Category Archives: Social Issues

Never Enough

Posted on by

Scientists have figured out how to extract stem cells from blastocysts without killing the blastocyst, says Nicholas Wade in the New York Times.

The new technique would be performed on a two-day-old embryo, after the fertilized egg has divided into eight cells, known as blastomeres. In fertility clinics, where the embryo is available outside the woman in the normal course of in vitro fertilization, one of these blastomeres can be removed for diagnostic tests, like for Down syndrome.

The embryo, now with seven cells, can be implanted in the woman if no defect is found. Many such embryos have grown into apparently healthy babies over the 10 years or so the diagnostic tests have been used. …

…“By growing the biopsied cell overnight,” he said, “the resulting cells could be used for both P.G.D. and the generation of stem cells without affecting the subsequent chances of having a child.”

Great breakthrough, huh? Now researchers can get all the embryonic stem cells they could ask for without killing blastocysts. But it looks like the scientists needn’t have bothered.

But the new method, reported yesterday by researchers at Advanced Cell Technology on the Web site of the journal Nature, had little immediate effect on longstanding objections of the White House and some Congressional leaders yesterday. It also brought objections from critics who warned of possible risk to the embryo and the in vitro fertilization procedure itself, in which embryos are generated from a couple’s egg and sperm.

Um, but it says the blastomeres were being removed anyway, doesn’t it?

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, suggested that the new procedure would not satisfy the objections of Mr. Bush, who vetoed legislation in July that would have expanded federally financed embryonic stem cell research. Though Ms. Lawrimore called it encouraging that scientists were moving away from destroying embryos, she said: “Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical questions. This technique does not resolve those concerns.”

What ethical questions? Do they want the blastocyst to sign a consent form?

“Embryos cannot give consent and the people they could become will obviously have had no say on whether cells should have been removed. Even if they are not destroying the embryo they are still putting it at some risk.

“A lot of these researchers make claims which are later disproved or turn out not to be as they promised, so we will have to wait and see if it really is as it seems.”

The Los Angeles Times explains:

What could possibly be the objection? The National Catholic Bioethics Center has two, for starters. One is that the extracted cell has the potential to develop into an embryo. Never mind that those extracted cells aren’t now developed into embryos when extracted for genetic testing or other uses.

The other is that the embryo is undergoing a medical procedure — the extraction of one cell — not for its own benefit but for the cause of science. If the cell can also be used for genetic testing, however, it is being used for that embryo’s benefit. And even if it is not, there are many other procedures — organ donation, for example — that do not benefit the host but are nonetheless viewed not only as acceptable but as moral.

Also:

President Bush offered little encouragement Wednesday and, if anything, raised the bar higher, suggesting he would not be comfortable unless embryos were not involved at all.

Well, we don’t want to make the President uncomfortable, do we?

Social conservatives already have begun complaining that the new technique falls short. They say the method does injure nascent embryos, and they question whether the cell that is removed from an embryo has the potential to develop on its own.

There’s no point trying to appease, reason, or compromise with the Fetus People. Say the words “embryonic stem cell” to them, and their warped little brains promptly go to work manufacturing new reasons why embryonic stem cells are bad. Unfortunately we’re all being held hostage by their ersatz “morality.”

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Posted on by

Alert reader Leigh Trail flagged this Associated Press story from the Dark Ages:

The American Medical Association is warning girls not to go wild during spring break. All but confirming what goes on in those “Girls Gone Wild” videos, 83 percent of college women and graduates surveyed by the AMA said spring break involves heavier-than-usual drinking, and 74 percent said the break results in increased sexual activity.

The women’s answers were based both on firsthand experience and the experiences of friends and acquaintances.

Sizable numbers reported getting sick from drinking, and blacking out and engaging in unprotected sex or sex with more than one partner, activities that increase their risks for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

See if you can guess which words do not appear anywhere in this story:

1. “men”

2. “boys”

3. “males”

4. all of the above

(Answer at the bottom of this post.)

In other news — what Molly says. Righteous!

[Answer: #4]

Touching Innocence

Posted on by

This is a sorta kinda followup to the last post, which discussed matters of life and death, space and time, religion, law, morality, and what it is to be human. Which was a tad ambitious now that I think about it. But I request that people not add comments disagreeing with this post until you’ve read that one. This will save us both a lot of time.

Anyway, I see that some righties are upset about a British court ruling that will allow physicians to impose a “do not resuscitate” order for Baby Charlotte, a desperately ill two-year-old, against the wishes of her parents.

The rightie blogger of Stop the ACLU asks,

Is this the direction America is headed? Is this where the ACLU, and the “right to die” folks will take us?

Kim Priestap of Wizbang blames socialized medicine:

Baby Charlotte’s health is fragile normally, so she will go through health scares like this again. This will cost Britain a lot of money. Since Britain has a nationalized healthcare system, funded by taxpayer money, it’s in the state’s best interest to let her die.

What’s going on here? As a mother myself I’m very uncomfortable when government interferes with family decisions like this. I tend to think that when the family is agreed the patient should be resuscitated, the doctors should respect the decision and not involve courts. I don’t know enough about Baby Charlotte to be able to judge whether there is a compelling reason to make an exception in her case. I infer from news stories that the doctors consider her case to be hopeless and that keeping her alive is just making her suffer. And her parents see things very differently.

I argued in the last post that humans need to struggle with hard choices. When governments or other institutions swoop into our lives and make our choices for us, it makes us less human. And this is true even when we make “bad” choices (within the law, of course). Our decisions may be less important than the process we go through to make them. So in that respect I’m sympathetic to the rightie point of view.

However … the title of this post doesn’t refer to Baby Charlotte. It refers to the righties who are oh, so innocent of the facts of life and death these days.

Nearly a year ago us “culture of death” liberals took up the cause of Sun Hudson, a Texas baby whose life support was terminated against family wishes. Although their diagnoses may differ, the legal situations of Baby Sun and Baby Charlotte seem to me to be nearly identical. If anything, Sun’s case was more extreme than Charlotte’s. His mother (father unknown) wanted aggressive medical care to continue, but the law sided with physicians who decided enough had been enough. Baby Sun’s breathing tube was removed on March 15, 2005, and he died of asphyxiation within minutes.

My understanding is that Sun Hudson’s prognosis really was hopeless. But then, so was Terri Schiavo’s.

Sun Hudson died three days before Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed for the last time. Some of you might recall that righties got a tad excited about the Schiavo case. However, they were mostly silent about Sun Hudson — slipped their attention, I guess. Were it not for liberal blogs I wouldn’t have heard about Sun Hudson either.

Why were righties so oblivious to the Sun Hudson case? One explanation is that the law that allowed his life to be terminated had been signed by then-Governor George W. Bush.

The federal law that President Bush signed early yesterday in an effort to prolong Terri Schiavo’s life appears to contradict a right-to-die law that he signed as Texas governor, prompting cries of hypocrisy from congressional Democrats and some bioethicists.

In 1999, then-Gov. Bush signed the Advance Directives Act, which lets a patient’s surrogate make life-ending decisions on his or her behalf. The measure also allows Texas hospitals to disconnect patients from life-sustaining systems if a physician, in consultation with a hospital bioethics committee, concludes that the patient’s condition is hopeless.

Bioethicists familiar with the Texas law said yesterday that if the Schiavo case had occurred in Texas, her husband would be the legal decision-maker and, because he and her doctors agreed that she had no hope of recovery, her feeding tube would be disconnected. [Knight Ridder]

The Sun Hudson story came out just as the VRWC media echo chamber was working overtime to promote George W. Bush as a champion of life. Faux News’s Bill O’Reilly first commented on the Sun Hudson story before he discovered the Bush angle, forcing him to flip-flop harder than a trout on a hot pier. While Terri Schiavo’s parents were depicted as noble and pure of heart, Sun Hudson’s mother became a deranged black woman who couldn’t face reality. Never fear; O’Reilly had flip-flopped back by April when he attacked the ACLU for (perhaps) being behind “infanticide for impaired babies.”

Let’s go back to the Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999, which is the law under which Sun Hudson’s life was terminated. Put very simply, the law allows a health care facility to discontinue life support against the wishes of the patient’s family. The law requires the facility to jump through a number of hoops before it can do this, which ensures there is an overwhelming medical consensus that the patient’s condition is hopeless before the plug is pulled. The family has the option of finding another medical facility willing to continue life support. But other medical facilities are unlikely to take such a patient, especially if the patient will be a drain on the budget.

In other words, if the family is wealthy enough to pay the costs of Grandma’s care and make a generous contribution to the hospital building fund, Grandma lives. If the family’s insurance is capped and they’ve already spent the second mortgage to pay her medical bills, she dies. To paraphrase (well, OK, mock) Kim Priestap of Wizbang (see above), Grandma’s care will cost hospitals a lot of money, so it’s in their best interest to let her die.

There are two issues to be addressed here, both involving rightie inability to face reality. The first is regarding health care and how it is paid for. Just about every nation on earth affluent enough for most citizens to own a microwave has some kind of national health care system. The exception is the United States. In a recent Newsweek column, Jane Bryant Quinn (hardly a socialist) said that America’s health-care system is turning into a lottery.

The winners: the healthy and well insured, with good corporate coverage or Medicare. When they’re ill, they get—as the cliche goes—”the best health care in the world.” The losers: those who rely on shrinking public insurance, such as Medicaid (nearly 45 million of us), or go uninsured (46 million and rising).

To slip from the winners’ circle into the losers’ ranks is a cultural, emotional and financial shock. You discover a world of patchy, minimal health care that feels almost Third World. The uninsured get less primary or preventive care, find it hard to see cardiologists, surgeons and other specialists (waiting times can run up to a year), receive treatment in emergencies, but are more apt to die from chronic or other illnesses than people who pay. That’s your lot if you lose your corporate job and can’t afford a health policy of your own.

Years ago there was a joke in circulation that said a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. The new joke is that a liberal is a conservative who’s lost his health insurance.

The point is that all the evil, inhumane things going on in Other Countries That Have Socialized Medicine are happening here, too. Righties just refuse to acknowledge them. Among those Other Countries, Britain is a good “bad example” because they’ve underfunded their system for years. Meanwhile, we in the U.S. spend far more per capita than other nations (see this report in PDF format; note especially Figure 1 on page 3) but we’re getting worse results (see Table 1, page 4). By some measures we’re getting even worse results than those cheapskate Brits.

And the moral is, people whose health care system is a broken down mess shouldn’t be pointing fingers at other peoples’ health care systems.

The other issue I see here is the touching innocence of righties regarding hopelessly terminal patients. Physicians have made decisions not to aggressively treat hopeless patients, especially suffering hopeless patients, since Hippocrates. Generally they’ve done it quietly and without drawing attention to themselves, but they’ve done it. For example, since the 19th century physicians have prescribed larger and larger doses of opiates to ease the pain of dying patients, knowing that eventually the dosage will be fatal. And as far as the family ever knew, it was the cancer that killed Grandpa, not that last dose of morphine.

Just about any health care professional will confirm this. I’m sure such decisions are being made all over America even as you read this.

The reason we’re hearing about such cases these days is, IMO, multifold. First, in the past medicine wasn’t all that effective. It was easy for doctors to make a show of “doing all we can” because in truth there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot they could do. But now we can do so much more. We have medical technology that will retain life in a body even when the person that body once sustained has long since dissipated, as in Terri Schiavo’s case. The line between life and death itself has blurred.

Second, because of the technology, more and more families refuse to accept a hopeless prognosis. I understand even anencephalic babies are sometimes put on life support these days, even though those babies have no hope of survival. In earlier times, the only choice offered parents would have been whether they wanted to hold the baby while it died, or not.

And third, mass media and our “reality TV” culture make sure the more controversial decisions get global publicity. In earlier times, these matters wouldn’t have been been discussed outside the family. Today, people with less than a half-assed idea of the facts can plaster their uninformed opinions all over the Web.

As individuals, as a nation, as a society, as a species, we’ve got hard choices to make. These choices involve ourselves and our loved ones. We need to make some mature, non-politicized judgments about how to pay for health care. We must think rationally about how much of our health-care resources should be spent on futile care. We need non-hysterical discussion about if, or when, governments should intervene in family decisions. These are all complex issues. Reasonable people will disagree on many points. But we’re going to get nowhere until we’re able to face some hard realities.

Which means we’re going to get nowhere as long as righties dominate the discussion.

It’s Us, Too

Posted on by

Roger Ailes’s objections notwithstanding — I’ll come back to them in a minute — David Ignatius’s column in today’s Washington Post comes close to saying the same thing I said in the “Patriotism v. Paranoia” post below. I wrote,

In the past century or so our species, worldwide, has undergone some seismic social shifts. People no longer remain neatly sorted by skin color, language, and cultural history. All over the globe people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds are having to learn to live together. Once upon a time “foreign” places were far, far away. But air travel has brought them closer in terms of travel time; now every foreign place on the globe is just over the horizon. Soon foreigners will be sitting in our laps.

I think nationalism arose and became dominant in the 20th century largely because of these seismic social shifts. People who can’t handle the shifts retreat into nationalism as a defense.

Ignatius describes what he calls the “connectedness to conflict” paradox, which says that more “connected” people become, the more conflicts seem to arise.

… as elites around the world become more connected with the global economy, they become more disconnected from their own cultures and political systems. The local elites “lose touch with what’s going on around them,” opening up a vacuum that is filled by religious parties and sectarian groups, Sidawi contends. The modernizers think they are plugging their nations into the global economy, but what’s also happening is that they are unplugging themselves politically at home.

In his column Ignatius quotes Francis Fukuyama and a couple of over over-educated ivory-tower types as they try to figure out why it is that the Middle East is in such turmoil because of its contacts with the West. And that’s the problem; these guys are all westerners trying to figure out what’s wrong with Middle Easterners and not noticing that a variation of the same thing is going on right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., not to mention Europe and other western-type spots.

If by “elites” you substitute “people who aren’t afraid of other cultures and of social and cultural change” I think you get a clearer picture. I don’t think the not-afraid people are necessarily “elites.” Some of the most retrenched nationalists are wealthy, well-educated and well-connected. What they’re not, is modern.

And in a kind of double-paradox, many people who are working hard at “plugging their nations into the global economy” are some of the same people who exploit local nationalistic and xenophobic feelings to stay in political power. Think Republicans Party.

Ignatius, Fukuyama, et al. scratch their heads over democracy and alienation, and of “elites” becoming “disconnected” with their own cultures, and write up a lot of verbose papers expressing highfalutin’ theories. Look, guys, this isn’t difficult. People are afraid of change. They are especially afraid of change that seems to threaten their autonomy and self-identity. And if they think this change is being imported by odd-colored people with exotic accents, don’t expect ’em to roll out the welcome wagon.

This rebellion against change, this retreat into nationalism, is happening all over the globe. It’s happening in Europe, big-time. It’s in the Middle East. And it’s happening here, too, although we’re a bit more subdued about it. So far. But as I noted here, the ongoing Muslim cartoon crisis, for example, amounted to Middle Eastern anti-modernists and western right-wingers whipping each other into a mutual hate frenzy. Granted the western wingnuts haven’t resorted to riots and destruction; they’ve been content with escalating hate speech. But the distinction is merely one of degree, not of kind.

Here’s where Roger Ailes comes in — in the remainder of his column, Ignatius postulates that all these people around the world are going berserk because they have the internets. Ignatius writes,

McLean argues that the Internet is a “rage enabler.” By providing instant, persistent, real-time stimuli, the new technology takes anger to a higher level. “Rage needs to be fed or stimulated continually to build or maintain it,” he explains. The Internet provides that instantaneous, persistent poke in the eye. What’s more, it provides an environment in which enraged people can gather at cause-centered Web sites and make themselves even angrier. The technology, McLean notes, “eliminates the opportunity for filtering or rage-dissipating communications to intrude.” I think McLean is right. And you don’t have to travel to Cairo to see how the Internet fuels rage and poisons reasoned debate. Just take a tour of the American blogosphere.

The connected world is inescapable, like the global economy itself. But if we can begin to understand how it undermines political stability — how it can separate elites from masses, and how it can enhance rage rather than reason — then perhaps we will have a better chance of restabilizing a very disorderly world.

Oh, good. Just cut ’em off from the Web and the natives won’t be so restless. Roger Ailes writes,

Oh, for the good old days — pre-1990s — a time when our sectarian wars and riots and lynchings and genocides were civilized affairs, based on pure, sweet reason. Oh, paradise lost!

I’d like to apologize personally to David Ignatius and Tom Friedman and Francis Fukuyama and Thomas P.M. Barnett and, most of all, to Charles M. McLean, who runs a trend-analysis company called Denver Research Group Inc., for coarsening the discourse. It was wrong of me to think that my opinions might be worth consideration even though I knew I didn’t have a book contract. Clearly, it was my rage that blinded me to the fact that I was poisoning reasoned debate and undermining political stability and separating elites from masses.

And I was such a nice fellow before October 2002; really, I was.

Let the healing begin.

Snark.

Another Rightie Myth Debunked

Posted on by

Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times:

A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools. …

… Though private school students have long scored higher on the national assessment, commonly referred to as “the nation’s report card,” the new study used advanced statistical techniques to adjust for the effects of income, school and home circumstances. The researchers said they compared math scores, not reading ones, because math was considered a clearer measure of a school’s overall effectiveness.

The study found that while the raw scores of fourth graders in Roman Catholic schools, for example, were 14.3 points higher than those in public schools, when adjustments were made for student backgrounds, those in Catholic schools scored 3.4 points lower than those in public schools. A spokeswoman for the National Catholic Education Association did not respond to requests for comment.

Now, for how many years has conventional wisdom been telling us that private schools are better than public schools? That the way to “save” public education was to give kids vouchers to pay for private schools? That parochial schools in particular were better because they could educate kids with lower per-pupil costs?

That last part always was a howler, because parochial schools generally don’t provide special education, and public ones must, and special ed programs are expensive. (Years ago I worked with a woman who had sent her children to Catholic schools, and only after her daughter had graduated high school did she learn that public schools would have worked with the girl to correct her speech impediment. Catholic schools didn’t bother. Boy, was she mad.) Also, parochial schools can bounce kids with behavioral problems, and as a rule public schools can’t until the little darlings get sentenced to juvenile detention.

Kevin Drum writes,

The study analyzed only the math portion of the NAEP test, and the results from the 4th grade test are shown below. The red line shows the average public school score, and the raw scores for most types of private schools (the black bars on the graph) are higher than the public school average. However, much of this difference is due to the fact that private schools attract better kids in the first place, not because the schools themselves are better.

So what would happen if both types of schools had similar student bodies? Those results are shown for private schools in the gray bars in the graph, where test scores are controlled for demographics, and they’re considerably lower than the public school average. In other words, if you took two similar kids and sent one to a public school and one to a private school, the kid in the private school would probably do a little worse than his public school twin. (Note that a difference of 10 points is roughly equal to one grade level.)

The 8th grade results are better, with most private schools scoring about the same as public schools. The only exception is the conservative Christian schools, which continue to score considerably lower than public schools — although the sample size is small enough that the results aren’t conclusive.

Worth bookmarking, I say.