Category Archives: abortion

The Big Giant Head Bites

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John Hanna, Associated Press —

An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O’Reilly over comments by the Fox television host that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor’s attorneys said Saturday.

Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.

Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.

During a Friday night broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor,” the conservative host said a “source inside” told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O’Reilly deemed “executing babies.”

O’Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller’s clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.

A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn’t know how O’Reilly obtained the information.

Facts and Fictions, Part I

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About a month ago I wrote a post that started with this quote:

Win or lose, the GOP talks about three core principles: less government, lower taxes, and a strong military. It doesn’t matter that, when in charge, Republican politicians have been known to grow government, raise taxes, and stretch the military too thin. Party leaders have decided that less government, lower taxes, and a strong military is what they stand for and what they run on. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it for good reason — because more often that not, it has helped them win. [Bill Scher, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! (Rodale, 2006), p. 13.]

I asked if we might come up with our own short list of “ideas” to run on. I see that LeonJohn Podesta asked a similar question:

“The question I’m asked most often is, When are we getting our eight words?” Podesta said. Conservatives, he went on, “have their eight words in a bumper sticker: Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare. And so on. Where’s our eight-word bumper sticker?”

My post generated some rich discussion, but no “eight words in a bumper sticker.” I’ve been thinking about this since, and realized that everything I come up with is much less specific than what the Right runs on. For example, where the Right always runs on cutting taxes, I would run on responsible taxes. Whether taxes should be raised or lowered, IMO, depends on a whole lot of factors that are always changing. Factors to consider include what people need from their government and what’s good for the economic health of the nation, both short and long term. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. And there’s a time to lower taxes, and a time to raise them. But the phrase “responsible taxes” doesn’t mean anything unless I explain what I mean, so we’re already over the eight words.

Of course, I always want to pin conservatives down on what they mean by “less” government, since many of them seem OK with big, strong, intrusive government in matters of sex and death. If you think about it, they seem to want government to go away only where money is involved. And I’m all for a “strong” military, but by that I don’t mean keeping the military-industrial complex gorged on no-bid contracts and sweetheart deals. I mean a military strong enough to defend the nation.

Leon Podesta said that coming up with eight words in a bumper sticker is harder for liberals, “because we believe in a lot more things.” I don’t think that’s true; righties certainly seem to have beliefs up the wazoo. Liberals get slammed because we don’t have beliefs. For example, check out what what Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Washington Post awhile back:

After years of single-party government, the prospect of a Democratic majority in the House ought to feel refreshing. But even with Republicans collapsing in a pile of sexual sleaze, I just can’t get excited. Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

In fact, Dems are brimming over with ideas; just check out Podesta’s think tank if you want some examples. Do the Dems as a party have clearly articulated principles to guide their use of power? That’s a harder question to answer. But do Republicans? Not that I’ve seen. Republicans have rhetoric; they have talking points; they have campaign slogans. Principles, not so much. But Republicans get a pass on the principle thing. In the same way, the Democratic Party is perpetually being challenged to come up with a plan for Iraq; individual Dems have come up with a number of plans, but since the party hasn’t rallied around any one plan, this doesn’t count. But Republicans as a party have no discernible “plan,” either, other than “stay the course.” And now some of them are disowning even that.

But as I’ve been combing through commentary this morning I’m struck by the fact that many commenters (like Mallaby) use words like idea, principle, and belief loosely and interchangeably as if they were synonyms, and of course they are not. Fuzzy use of language usually connotes fuzzy thinking. Why is it that Republicans get credit for having ideas even though they haven’t had a genuinely new idea since the McKinley Administration? Why is it Republicans get credit for having principles even though their words and deeds rarely meet up in the same ball park?

Many liberals argue that righties have us beat in the language and framing departments, and I think that’s part of it, but I say there’s a more fundamental reason: righties have a strong ideology, and lefties don’t.

I just stumbled upon this very lovely quote —

    “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.” -Bertrand Russell

Contrast this to our current crop of American conservatives, who remain steadfastly loyal to their ideas even after trial and empirical evidence reveal they don’t work. Supply side economics comes to mind.

I’m not saying ideologies are better than no-ideology; just the opposite. I am leery of ideology. The dictionary defines ideology thus —

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

— But I think ideology is better understood as an interface to reality. An ideology makes interacting with reality easier, because it eliminates much of the detail and limits one’s choices.

For example, if a non-ideological person wants to understand why there is so much poverty in New Orleans, he has to piece together myriad historical, cultural, political, and economic factors, some of which may be unique to New Orleans. But an ideologue can click on the drop-down menu for social problems, then choose poverty, and get a simple answer. Easy as pie.

Simple answers have the advantage of being easier to explain and to understand than complicated answers. This gives politicians with simple answers a strong advantage over those whose answers require some explaining. A person with simple answers also can seem more certain about what he says than someone who understands all the ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors.

And, my dears, there are always ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors. Pretending they aren’t there doesn’t make them go away.

Put another way, instead of learning more about a issue to understand it, ideologues eliminate factors until the issue becomes easily understandable. The fact that the “understanding” may have little to do with reality is of no consequence. You see this phenomenon in righties’ quest for “moral clarity.” The way one achieves “moral clarity” is not through deep thinking or thorough study; it is through reducing complex issues to a simple “good versus evil” equation. And this equation is created by eliminating any factors that don’t return the desired answer.

For example, “moral clarity” on the abortion issue usually means designating the embryo as “good” and the woman who wants to abort as “bad.” In order to be “clear” the ideologue sees the embryo as innocent and blameless, but the “bad” woman is narcissistic and immoral. Crushing personal circumstances or genetic anomalies are dismissed as “inconveniences” that virtuous women would accept without complaint. Factors that don’t fit into the equation are dismissed as unimportant, in other words.

To be fair, there are lefties who dismiss the embryo as a “growth” or a “parasite,” which is another easy way to achieve “clarity” on the issue. To my mind, these people are playing the same mental games righties are playing. It’s not an honest way to look at the issue.

Ideologies can be found all along the political spectrum. But neither conservatism nor liberalism are in themselves ideologies. In some people, conservatism or liberalism are no more than inclinations or attitudes that cause them to sympathize with one set of values more than another. If you look at political conservatism around the globe and over time, you find all manner of competing and contradictory ideas attached to it. And many Americans have called themselves conservative without having to believe that taxes must always be cut or that abortions must be stopped at all cost.

But right now, in the U.S., most of the Right is strongly ideological, but most of the Left isn’t. Most of us who call ourselves “liberals” or “progressives” or “Democrats” these days do not have simple doctrines and beliefs and dogmas that tell us whether taxes should go up or down, for example. Instead, we’ve got policy wonks studying trends and crunching numbers. Most of us in favor of reproduction rights are concerned about the impact of abortion and birth control bans on the lives and health of women, and our concerns are based on real-world experience. We think government ought to be responsive to the needs and desires of citizens, but we don’t assume what those needs and desires are always going to be.

Thus, we have “nuances.” We lack “clarity.” We aren’t always sure we are right. We can’t reduce our ideas into simple slogans and equations. The Right can do these things, however. While the Left consults maps and debates diverse routes, the Right knows exactly which way to march.

But then, so do lemmings.

See also: The Anonymous Liberal, “Straw Man Politics and The Great Rhetorical Divide“; Robert Parry, “Whose Moral Clarity?“

People With One Watch, Part III

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    I celebrate myself;
    And what I assume you shall assume;
    For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you. (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)

(Note: This is a continuation of the previous two posts; if you haven’t read those, much of this won’t make sense.)

Embryonic stem cell research, from two perspectives. Elizabeth C. writes,

Regarding stem cell research, destroying human life at any time prior to its ability to sustain itself is murder. To the thinking mind, the term “harvesting” is descriptive enough to prevent legalization. We are messing with life itself, believing ourselves so scientifically advanced that we can get away with it. It’s just a matter of time before the legalized slaughter of the lambs via abortion finds us unprepared for the ultimate results: A world deprived of what would have been, had life been allowed. …

… My beloved grandchildren are proof enough for me that lives lost via abortion and stem cell research would have been lives loved, had their biological parents not made the easiest choice in today’s McDonald’s society, here today, gone tomorrow, whatever the reason.

The other perspective: Laurie Strongin writes in the Washington Post about the death of her son, Henry, who was born with Fanconi’s anemia. “Our only hope lay on the frontiers of science, in human embryo and stem cell research,” she writes. She found a doctor named Mark Hughes, then chief of reproductive and prenatal genetics at the National Institutes of Health, who had pioneered a stem cell procedure he thought could save Henry.

But on Jan. 9, 1997, an article in The Washington Post reported that Hughes was violating a two-year-old federal ban on human embryo research with his work on PGD.

Under the ban, Hughes was barred from performing that work as part of his position at NIH. Refusing to abandon his research or the families who were depending on it, he set up a lab as part of an in vitro fertility program at a private hospital across the street in Bethesda. But he was considered in violation of the federal law because his work at the hospital employed NIH research fellows and used NIH equipment — a refrigerator.

Over the following weeks, the daily headlines all read the same to me: Henry is going to die. As our doctor was forced to resign from his job and faced congressional hearings, Henry’s blood counts declined. We searched for alternatives to PGD, but none existed. The politically triggered delay had stolen precious time in our race to save Henry’s life. On Dec. 11, 2002, he died in my arms.

The procedure that Henry was denied because of a refrigerator was the same one used to save the life of Molly Nash, who also was born with Fanconi’s anemia. Today Molly is eleven years old and free from disease.

The odds that any particular blastocyst, once frozen, will ever become a baby are, well, long. It’s likely most will never be thawed. A large part of those that are thawed will not survive thawing. And of the select few that survive thawing and are implanted in a uterus, only some will result in a pregnancy. Yet by some twisted moral algebra, these blastocysts are considered more precious (to some people, like Elizabeth C.) than a child like Henry.

Recent news stories say that about 400,000 surplus frozen embryos are in storage in America. But according to this article in the current issue of Mother Jones, the number 400,000 represents the embryos stored in 2002. Four years later, there is every reason to believe the actual number is higher — close to half a million — and growing rapidly.

In other words, during the time it took for about 110 “snowflake children” to be born, another 200,000 blastocysts went into storage.

The Fetus People have persuaded themselves that since only a small percentage of stored embryos have been designated by their “parents” to be made available for research, the remainder are just sitting around waiting for Mommy and Daddy to thaw them out and pop them in the oven. This is, of course, nonsense. As the Mother Jones article linked above makes clear, the in vitro process requires creating a surplus of blastocysts to achieve one pregnancy. But once treatment is over many parents struggle with the choice of storing, donating, or destroying the leftovers. Many couples choose to store the blastocysts even though they have no intention of using them —

[A] woman described her embryos as a psychic insurance policy, providing “intangible solace” against the fundamental parental terror that an existing child might die. “What if [my daughter] got leukemia?” said yet another, who considered her frozen embryos a potential source of treatment. A patient put the same notion more bluntly: “You have the idea that in a warehouse somewhere there’s a replacement part should yours get lost, or there is something wrong with them.”

For others, embryos carried a price tag that made them seem like a consumer good; a few parents considered destroying them to be a “waste” of all the money spent on treatment.

Michael Kinsley, who supports stem cell research, writes that “if embryos are human beings with full human rights, fertility clinics are death camps.”

In any particular case, fertility clinics try to produce more embryos than they intend to implant. Then — like the Yale admissions office (only more accurately) — they pick and choose among the candidates, looking for qualities that make for a better human being. If you don’t get into Yale, you have the choice of attending a different college. If the fertility clinic rejects you, you get flushed away — or maybe frozen until the day you can be discarded without controversy.

And fate isn’t much kinder to the embryos that make this first cut. Usually several of them are implanted in the hope that one will survive. Or, to put it another way, in the hope that all but one will not survive. And fertility doctors do their ruthless best to make these hopes come true.

Kinsley argues that if one genuinely believes that destroying a blastocyst to extract stem cells is murder, then logically one must also be opposed to in vitro fertilization. The routine practices of fertility clinics destroy far more blastocysts than would ever likely be destroyed for stem cell research. “And yet, no one objects, or objects very loudly,” Kinsley says. “President Bush actually praised the work of fertility clinics in his first speech announcing restrictions on stem cells.”

The fact is, opponents of stem cell research routinely lie — to themselves, to each other, to anyone who will listen — in order to defend their belief that embryonic stem cell research is immoral. This suggests to me that the real reasons people object to stem cell research have less to do with moral principle than with some deeply submerged but potent fear. And this takes us back to elective ignorance. Something about flushing all those blastocysts makes the Fetus People uncomfortable in a way that condemning Henry Strongin to death does not. The arguments they make against stem cell research, which are mostly a pile of lies and distortions, are not the reasons they are opposed to stem cell research. They are the rationalizations created to justify their opposition.

Exactly what it is that frightens the Fetus People so is beyond the scope of a blog post. I hope the social psychologists will get out their chi squares and p values and get to work on finding the answer. But I hypothesize that many of them have years of ego investment in anti-abortion propaganda, to the point that they’re chanting “life begins at conception” in their sleep. If they give so much as a millimeter of ground on the “conception” issue their entire worldview, which includes their self-identity, will crumble apart. Hence, they are less concerned with saving Henry Strongin than with saving blastocysts. Hence, elective ignorance.

I’ve explained my views on “when life begins” before. Many on the Right are absolutely certain that “conception” is the only possible answer, but in fact there are a multitude of different answers that can be arrived at both scientifically and philosophically. As this essay explains nicely, across time and cultures there have been many different opinions as to when life “begins.” Even the Catholic Church has changed its papal mind several times in its history.

The Fetus People argue that since a human blastocyst is human, and alive, it must be human life and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges and protections the law allows. Others of us think claiming a blastocyst is equal in value to, say, Nelson Mandela is self-evidently absurd; DNA does not equal personhood. And “human life” doesn’t explain why blastocysts are protected with more ferocity than Henry Strongin. We might giggle at Senator Brownback’s Amazing Talking Embryos, but in truth we’re allowing medical and scientific policies to be set by people with simplistic, childish, even primitive ideas about medicine and science. Not funny.

As I explained in Part I of this little trilogy, we’re all conditioned from birth to understand ourselves and the world around us in a certain way. Ultimately our understanding of blastocysts and Henrys and their relative value is based on how we understand some pretty basic stuff, like selfness and beingness, life and death, us and other. Those who insist that life “begins” at conception have a very rigid and narrow understanding of these matters.

I’m going to attempt to explain my understanding as best I can, just as an example. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, which is not a problem as far as I’m concerned.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, it seems to me that life doesn’t “begin” at all. However it got to this planet four billion years ago, it hasn’t been observed to “begin” since. Instead, life expresses itself in myriad forms. And whatever it is you are is a result of a process stretching back those four billion years. Calling any point a “beginning” seems arbitrary to me.

What is the self? If you’ve ever done time in a Zen monastery, that’s the question the Roshi brings up, over and over again. Kensho might be defined as a paradigm shift of self-ness; a realization that you are not what you thought you were. The realized self is not something that can be explained, but a basic (if crude) analogy is that an individual “self” is a phenomenon of life, as a wave is a phenomenon of ocean. When a wave begins nothing is added to the ocean, and when a wave ceases nothing is taken away from the ocean. Although a wave is a distinct phenomenon, it is also ocean. A person is a distinct being, yet at the same time a person is the great ocean of Being. At birth, nothing is gained; at death, nothing is lost.

So, while I am I and you are you, at the same time I am you and you are me, whether we like it or not.

As I said, this is very crude, and if you ever get interested in Buddhism don’t attach to it. Concepts are always short of reality. But if you understand yourself this way, then you understand all individuals and organisms throughout space and time as a great interconnected process. And you and me and all the blastocysts in the IVF clinics and all the suffering people waiting for the cures that stem cell research promises are all One. In a sense, every atom belonging to one of us as good belongs to everybody.

The “life begins at conception” model, on the other hand, assumes that at conception the individual is broken off from all the rest of Creation and hence is alone in the universe. Seems cold, I say. The Buddha taught that understanding yourself this way leads to grasping and greed, which is the source of all suffering. (See The Four Noble Truths.) Thus the Fetus People are making us all miserable with their campaigns to Save Every Blastocyst while keeping people who have already dissipated back into the Ocean of Being hooked up to life support. At the base of this is (I postulate) their own existential fear.

That’s my take, which you are free to dismiss; I don’t insist everyone share my worldview. But I argue that there is nothing moral about saving surplus blastocysts from being used in medical research, just as there is nothing principled about lying to yourself and others to justify your opinions. Indeed, from a Buddhist perspective it is deeply immoral to keep hundreds of thousands of blastocysts in cold storage — where they are not expressing life — when they could be used to alleviate suffering and express life through other individuals.

If you respect life, you don’t waste it.

    What do you think has become of the young and old men?
    And what do you think has become of the women and children?
    They are alive and well somewhere;
    The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
    And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
    And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. (Walt Whitman)

Missing Clues

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Avedon is right — this story doesn’t add up.

When the dispatcher called, Stephanie Adamson knew this might be the run she had feared. But it wasn’t until her ambulance arrived at the hospital and she saw the words “elective abortion” on the patient’s chart that she knew she had to make a choice.

“I just got a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Adamson, an emergency medical technician from Channahon, Ill.

Adamson called her boss to say she could not transport the patient to the other hospital where the procedure was scheduled.

“I just knew I couldn’t do it. I’ve never been for abortion — I’ve always been against it,” Adamson said. “I was brought up in a Christian home and always believed life was precious.”

Adamson’s supervisor fired her on the spot and dispatched another ambulance to transfer the distraught young patient.

Adamson sued the ambulance company, charging religious discrimination. But Avedon is right — who calls an ambulance just for an elective abortion? There’s got to be more to this story that Adamson isn’t admitting. Such as, what sort of medical emergency required the patient to go to a hospital by ambulance to terminate her pregnancy?

Washington Post reporter Rob Stein must’ve been asleep when he wrote this. Alarm bells should have gone off in his head that he’d better call the ambulance company and get its side of the story. Is Anderson lying when she says the patient’s chart said elective abortion? Did the chart in fact say therapeutic abortion, and Anderson either misread it or doesn’t know the difference between elective and therapeutic? Did the person who initiated the chart write the word elective by mistake? Had the patient already undergone an elective abortion but was having complications that required emergency medical treatment? If in fact the young woman was having no medical problems and simply wanted an elective abortion, who did the ambulance company expect to bill for the ambulance ride, since no insurance company I’ve ever heard of would have paid such a bill? And why didn’t she just take a cab?

I suspect Adamson just saw the word abortion on the chart and refused to transport the patient, no matter what the patient’s emergency was. In which case the ambulance company was correct to fire her.

Update: Avedon has more of the story. The patient was in severe pain, and the ambulance company fired Adamson for putting the patient in danger.

Brave New El Salvadore

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I’ve written before about abortion in Latin America. I’ve written about how abortion rates in Latin America are higher than rates in the U.S. in spite of the fact that abortion is illegal in most of Latin America. I’ve written about the approximately 5,000 Latinas who die every year from botched illegal abortion.

In this Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Jack Hitt focuses on one Latin American nation, El Salvador, which eight years ago criminalized all abortions. All of them, for any reason. Women can get a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison for getting an abortion. [Update: See correction to the Hitt article here.]

Physicians are under pressure to report any women who might have aborted to the proper authorities, on pain of prosecution —

“Many doctors are afraid not to report,” says Mira, the obstetrician I spoke to. This fear is heightened for doctors, she explains, by the fact that nurses also have a legal duty to report abortion crimes but are often confused about their obligation of confidentiality. So doctors are afraid that the nurses will report them for not reporting. “The entire system is run on fear,” Mira said.

The criteria for deciding whether a woman aborted sound like something out of The Crucible.

If the woman is “confused in her narrative,” Vargas said, that could well indicate that she’d had an abortion.

Vargas offered me an example. “Last year, in March, we received a 15-year-old who came referred from a hospital in an outer area,” she said. “She had a confused patient history. She had already been operated on and had a hysterectomy and had her ovaries taken out. She was in a delicate state, on respiratory assistance in intensive care. The doctors there said they had seen a perforation in the space beneath the cervix.

“This was around Eastertime last year, and the prosecutor’s offices were closed,” Vargas said. She had not seen any of the evidence herself, she said, but saw that the other doctors “had tried to call the prosecutor’s office, but it was closed. I came in, and on the chart what was pending was to call the police. So I called them.”

Courts can order vaginal inspections of women under suspicion. If a woman needs a hysterectomy after a suspected back-alley abortion, the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute for examination. If the case goes to trial, the organ may be used as evidence against the woman.

El Salvadore’s laws are so insane physicians cannot even terminate an ectopic pregnancy before it becomes critical —

Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.

According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. “That is our policy,” Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. “That is the law,” she said. “The D.A.’s office told us that this was the law.” Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital’s practice. “Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital,” she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. “If it’s dead, we can operate,” she said. “Before that, we can’t.” If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture. If they are able to persuade the patient to stay, though, doctors can operate the minute any signs of early rupturing are detected. Even a few drops of blood seeping from a fallopian tube will “irritate the abdominal wall and cause pain,” Valdés explained. By operating at the earliest signs of a potential rupture, she said, her doctors are able to minimize the risk to the woman.

Hitt interviewed one woman serving a 30-year sentence whose three children are growing up without her. He describes young women chained to hospital beds and guarded by police. Clandestine networks, something like the Underground Railroad, help poor girls travel to abortion providers in other countries.

The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, says “El Salvador is an inspiration,” an important victory for the “pro-life” movement.

Every now and then I run into a so-called “libertarian” who wants to criminalize abortion. You can talk to these lamebrains until you are purple, and they will not understand why criminalizing abortion limits the liberty and dignity of women.

Well, assholes, this is why.

Update: See also Scott Lemieux.

Fire Thunder

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Via Paul the Spud — the President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, is fighting back against the South Dakota abortion law.

A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

President Fire Thunder is taking donations to help build the clinic. What better way to kick the Fetus People in their collective butt?

Three Lessons About Abortion

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There’s an excellent op ed in today’s Los Angeles Times by Marianne Mollmann of Human Rights Watch. In “Abortion lessons from Latin America,” Mollman draws on the experiences of women in Latin America to compile three lessons for the bleepheads who brought about South Dakota’s abortion ban.

Lesson 1: Outlawing abortion does not stop women from having them. “What do I care if abortion is legal or illegal?” Marcela E. told me in 2004 in Argentina, where abortion generally is banned. “If I have to do it, I have to do it.” The 32-year-old mother of three had a clandestine abortion after her husband raped her.

A community organizer in Argentina told me: “You will not believe what women end up putting in their uteruses to abort.” I wish I didn’t.

I have spoken to women who used knives, knitting needles, rubber tubes, even pieces of wood to pry open their uteruses. Some got access to abortive medicines that in theory lower the possibility of direct infection but that caused serious complications when they took them without medical assistance. Affluent women suffered fewer traumatic ordeals, often traveling to the U.S. for the procedure or sneaking off to upscale private Latin America clinics where, on paper, they had surgery for appendicitis.

Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion. Banning abortion doesn’t seem to put much of a dent in the rate of abortion. Latin America is proof. As I wrote here, worldwide there is no correlation whatsoever between abortion rate and abortion law. Some nations that ban abortion have very high rates of abortion; some nations with legal abortion have very low rates of abortion. According to this New York Times article,

Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.

By contrast, the abortion rate in the U.S. is 21.3 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. The Netherlands and Belgium, with liberal abortion laws, have an abortion rate of 7 per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

Mollman continues,

Lesson 2: Providing limited exceptions to an abortion ban does little to improve access to safe abortions.

In reality very few, if any, women get such “non-punishable” abortions because there are no clear procedures. Fearing that they’d be charged with a crime, many of the women I interviewed who might have qualified for a legal abortion because they had been raped or because their health was endangered by the pregnancy did not dare to out themselves as potential abortion candidates. They went straight for the illegal and mostly unsafe back-alley abortions. A large proportion of maternal mortality in Latin America is caused directly by the consequences of such unsafe abortions.

As discussed here, would-be abortion banners have a remarkable ability to not think real hard about how their abortion bans would actually be implemented. They claim that women seeking abortion wouldn’t be punished (as if forced pregnancy and childbirths weren’t punishment). But where the banners allow for exceptions, who judges? If there’s a rape allowance, how does a woman prove she was raped? Would the rapist have to be convicted first (in which case, the “product” would be potty trained by then). Would this cause women seeking abortion to make false rape charges? If there’s a “life of the mother” exception, who stands over the physician’s shoulder to make the call? Some conditions (preeclampsia comes to mind) may be manageable, or may be fatal. It’s hard to know for certain until the woman drops dead. Different physicians may make different judgments on whether the pregnancy should be terminated. Is the government going to snoop around and second-guess doctors who perform abortions to save women’s lives?

Mollmann continues,

Lesson 3: In Latin America, as everywhere else, the best way to stop abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Women and girls act within the circumstances imposed upon them. In Latin America, where contraceptives are inaccessible and sex is stigmatized (through cultural expectations that they be virginal and uneducated about sex), unwanted pregnancies are more common; not surprisingly, there is a higher proportion of abortions to pregnancies than in, for example, the U.S. The simple fact is that women with unwanted or imposed pregnancies would have preferred not to need abortions.

Recently Priya Jain reported in Salon about a movement in the U.S. to ban birth control. Now, I don’t think the American public would put up with this, but they are putting up with allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, so what do I know? Recently the Missouri state legislature refused to fund family planning services in public health clinics. And Jain points out that Concerned Women for America is anti-contraception. It’s becoming more and more obvious that if the abortion banners get their way with abortion, banning contraception will be their next goal.

Mollman concludes,

South Dakota’s abortion ban won’t end or even cut down on abortions among the women in that state, and it probably will have disastrous effects on their health and lives. Laws and policies on abortion and contraceptives should not punish women and girls for doing what they feel they must to live with dignity.

Well said.

Update: See Pacific Views, especially this part —

That’s the result of public ‘morality.’ The result of public servants wanting to pray in front of the masses and be admired for their rectitude. It happens in every single country where abortion is outlawed and access to contraception is restricted. It has already happened in America as a result of parental notification laws:

Becky Bell lived with her parents, Karen and Bill, and brother in a small town near Indianapolis. Becky was a junior in high school in 1988 when she became pregnant. She sought an abortion at a women’s health clinic but learned that, under Indiana law, she first had to obtain the consent of one parent. Afraid to disappoint her parents, Becky had an illegal abortion and died from complications one week later. This is Karen Bell’s story…. The nuns and nurses at St. Vincent Hospital, where we have taken her for everything, kept asking Beck, “What have you done to yourself?” I heard the nurses say her veins had collapsed. They put oxygen on her, but Becky pulled the mask off. I leaned down and said, “Honey, tell Mom, tell me, honey.” She said, “Mom, Dad, I love you, forgive me.” And that was it. Her heart stopped. They said that her lungs had literally come apart from infection, and they hooked her up to life support.

… 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.” …

The questions to ask when thinking about abortion restrictions come simply to these: What lower-income mother would you sentence to health problems she can’t afford? Whose daughter would you sentence to death?

BTW, when did any advocate for abortion rights shoot a hole in a building where a “lifer” was speaking?

Fix Bayonets!

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Much political chatter this year has urged prochoice advocates and politicians to move to the right. How many more times are they required to recite the pledge — ”We want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare” — while prolife purists fight to make it unsafe and illegal? — Ellen Goodman

Amen, Sister Ellen.

Ms. Goodman says the new South Dakota law that bans abortions except to save the life of the mother has awakened some people to what the so-called “right to life” movement is really about.

As Nancy Keenan of NARAL Pro-Choice America put it simply: ”They’ve come out from behind the curtain.” Forget the political jockeying by prolifers to gain a foothold with moderates. Never mind laws on parental notification and consent in the name of family involvement. Or attempts to ban one abortion procedure at a time. Or laws to mandate misinformation and waiting periods.

Until now the antiabortion right has not only tried to frame itself as moderate, it has dressed up in woman-friendly camouflage. It has touted research that makes one false claim after another linking abortion with depression and breast cancer. It has cast women as the hapless victims of abortion and portrayed its own side as protectors.

Every time I hear the Fetus People express concern about the “dangers” of abortion I want to scream. A first-trimester abortion is, statistically, considerably safer than pregnancy and childbirth. This goes double for young teens. But abortions become more dangerous the longer they are postponed. So, if you actually care about safety, you want to close as many abortion clinics as possible, mandate waiting periods, and otherwise make women jump through as many hoops as you can devise before they can finally have the procedure. Oh, wait …

I am sick to death of “pundits” and “experts” who advise us liberals that we’re the ones who have to adapt on the issue of abortion; we’re the ones who have to compromise; we’re the ones who have to prove we have hearts. Bleep that. Consider the experience of Marie Myung-Ok Lee when she arrived at 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.

Myung-Ok Lee was not, in fact, pregnant.

Michael Bérubé has a post up directed at moderates and others who didn’t believe the anti-choice people were serious. Ralph Nader, for example, quoted in 2000 —

Mr. Nader said he did not think there would be much difference between the justices Mr. Gore would choose and those Mr. Bush would appoint. After all, Democrats had helped confirm Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hadn’t they? Besides, “You can’t really predict how Supreme Court justices will behave.”

And he called the possibility that a court packed with Republican appointees could overturn Roe v. Wade a “scare tactic.” On Sunday, Mr. Nader said in a television interview that even if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the issue “would just revert to the states.” Just?

“Here’s what happened on that,” he said wearily. “The scare tactic is that would end choice in America, and I just said that’s not true, but I should have been astute enough not to mention that.”

He said he did not in any case believe for a moment that Mr. Bush would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble and they know it,” he said. He described the party’s opposition to abortion as just for show, “just for Pat Robertson.”

This was part of Ralph’s “Democrats are just as bad” rationalization, btw; the claim that it didn’t matter whether the nation elected Bush or Gore in 2000. They were both just alike, Ralph said. Thanks, Ralph.

Anyway, Michael B. writes, too many men on the left didn’t believe the rightie culture warriors really mean what they say.

If there’s anyone out there who still thinks that way — let me introduce Bill Napoli.

“They mean it,” Digby says.

They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them — and if there is, they don’t care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they’ll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don’t give up just because liberals get up-in-arms. They certainly don’t care if we think they are shrill.

We’re up against utterly irrational extremism here. We’re not going to change their minds. But they are a minority. The majority of American support Roe v. Wade and don’t want laws like South Dakota’s put into effect. Bleep moving to the Right. We’ve got to say to the majority, these people want legal control of your reproductive system. Is this OK with you? If not, will you please wake the bleep up and pay attention to which bleeping political candidates you vote for?

Scott Lemieux has a new series posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money on the importance of Roe v. Wade and why arguments that it was “wrongly decided” are a pile of pooh. Check out:

After South Dakota, Pt. 1: The Side of Principle

After South Dakota Pt. II: Stand Up For Roe

After SD Part III: The Best Defense of Reproductive Freedom Is A Good Offense

In this last post, Scott argues that the South Dakota law presents us with an opportunity to go on offense and change the debate.

Even before this pro-choicers already had many opportunities, starting with the fact that the national Republican Platform endorses a constitutional amendment that would make abortion first-degree murder in all 50 states. When was the last time you heard a Democratic politician mention that, even though maximizing the public’s knowledge of their opponent’s most unpopular positions would seem to be Politics 101? Instead, taking the advice of people like Saletan they accept the debate as it has been arbitrarily carved up by disingenuous pro-lifers, getting in sucked into ludicrous ginned-up non-issues like the “partial-birth” nonsense. The Republicans have been masterful about playing both ends, and keeping the debate focused on tangential side issues. The way to counteract this is not to go along with the existing discourse, but to change the terms of the debate, to make clear what Republicans want to do and put the debate in terms of keeping abortion legal, where public opinion massively favors the Democrats. The draconian (and illegal) actions of the South Dakota legislature provide an excellent frame for making this clear, but the Democrats need to start playing some offense.

During the 2004 election I kept hearing that Kerry didn’t know how to “talk” about abortion. That’s because he had to simultaneously express the view that he didn’t like it while proposing to keep it legal. Too much nuance.

Here’s our new message: The Fetus People want to ban all abortions, and when they’ve accomplished that they want to ban birth control. Here’s your choice: Vote for them, and they own your reproductive system; or vote for us, and you can make your own choices. Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one.

Not too nuanced, I don’t believe.

There’s Got to Be a Morning After

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More reproductive rights news to follow up “The Daughter Effect“:

Tony Pugh of Knight Ridder reports that Rep. Henry Waxman (da man!) discovered the Bush Administration is not being honest (ah-HEM!) about its morning-after-pill policies.

Internal documents made public Thursday have raised new questions about the federal government’s continued refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of the emergency contraceptive known as “Plan B.”

The documents, obtained by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., show that in February 2004, policymakers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found no problem in allowing the so-called morning-after pill to be sold without a prescription to women of all ages.

Yet 18 months later, former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford cited concerns about selling the drug to younger teens as a major reason for blocking the move.

The move prompted outrage from women’s rights groups and Democratic lawmakers, who claimed that the agency was blocking the measure for political reasons despite scientific evidence that showed nonprescription sales of the pill were safe.
One FDA official opposed to the decision resigned.

Here’s the juicy part:

Barr Laboratories, the maker of Plan B, originally sought to sell the drug over-the-counter to women of all ages. Only after meeting resistance from FDA officials and conservative organizations did the company opt to require prescriptions for women ages 16 and under.

The FDA records indicate that the change was engineered by FDA senior officials who worked behind the scenes against the company while appearing to remain neutral.

After mid-level FDA officials made their recommendation to approve Plan B sales without prescriptions, their superiors told them that FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan and other senior managers at the agency “cannot support the non-prescription switch of Plan B,” according to the agency’s records.

By that time, the FDA already had begun urging Barr to seek over-the-counter sales for those 17 and older.

Barr eventually did so, but the request was tabled in August 2005 by Crawford, who claimed the move raised “difficult and novel policy and regulatory issues.” The FDA hasn’t yet decided the matter, and Plan B remains available by prescription only.

However, seven states allow Plan B to be sold over-the-counter. These are Washington, California, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Maine and New Hampshire.

What I want to know is. when is it going to be the morning after for the bozo Bush appointees in the FDA responsible for this nonsense?

The Daughter Effect

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This Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial needs more attention —

A new report posits what many fathers of daughters already know — that having a daughter can change a man’s political perspective on women’s issues. …

… Having a daughter is likely to literally bring such issues home, forcing lawmakers to view them in real, not abstract, terms. It always helps to put a human face on an issue. It would seem even more so when that face is your child’s.

It may, as well, make it easier to recognize that reproductive choices belong in the personal province of a woman and her family, not the state.

The report is called “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues,” and it was written by Ebonya Washington for the National Bureau of Economic Research and dated January 2006. It is available for download for a $5 fee at the NBER web site. Here is a summary. I also found what might be a preliminary version of the report in PDF format — “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues” by Ebonya Washington, Yale University, May 2005. It may not be exactly the same as the more recent NBER document, but it’s free.

Anyway, Washington looked at voting patterns in the 105th Congress and found that having daughters is a “positive and significant predictor” of how legislators vote on reproductive rights. I skimmed through the Yale version of the report and found these points:

1. The daughter effect is more pronounced in male legislators than in female legislators.

2. Although the daughter factor has some effect across all “gender gap” issues, it is most pronounced in the area of reproductive rights.

3. Point #2 is significant because public opinion polls on reproductive rights actually show less of a “gender gap” than some other issues, such as crime, defense, gay rights, and welfare spending. This suggests that fathers’ opinions are not changing just because they are exposed to their daughters’ points of view.

4. The older the daughter, the more pronounced is the daughter effect. It seems to grow over time.

You can glean more about factors and methodologies from the paper. There’s, like, tables and Greek letters and everything. The point is that the mere fact of having daughters, especially daughters approaching reproductive age, seems to have a statistically measurable impact on the way legislators, especially male legislators, vote regarding reproductive rights. (My skimming through the report didn’t tell me how big the daughter effect is; perhaps someone who understands statistical analysis could take a look and explain it. I would appreciate that muchly.)

I wrote recently that “whether one is pro-choice or anti-choice does not depend on whether one thinks embryos are human beings. It depends on whether one recognizes that women are human beings.” The study seems to corroborate this.