editorial standards.” Just the opposite, actually.

The article in question is one I discussed here last April, about draconian abortion law in El Salvador. The error that was corrected concerned a woman named Carmen Climaco. The article says she terminated a pregnancy at 18 weeks’ gestation; El Salvadoran courts contend she delivered a full-term baby and strangled it. The Times acknowledges the court records invalidate Climaco’s claims, but it stands by the rest of the article.

I looked at the article; Climaco is not mentioned until the closing paragraphs of a very long article, and deleting those paragraphs doesn’t diminish the article as an indictment of El Salvadore’s inhumane abortion laws. But for the sake of this discussion here is the offending section:

In prosecutors’ offices in El Salvador, as in prosecutors’ offices anywhere, longer sentences are considered better sentences. “The more years one can send someone away for,” I was told by Margarita Sanabria, a magistrate who has handled several abortion cases, “the better it is for the prosecutors.” She cited this motivation to account for what she has observed recently: more later-term abortions being reclassified as “aggravated homicide.” If an aborted fetus is found to have been viable, the higher charge can be filed. The penalty for abortion can be as low as two years in prison. Aggravated homicide has a minimum sentence of 30 years and a maximum of 50 years.

The issue of proving viability after an abortion is a tricky one, of course. There is no legal standard. But many of the people I talked to in El Salvador, including Tópez, the prosecutor, said there was a rule of thumb: if an aborted fetus weighs more than 500 grams, or a little more than a pound, then you can argue that the fetus was viable. When I mentioned this to Judge Sanabria, she said she wished she had known more about the rule before. She recalled one case, that of a 20-year-old mother named Carmen Climaco, whose abortion of a fetus estimated at 18 weeks had been recast by the prosecutor as aggravated homicide. The judge admitted that if she had known this rule of thumb, she might not have sent the case to trial. “I feel bad about it,” she said.

But the case did go to trial, and the prosecutor won a conviction for aggravated homicide. At trial, the evidence included lifting Climaco’s fingerprints from the fetus, which was found under her bed. The prosecutor’s accusation was infanticide by strangling.

The women’s prison where convicted murderers are sent is in the outer district of Tonacatepeque. I visited it in January. It’s an old, creaky facility that inspires the kind of dread that comes of seeing concertina wire and much-painted cinder blocks, made all the creepier by a paint choice of baby-boy blue. Inside the first gate is a neutral area. It’s filled with almond trees that provide a flickering shade on a hot winter afternoon. All the women are kept in a deeper jail, walled off inside. Through a small window, I could see an open area crisscrossed by laundry lines and arrayed by different women lying around smoking.

I was there to see Carmen Climaco. She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence. She has three children, who today are 11, 8 and 6 years old. We talked about them for a while. Since she was the only person in the family who worked, her children’s financial situation is precarious; they now stay with their grandmother. Climaco said she lives for their visits, which are brief and come only twice a month. She was dressed in red jeans and a white polo shirt. We sat with an interpreter in the half-shade in green plastic yard chairs. Climaco had a paper napkin with her that she folded and folded into a familiar-looking pill. She had light brown hair, and occasionally a smile steadied her trembling lips.

“I became pregnant at a time when my smallest child was in the hospital,” she said. “I never thought I could get pregnant because I had been sterilized. Suddenly I saw two doors shutting at the same time. There was nothing I could do. My mother said she’d toss me out of the house if I got pregnant.”

Her story came out in fits and starts. She said that she was innocent and had never done anything illegal. Then she said, “I keep asking God to pardon me for what I’ve done.” She said that the day it happened, she felt dizzy and collapsed at home. She woke up covered in blood. “I stood up and it felt like something fell out of me.” It took her a while to understand just what had happened. “I put my hand on its throat to see if it was moving,” she said, “which is why my fingerprints were found on its neck.”

I spent the better part of an hour watching Carmen Climaco’s face, listening to her whimpering pleas to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and tiny prayers to me to believe in her innocence. Like anyone serving time in prison, she has inhabited the details of her story to the point that they no longer sound true or false. She has compressed her story into a dense, simple tale of innocence — she just woke up covered in blood — to hold up against the public accusation of baby-strangling. I kept looking at her face, incapable of seeing the innocent girl she described or the murderer the prosecutor sent to prison. The truth was certainly — well, not in the “middle” so much as somewhere else entirely. Somewhere like this: She’d had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, not all that different from D.C.’s, something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.

Of this, Byron Calame of the NY Times wrote yesterday,

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of “aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the “truth” was different.

The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny — “bulletproofing,” in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was “no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported.”

Apart from the flawed example of Ms. Climaco, Mr. Hitt’s 7,800-word cover article provided a broad and intriguing look at a nation where the penal code allows prison sentences for a woman who has an abortion, the provider of the procedure or anyone who assisted. His interviews with doctors, nurses, police officers, prosecutors, judges and both opponents and advocates of abortion offered revealing personal perspectives on the effects of the criminalization of the procedure.

Note that the author, Jack Hitt, did not exactly pull the Climaco story out of his ass. He’d been tipped off by a magistrate who had handled the case, and then he interviewed Climaco herself. In the article he did express some reservations about the veracity of Climaco’s story. Calame says Hitt had asked the magistrate for the court records but was told they’d been archived and would be difficult to retrieve, so he let it drop. Calame’s apology suggests that Hitt had been scammed by the magistrate and Climaco, who used the Times story to solicit help with an appeal of her case. Once the Times editors did look at the court records (which, in truth, had not been hard to obtain) they were persuaded that the Climaco story was bogus. So they corrected it.

Of course, it’s also possible Climaco is innocent and the court records are lies, and that the Times is caving in to pressure from anti-abortion activists, the El Salvadoran government, and/or our own State Department. Calame continues,

Complaints about the article began arriving at the paper after an anti-abortion Web site, LifeSiteNews.com, reported on Nov. 27 that the court had found that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy ended with a full-term live birth. The headline: “New York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper — Infanticide Portrayed as Abortion.” Seizing on the misleading presentation of the article’s only example of a 30-year jail sentence for an abortion, the site urged viewers to complain to the publisher and the president of The Times. A few came to me.

Note that it doesn’t bother Lifson that LifeSiteNews.com’s headline “New York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper” was a lie, since the article did not, in fact, promote abortion.

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Lifson of American Thinker makes much of the fact that Hitt had used a translator who had done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group. But then he turns around and says “The Times apparently became aware of the lie it had published at least a month ago” because it was getting complaints generated by LifeSiteNews.com. Apparently LifeSiteNews.com is such an unimpeachable source the Times doesn’t need to take the time to fact check it.

Calame writes that he received an English translation of the court records on December 8, and after reading them he conducted an internal investigation to find out who had dropped the fact-check ball. The subsequent correction article was given a prominent spot inside this Sunday’s Week in Review section, under an approximately 30-point headline. Lifson writes,

Worst of all, even after the proof of the lie, the paper’s editor and publisher refuse to publish a correction or even an editor’s note. The paper is therefore content to let the lie stand, officially. If it were interested in honest reporting, it would be duty-bound to issue a retraction, one as prominent as the original lie.

Lifson is, of course, hallucinating.

Calame says the Times should have obtained the court records before publishing the story, and of course they should have. But the truth is that very few newspapers or magazines in the U.S. would have bothered to go to the trouble, given that the writer was someone known to be a good reporter who had two corroborating sources — the magistrate and Climaco. Maybe in the distant past things were different, but newspapers and other news bureaus are trimming staff to stay afloat financially, which in turn makes the news reporting process a lot more precarious.

That’s why I say that Calame’s article is not “an exposé of the utter breakdown of editorial standards,” but is rather an affirmation of what the standards should be. Now, if only the New York Times editors had been that forthright about Judith Miller’s Iraq War stenography, I might actually respect them.

Update: Talk about righties who can’t read — this one links to Lifson under the head “The NY Times publishes another lie that it will not admit to,” when Lifson’s story is about editor Calame’s admission of the error. Jeez louize, that’s stupid. You wonder how these people get on the Internets. Another poor dumb-as-a-doorknob mouth-breather complains that the “New York Times Falsified Abortion Article.” Look, children, the writer got scammed, the Times got scammed, the Times admitted the error. You might want to read the other 4,300 or so words of the story that the so-called right-to-life scammers couldn’t find a mistake in.

Update update: Righties are playing their usual game of discrediting an entire body of work because they found one flaw. John Hinderaker’s post makes it sound as if Hitt’s entire article rested on the Climaco story, when in fact the Climaco story was a very small part of it; essentially an anecdote used to add some punch to the ending. Hinderacker wrote, dishonestly,

Hitt alleged that in El Salvador, women convicted of abortion can serve long jail terms; the story’s opening paragraph said that “a few” women had been sentenced to 30 year jail terms for obtaining abortions. Hitt featured one such woman, Carmen Climaco.

In fact, El Salvadoran law provides for sentences as long as 50 years. From Hitt’s article:

Today, Article 1 of El Salvador’s constitution declares that the prime directive of government is to protect life from the “very moment of conception.” The penal code detailing the Crimes Against the Life of Human Beings in the First Stages of Development provides stiff penalties: the abortion provider, whether a medical doctor or a back-alley practitioner, faces 6 to 12 years in prison. The woman herself can get 2 to 8 years. Anyone who helps her can get 2 to 5 years. Additionally, judges have ruled that if the fetus was viable, a charge of aggravated homicide can be brought, and the penalty for the woman can be 30 to 50 years in prison.

Hitt could not find out how many women were serving such senteces. However, he did verify that women are being prosecuted and sentenced for receiving abortions.

Nationwide, after the ban came into effect in 1998, the number of legal cases initiated nearly doubled, according to a study published in 2001 by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Today the number of abortion cases investigated each year averages close to 100, according to Luz McNaughton and Ellen Mitchell, policy consultants with Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group in Chapel Hill, N.C., who gathered the statistics for a study to be published later this year by the American Journal of Public Health. In 2004, the most recent year for which any statistics are available, there were 93 investigations of people associated with a clandestine abortion. In 2003, there were 111 investigations; in 2002, there were 85. (El Salvador’s population is 6.5 million, roughly that of Massachusetts.) The vast majority of charges are brought against the woman or the provider. In a few cases, the boyfriend or mother or someone else who has helped out is also charged. Typically, the woman can avoid prosecution altogether if, after she is arrested, she names the provider.

When the woman is first detained, the form of custody can vary. Wandee Mira, an obstetrician at a hospital in San Salvador, told me that she had seen “a young girl handcuffed to her hospital bed with a police officer standing outside the door.” In El Salvador, a person accused of a major crime is typically held in jail in “preventative detention” until the trial begins. Tópez, who said she had prosecuted perhaps 10 or 15 abortion cases in the last eight years, said that she took the severity of the case into account and sometimes argued for “substitutive measures instead of jail,” like house arrest, while the accused was awaiting trial. My impression was that Tópez was emphasizing such relative leniencies as house arrest instead of detention, as well as suspended sentences for women who report the abortionist, because, like most people, she was uncomfortable with the inevitable logic that insists upon making a woman who has had an abortion into a criminal. Even Regina de Cardenal, whose group was instrumental in passing the ban, could not quite square the circle.

“I believe the woman is a victim,” de Cardenal told me. “The criminals are the people who perform the abortions.” When pressed about the fact that the law she helped pass does treat the woman as a criminal, she said: “Yes, it’s part of the law of our country. Because the woman has murdered her baby — and that’s why she is sent to jail. But I believe that the woman who is sent to jail remains a victim of the abortion doctor, the abortionist, who knows exactly what he is doing.”

But you know how the rightie brain works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be. From now on, in rightie lore, no women are ever prosecuted at all for abortion in El Salvador.

Dichotomies

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    The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
    When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised.
    Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
    If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything.
    To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
    When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail. — Sengtsan, 3rd Zen Patriarch

Humans have a proclivity for framing issues as dichotomies — this and that, right and wrong, black and white, us and them. Old Sengtsan would have called this “dualism.”

Dualism is actively at work distorting our ongoing political discussions. For example, few days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote about the Iraq Study Group:

But more notable than the supposed exclusion of neocons (something that should be believed only once it is seen) is this claim about Washington-style balance and “centrism”:

    The panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq, participants said. Organizers avoided experts with extreme views on either side of the Iraq war debate.

I’d really like to know what the excluded anti-war “extreme view” is that is the equivalent of the neonconservative desire for endless warfare in Iraq and beyond. The only plausible possibility would be the view that the U.S. ought to withdraw from Iraq, and do so sooner rather than later. What else could it be? Nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing that we cede American territory to the Iraqi insurgents, so withdrawal essentially defines the far end of the anti-war spectrum.

Is withdrawal — whether incremental or total — considered to be an “extreme view” that the Washington “centrists” have not only rejected but have excluded in advance even from consideration?

Good question, and I fear the Baker panel does consider withdrawal to be an extreme view not under consideration. We’ll see.

But I’ve long believed news media screws up discussion of abortion the same way. We’re told there are two “extremist” views, pro- and anti. But what is the “pro” extreme view? I know of no reproductive rights organization that advocates elective third-trimester abortion, for example. Reproductive rights organizations have been fighting to maintain Roe v. Wade, which allows states to ban abortions after the 23rd week gestation (earliest possible viability; late second trimester) as long as exceptions are made for life and health of the mother. That’s extreme? Extremists on the other side not only want to eliminate the “health” exception. They’re not crazy about the “life,” “rape,” and “incest” exceptions, either. And don’t get them started on birth control.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the enormous majority of pro-choice people would accept some kind of legal gestational limit on elective abortion as long as it wasn’t set absurdly early and as long as physicians are allowed a decent amount of discretion for deciding what constitutes a legitimate medical reason for a non-elective abortion. In fact, I think a big whopping majority of the American electorate would accept that compromise. The Fetus People, on the other hand, will not rest until they achieve a total ban on abortions, no matter what voters want.

So who’s “extreme”? Seems to me the preponderance of the extremism is on one side.

I thought of dualities today when I read this column by Cathy Young:

Behind the political divide in America, there is also a religious divide.

The split is not just between people who believe and people who do not; it is between those who see religious faith as society’s foundation and those who see it as society’s bane.

I guess those of us who see it as neither society’s foundation nor society’s bane don’t count.

A look at recent best-selling books illustrates the divide. Ann Coulter’s “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” excoriates liberals for being, well, godless. Bill O’Reilly’s new tome, “Culture Warrior,” urges traditionalists to combat the evil influence of the “secular-progressives.” For the other side, there’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” by philosopher Sam Harris, who calls all religion “obscene” and “utterly repellent,” and “The God Delusion” by biologist Richard Dawkins, a tome whose title speaks for itself.

Both sides in the debate traffic in simplistic stereotypes.

Sort of like Cathy Young?

It doesn’t help that religion has become intertwined with politics. A recent column by film critic and pundit Michael Medved conflates attacks on religion with criticism of the political power of religious conservatives.

Such books as “”The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right” by Rabbi Michael Lerner, written from a religious point of view, are lumped together with Harris’ anti-religion screed. Meanwhile, conservative author Heather MacDonald, writing in USA Today, complains that “skeptical conservatives” feel marginalized in today’s discourse.

Over the past several weeks I’ve seen the “religious right” juxtaposed against the “unreligious left” dozens of times, and hardly anyone questions this. I don’t think it reflects reality, however. There are plenty of deeply religious lefties, and plenty of atheist and agnostic righties.

What’s more, if the “extremes” are pro-religion (as defined by Michael Medved) and anti-religion (ditto), then what the hell is the center? The “I don’t give a shit about religion (and/or Michael Medved)” faction?

What if we change the dichotomy? Let’s put everyone who thinks religion should be everyone’s bleeping personal business at one extreme, and people who want to coerce everyone else to think his way (a.k.a. God Nazis) at the other? This would put Richard Dawkins and Michael Medved together at the “God Nazi” end of the continuum, opposite from me.

I’m sure Dawkins and Medved would disagree with this model, but I care what they think about as much as they care what I think.

But I suppose I should try to take Sengtsan’s advice. Looking at religion dispassionately reveals a lot of people frantically grabbing for something to either soothe their existential fears or stoke their egos, or both. There are people looking for easy answers to difficult questions and finding difficult answers to easy questions. There are dogmatists and there are mystics; there are those who approach religion with fear, and those who approach it with love. There are those who find comfort in familiar liturgy and iconography and those who leave the familiar behind and wander off in search of something else. And there are those who don’t see any point to religion at all.

The problem is that people mistake whatever little bit of doctrinal or institutional jetsam they’re clinging to as the Complete and Total Absolute Truth and Wisdom of the Cosmos Forever and Ever Amen. This reminds me of an essay written by John McGowan and posted at Le Blogue Bérubé in June 2005. This is about politics, but it speaks to any issue (emphasis added) —

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place—democracy in the people, liberalism in the law—and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity.

Not only the Republicans, but the American nation as a whole, seem to have lost any sense whatsoever of what liberalism means and what it strives to insure. Even at the best of times, the liberal check upon power is a tenuous bulwark that fights against the odds. There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful—or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic—and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?) …

… I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. Given how distasteful liberal expedients are in experience, it is a miracle that they ever get established and maintained. But the benefits of that miracle are multiple—and we, as a nation, will sorely regret it if we trash our liberal edifice out of impatience, frustration, or, even worse, sheer forgetfulness of why that edifice was put in place, how it works, and what it accomplishes.

It frustrates Michael Medved’s will that filmmakers are allowed to express their own points of view in their films. Religion itself seems to frustrate Richard Dawkins’s will. But the contest shouldn’t be between opposing points of view on religion, but between those who support the First Amendment of the Constitution and those who would circumvent it.

Whatever your religious beliefs, as long as you’re with me on the Constitution’s side, we’re good.

Respecting Life

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Emptypockets has a long rumination about embryonic stem cell research at The Next Hurrah.

That subject of desecration and its relationship to organ donation is, I think, a more apt context for discussing embryonic stem cells than the abortion rubric under which stem cells are usually put. Unlike a fetus, which likely would become a person, an unimplanted blastocyst is terminal and the moral issues about how we treat it are closer to end-of-life issues than conception ones. At least, that analogy is more apt biologically — whether it is helpful politically, I don’t know.

What does emerge from this analysis is, for me, a better understanding of what may be on the minds of stem cell research opponents. The sanctity of life may mean, for them, not only the call to preserve life itself — something which is, for an unimplanted blastocyst, impossible — but the demand to treat the elements of human life with respect and dignity. Some opponents may be appalled not by the demise of a ball of cells, but by what they see as an undignified death, in the polished steel of a tissue culture hood with a lab-coated graduate student bearing a pipetteman in place of a funeral Mass.

Call it a desecration or just plain creepy, that cold alien-autopsy vision of life’s end may be what drives some segments of the opposition. It is partly relieved by shifting the view to patients the research might help, just as rabbis struggling with organ donation may yield most often when they confront the potential for saving another life. But it may also be partly relieved by writing into future stem cell legislation explicit language requiring the blastocysts be treated with respect, and by acknowledging in debate that scientists recognize this concern and are sensitive to it.

I doubt opponents of embryonic stem cell research will be appeased by promises to treat blastocysts “respectfully.” However —

I’ve gone on and on about life and the moral argument for embryonic stem cell research already, and I don’t want to repeat all that now. Let’s explode everyone’s head today and look at some undiluted Zen.

Living beings are the result of many factors and conditions. Some of these are the presence of sperm, an egg, the condition of fertility, and the presence of a being desiring a form. Once living beings are created, there are other conditions necessary for their survival, such as sunshine, warmth, air (or the absence of these) as well as water and food. Many of the things that make up our world were once alive and depended on these same conditions, like wood, paper, cotton, wool, and oil products. Even stones and diamonds, and the planet itself, are the result of many related factors. All causes and conditions are interrelated. Yet, because of our conditioning and our delusions, we are easily confused and distracted from seeing our true relationship to all things. I think the nature of delusion is that it makes us feel separate, giving the illusion of duality.

In Taking the Path of Zen, Aitken Roshi writes, “There is fundamentally no birth and no death as we die and are born. When we kill the spirit that may realize this fact, we are violating this precept. We kill that spirit in ourselves and in others when we brutalize human potential, animal potential, earth potential.”

Another facet:

In the first precept, the crucial section is, “In the sphere of the everlasting Dharma, Not nursing a view of extinction…” The Dharmakaya is complete, ultimate reality. It is selfless and empty and is the origin from which everything arises and to which everything returns. The Dharmakaya is never “born” into the world of appearances, so it cannot die. We arise, together with our world, as human beings. Each moment we arise from and return to unity with everything; we are all children of our common parent – the Dharmakaya. When we consider the questions of “killing” or “not killing” we have already divided our world into self and other. If we see our world only through human self-interest we will miss the underlying unity that is our common origin. When we are unaware of this underlying unity, the best that we can hope for is a respect for all life.

From this perspective, to deny the potential of a blastocyst to heal the sick — a blastocyst that would otherwise remain frozen until it had lost all potential — is not respecting life at all, but denying life. Belittling Michael J. Fox for the sake of keeping some cells frozen is not respecting life. Belittling, even lying about, the potential of embryonic stem cell research is not respecting life.

More:

The First Grave Precept is “Affirm life—do not kill.” What does it mean to kill the environment? It’s the worst kind of killing. We are decimating many species. There is no way that these life forms can ever return to the earth. The vacuum their absence creates cannot be filled in any other way, and such a vacuum affects everything else in the ecosystem, no matter how infinitesimally small it is. We are losing species by the thousands every year, the last of their kind on the face of this great Earth. And because someone in South America is doing it, that doesn’t mean we’re not responsible. We’re as responsible as if we are the one who clubs an infant seal or burns a hectare of tropical forest. It is as if we were squeezing the life out of ourselves. Killing the lakes with acid rain. Dumping chemicals into the rivers so that they cannot support any life. Polluting our skies so our children choke on the air they breath. Life is nonkilling. The seed of the Buddha grows continuously. Maintain the wisdom life of Buddha and do not kill life.

Treat the air respectfully, and the seas respectfully, and birds and bugs and everything else on the planet respectfully. And we should treat living beings respectfully. Picketing an abortion clinic while wearing shoes made with slave labor in a third world country is not respecting life. Opposing abortion by belittling the lives of women — screaming at women entering abortion clinics, for example, or calling them selfish — is not respecting life.

Making excuses for civilian deaths in Iraq is not respecting life.

More:

We can play around with the word “state.” “State” is a condition or manner of being. In Buddhism, mind-states determine our thoughts, words, and actions which in turn create karma and its fruits. In a worldly sense “state” means position or rank or class. It also means a polity or nation. America’s leaders point their fingers at an “axis of evil” states. As far as they are concerned, it is just fine to despise Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. They add other enemies like Cuba, Syria, and even France (without whom there would never have been a United States). Despising these states and the people who live in them goes against the spiritual reality that all beings are Buddha, all beings are God. They may as well be pointing at themselves. [p. 3]

Yes, of course we should treat the blastocysts with respect. This means freeing them from freezing and allowing them to be life — if not as an embryo, then as a treatment for a sick child or a crippled adult.

It’s all One.

America Says No to Wedgies

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I’m still trying to wrap my head around the results of the midterm elections. But one result I hope I’m seeing is the beginning of the end of “wedge issue” campaigns that get right-wing extremists elected.

Consider same-sex marriage. It’s true that seven of eight states passed same-sex marriage bans on Tuesday. However, these ballot initiatives — which in the past brought enough hard-Right voters out of the woodwork to swing elections — seem not to have impacted House or Senate races at all. Andrew Romano, Lee Hudson Teslik and Steve Tuttle write for Newsweek.com:

Three of those states—South Carolina, Idaho and South Dakota, all of which voted for bans—were reliably Red, and no Republican candidates needed the boost. In Wisconsin (which voted 59 percent to 41 percent in favor), gay marriage had no bearing on the outcome: incumbents won across the board, with a Democrat, Steven Kagen, taking the only contested House race. A similar story played out in Colorado, which voted 56 percent to 44 percent for the ban: the lone Republican to win a key race was an incumbent. In Tennessee (80 percent to 20 percent in favor), the measure wasn’t much of a wedge, despite a crucial Senate win for Republican Bob Corker. Both he and his Democratic opponent, Harold Ford, opposed gay marriage.

Another ban passed in Virginia, but it appears Virginians elected Jim Webb anyway. In the House, Virginia incumbents, mostly Republican, all won; no seats changed parties. Perhaps the ban impacted some close House races and kept the Webb-Allen contest closer than it might have been, and had a more liberal Democrat been running against Allen the wedge tactic might have worked. But you know what they say — woulda, shoulda, coulda.

And Arizona narrowly rejected a same-sex marriage ban. If “gay marriage” has lost its usefulness as a wedge issue, I predict the national Republican Party is going to be far less interested in it in the future.

Arizona also rejected a slate of immigration hard-liners in favor of candidates with more moderate positions on immigration. This is from an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

… voters in the state demanded a more nuanced and pragmatic solution than that being offered by the most virulently anti-illegal immigration candidates. The best illustrations came in the races for two House seats, one representing the sparsely populated border counties in southeastern Arizona and the other representing some upscale suburbs east of Phoenix. A six-term Republican incumbent, J.D. Hayworth, and a former Republican state representative, Randy Graf — both known for their firebrand stances on border security — lost to Democrats Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords, who had aligned themselves on immigration with McCain.

Make no mistake; Arizonans have not gone “soft” on immigration. The editorial says Arizona voters —

… overwhelming support Tuesday for ballot initiatives to deny bail, curtail subsidies for education and childcare, limit civil damage awards for illegal immigrants and make English the state’s official language. Voters backed all these proposals, reflecting a widespread belief that illegal immigrants impose a variety of burdens on taxpayers.

But the voters might have had enough of the bullying extremists. Via David Neiwert, Kynn Bartlett reports,

In the morning on voting day, two men — anti-immigrant crusader Russ Dove and his cameraman — showed up at precinct 49 in Tucson, at the Iglesia Bautista church, 4502 S. 12th St. Their plan: To harass and intimidate Spanish-speaking voters by using an “English-only” petition to screen for “illegal immigrants” trying to vote, videotape them, and post their likenesses on the Internet. Roy Warden also came, armed with a gun — as he usually does — and the trio started approaching a small number of people. MALDEF monitors were there, to observe the effect of Arizona’s new requirement for ID to vote, and observed the attempted intimidation tactics.

The trio left around noon to head to other polling places, then gave up after talking to only a few people. MALDEF reported this to the authorities, who are investigating; MALDEF has photographs of the men from when they were there.

MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) reports other intimidation tactics at the polls. Be sure to read all of David’s and Kynn Bartlett’s posts to get the full picture. (And may I say the thought of some extremist thug showing up at a polling place with a gun gives me the willies.)

In Missouri, the embryonic stem cell initiative worked as a wedge issue in Claire McCaskill’s favor. As the Newsweek.com article linked above says, “The issue divided Talent’s Republican supporters, many of whom favor stem-cell research for its potential to boost a local economy increasingly reliant on biotechnology firms.” Since a big majority of Americans nationwide support federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, I believe the national Republican party will be very cautious with this issue going forward. (They should have known better than to cross Nancy Reagan.)

South Dakota voters handily defeated SD’s draconian abortion law, which banned all abortions with no exceptions for rape and incest and only the flimsiest thread of an exception for a woman’s health. In spite of this, SD’s whackjob Republican governor, who was behind the ban, was re-elected by a wide margin. Still-red SD also voted to ban same-sex marriage and rejected a medicinal marijuana initiative. The Fetus People vow to continue the fight in SD and re-introduce the abortion ban in the future. But the several other state legislatures considering similar bans may be having second thoughts. Meanwhile, Oregon and California voted no on proposed laws that would have required parental notification when minors seek abortions.

In California, voters dumped an anti-environment extremist incumbent. Michael Doyle reports for McClatchy newspapers:

The “Western rebellion” that propelled California Republican Rep. Richard Pombo to power now has receded, leaving many of its most important goals unmet and possibly beyond reach. …

… The Western rebellion, also known as the Sagebrush rebellion, involves people in the West who think that the federal government oversteps itself on property rights issues, especially regarding enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. They also chafe over the fact that half the West is owned by the federal government instead of privately.

Pombo’s surprisingly resounding loss to wind energy consultant Jerry McNerney, 53 percent to 47 percent, made the onetime rancher the only one of 19 Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives to go down in defeat Tuesday.

Nationwide —

Of 13 lawmakers identified by the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” campaign, nine lost Tuesday. They included Rep. Charles Taylor of North Carolina, whose Democratic opponent, Heath Shuler, likewise benefited from the organization’s ads. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, another ad target, also lost.

Why electing a Democratic majority matters:

The probable new chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. She’s one of the Senate’s most liberal members; the current chair, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, is among the most conservative.

The changing cast of characters will play out in many ways:

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil-and-gas drilling perennially championed by House Republicans won’t go anywhere in the next Congress. Drilling off the coast of Florida or other states becomes a real long shot.

Other controversial ideas that Pombo once toyed with – such as selling 15 little-visited National Park Service sites, including playwright Eugene O’Neill’s home in the California city of Danville – are down for the count.

The Endangered Species Act, which Pombo built his career on combating, has a new lease on life. The Democrat who’s poised to become House Resources Committee chairman, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, voted against Pombo’s Endangered Species Act legislation. The League of Conservation Voters gave Rahall a vote ranking of 92, compared with Pombo’s score of 17.

Take that, Naderites!

Minimum wage increases passed in all six states it appeared on the ballots. However, Tuesday was not a sweep for liberalism. Per the Newsweek.com story linked above, Michigan banned affirmative action. Initiatives in Colorado and Nevada that would have decriminalized private possession of small amounts of marijuana were defeated. But on the whole, Tuesday’s elections did more than turn the House and Senate over to the Dems. It also took the wind out of the extreme Right’s sails.

See also: The “Top Five Winners and Losers.” The article actually lists the top six winners and losers, but there’s plenty of winning and losing to go around this week.