Category Archives: Women’s Issues

Speak for Yourself, Charlotte

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WaPo’s Charlotte Allen actually wrote a whole article about how women are stupid. It’s like she’s living through 1962 again, and second-wave feminism hasn’t happened yet.

There is, um, robust commentary on the blogosphere today regarding this article. Best comment so far is from Atrios:

It turns out the Post did have someone on the “other side” of the “are women stupid” debate. It turns out the conflict was not between whether women are stupid or not, it’s between whether they’re stupid or fickle. …

… Hopefully Camille Paglia will be along next week to tell us that the answer is, of course, both! Then we can put all this behind us and move on to more important issues. I suggest the inscrutability of Asians, or perhaps the brain/penis size tradeoff men face, but others may have some better ideas.

Find links to other observations here. I just want to answer one line:

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?

I have two answers to that. First, if it weren’t for our lapses in judgment, the species would have died out a long time ago. Second, do we want to spell out what it is that men always fall for? And that makes them smarter, somehow?

Next: Honor Killings?

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Get this: The Air Force dropped a rape prosecution and instead charged the alleged victim (an Airman first class) with committing an indecent act. The Air Force granted the three male airmen who allegedly assaulted her with immunity for their testimony against her.

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.

Stout-Hearted Men?

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Glenn Greenwald has a post up on the right-wing cult of contrived masculinity. He writes that at the heart of movement conservatism

… is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archetypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind — or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is — and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

I’d say that at the heart of the cult of masculinity is something even more primordial, which is fear. As I wrote here, the pseudo-conservative movement that is the foundation of “movement conservatism” —

… started out as an intellectually incoherent reaction to the New Deal and the ideals and values that were mainstream 50 and more years ago. It was based on a complex of fears — fear of foreigners, fear of Communists, fear of the powerful forces in the world that they didn’t understand. Most of all, they were besieged by doubts that they fit into a world that was rapidly changing but which they didn’t understand. They feared they were being pushed out of what they saw as their rightful place in American life. Exactly what that place was, and who was pushing them, cannot be clearly defined. Often they lashed out not at real enemies but at the very institutions that protected them and enabled social and economic stability. Theirs was an irrational attempt to erase the previous several years of world history and go back to an earlier time — before the Depression, before World War II — when they had felt more secure. It didn’t sink in that that old feeling of security had been delusional.

I go on at more length in the old post. The point is that inside every wingnut lives a frightened little child looking for a daddy.

The Right’s masculinity problem is something I’ve written about before also, such as here, from 2003:

The faux masculinity celebrated by our culture equates violence with strength and power with potency. It is a rogue thing that does not honor the principles of civilization or the processes of governance. Like most John Wayne characters, or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, following the rules is for girls and sissies. Why bother with a justice system when you’ve got a gun? …

… George W. Bush is an adolescent’s fantasy of what a president should be, just as John Wayne was an adolescent’s fantasy cowboy/lawman, and Dirty Harry an adolescent’s fantasy detective — easily bored with rules and talk, but quick on the trigger. Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got the biggest, baddest military in the world?

If you understand that this is where their heads are, one begins to understand why righties are not bothered by Abu Ghraib or that some of the people detained at Bagram, Kandahar, and Gitmo without due process of law turn out to be innocent. They think as children think. Children generally are unable to think rationally about what frightens them; if they are afraid there’s a monster in the closet, no amount of explaining there isn’t a monster in the closet will settle them. All they want is someone strong to protect them.

Thus, rghties want to smash everyone that frightens them without sorting out whether the thing they fear is a real danger or not, or whether the smashing is smart policy or not. And in Rightie World, applying rational judgments to fearful things is a sign of weakness. For example: The Iraq War is growing the threat of terrorism in the world. Yet you cannot explain to a rightie that a smart war on terror would require disengagement from Iraq. All they know is that there are Islamic extremists over there, and we must kill them. And (they think) if you don’t want to kill them, you are weak. Smash first; think later. If ever.

Of course, a Faux Man rarely volunteers to do the dirty work himself. As Glenn points out, righties on the whole think highly of military glory but are not so keen on gettng shot at themselves.

Another common trait of faux masculinity is misogyny; deep down inside faux men hate and resent women. As Robert Bly artfully explained awhile back in Iron John (I failed to find a good link explaining this point, sorry), faux men have unresolved issues about their mothers, and that lack of resolution leaves them in a state of perpetual adolescence — resentful, confused, fearful, simultaneously seeking yet rebelling against authority. They want a daddy who protects them from the monster in the closet; not a mommy who tells them to eat their vegetables, pay their taxes, and reduce their carbon emissions.

Glenn’s post is about Ann Coulter and why the Right won’t let go of her. He writes,

Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur — that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay — but instead only used the word as a “schoolyard taunt,” to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.

This is from Stephen J. Ducat’s book, The Wimp Factor:

I saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman…. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the “Breck girl.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, “economic girlie-men.” The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips.

Two years ago in a Buzzflash interview, Stephen Ducat said,

In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one’s opponent especially important. This femiphobia–this male fear of being feminine–operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism. …

… In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It’s a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it’s so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It’s quite Sisyphean–you know, you can never quite get there. You’re always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination–either in a personal or a global context–can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

Faux men have to keep proving they are not tied to Ma’s apron strings; and subconsciously, to faux men any woman is All Women is Mother. The compulsion to denigrate women or anything understood to be “feminine” is, always, the mark of a faux man. Ann Coulter is “safe” because she is relentlessly unfeminine; a guy in a girl’s body. She uses the word female as an insult; she is alleged to have said in a 2003 interview, “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact.” (If anyone can find a link to the original source, please let me know.) Righties can count of Coulter not to get all womanly and maternal on them. She is the ideal woman for men who hate women. She does not remind them of their mothers.

Glenn continues,

The Coulter/Hannity/Limabugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Grahib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. The reason people like Rush Limbaugh not only were unbothered, but actually delighted and even tickled by, Abu Grahib is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement — feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. The only real complaint from Bush followers about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough Guantanamos and wars and aggression and barbaric slaughter and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong.

And that is where Ann Coulter comes in and plays such a vital — really indispensible — role. As a woman who purposely exudes the most exaggerated American feminine stereotypes (the long blond hair, the make-up, the emaciated body), her obsession with emasculating Democratic males — which, at bottom, is really what she does more than anything else — energizes and stimulates the right-wing “base” like nothing else can. Just witness the fervor with which they greet her, buy her books, mob her on college campuses. Can anyone deny that she is unleashing what lurks at the very depths of the right-wing psyche? What else explains not just her popularity, but the intense embrace of her by the “base”?

Yep.

While looking for other things I came across a nice specimen for the Faux Male exhibit. Awhile back rightie writer Harvey C. Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness that I have not read but have read much about. This review of Manliness on the site Intellectual Conservative is worth a comment. It begins:

In the twenty-first century workplace, the neutered male, all-too-often, is the employee most successful at climbing organizational hierarchies. Being a good listener, empowering others, and providing solicitous attention — as opposed to speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek — are the traits most likely to result in becoming a CEO or CFO. To get ahead, one must avoid confrontation rather than precipitate it. Characteristics like stoicism, independence, and reticence are now construed as signs of not being a team player despite their once being prevalent in the manliest of men. Perhaps a desire to commemorate what once was is what motivated Harvey Mansfield to write his book, Manliness, as the term itself has become a pejorative.

The premise is nonsense. Although there are exceptions to everything, in my experience corporate CEOs are not touchy-feely types. More often they exhibit absolute self-confidence and ruthless, take-no-prisoners aggression. A touch of sociopathy doesn’t hurt. Mansfield is an academic who needs to get out more. The reviewer, Bernard Chapin, possibly has another excuse. Or not. This comes later in Chapin’s review:

Levity aside, the strongest message of Manliness is delivered in these lines:

    As opposed to being manly, a defense of manliness requires that a man look a woman in the eye and tell her that she is inferior in certain important respects. Men cannot do that today.

He could not be any more right. The very reason that men are vilified and maligned is due to their refusal to defend themselves.

Obviously, Chapin and Mansfield are sniveling little weenies. Real men don’t have to put down women to “defend themselves.”

Having exposed Mr. Chapin for the unmanly lump of protoplasm that he is, you will not be surprised to find out that Mr. Chapin is an Ann Coulter admirer. Of course. Defending her use of the word faggot — which, inexplicably, he doesn’t spell —

F*ggot is not a term of hate. It’s a word sometimes used to describe gays as well as a bundle of sticks or branches, a type of meatball, and, way back when, it even represented a unit of measurement.

Chapin writes,

Consider Coulter’s statement for a moment. Does she really think that Edwards is gay? I seriously doubt it. She was using her enemies’ PC sensitivity as a means to provoke and incite — which is exactly what happened. The quip was an incendiary joke. Coulter is not publicity shy, and, given her background, must have known that furor would follow her heretical observation. Ironically, Howard Dean’s response — “this kind of vile rhetoric is out of bounds” — plays like made-to-order dogma. Like Dean, many leftists would like to send Coulter to places far fouler than rehab. Why is saying a word like f*ggot out of bounds? If a homosexual called Coulter a breeder or a black person called her a cracker, would we judge them “hate-filled and bigoted?” Of course not.

Well, um, I would, if the name-calling were intended to be hateful. (Coulter is neither a breeder nor a cracker as I understand the terms, however.) But the point is that if we measure Mr. Chapin by his own masculinity measure — “speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek” — you can see that he falls a tad short. What Coulter said was nothing but a juvenile slur. Pretending otherwise is not “speaking the truth.” It’s “pathological denial.”

Oh, those silly kids

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One of the comments to my post about the HPV vaccine mentioned that it was nice to see a “younger” voice on this blog, so that’s what I want to post about now, while the maha-in-chief is still in Washington.

A few links. Sadly, some of these are behind subscription walls.

My mother has said to me that the feminist movement is effectively dead, but, although I think the movement has lost some of its oomph for sure, I like to think it’s still flailing and kicking somewhere. Perhaps on college campuses: Salon’s Broadsheet reports that an organization of anti-feminists is opening up chapters on campuses all over the country:

These young women read Danielle Crittenden and Christina Hoff Sommers, attend conferences key-noted by Ann Coulter and Elaine Chao, spread jittery but false gossip that Lynne Cheney is a donor, and host 80’s dances in honor of Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Kinda sends shivers down your spin, dudn’t it?

Broadsheet crows that this is a sign that women’s movements are enjoying a “a vibrant, exciting renaissance” among college-aged women. I hope that’s true; certainly when groups emerge to oppose you, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right.

But, so, young people. There’s a vicious cycle at work wherein young people don’t participate politically and therefore their interests aren’t represented or talked about and therefore they don’t want to participate. It means us 20-somethings get slandered a lot for being lazy or entitled.

Young women in particular are left out of the conversation. A friend of mine recently pointed to MoveOn‘s most recent campaign as an example. Ten issues were voted on and narrowed down to three big ideas: “Health care for all, energy independence, and restored democracy.” Worthy goals, certainly, but of the ten issues originally presented to us, not one of them dealt with the eroding rights of women — access to abortion and birth control, which you may think is a pet issue, but which I think is key to women’s autonomy and equality, and that’s a hell of a big deal to me. Or equal pay, for that matter. Or better family policies, like access to childcare and better maternity/paternity leave… and these are “women’s issues” in the public discourse, I guess because “family” still falls in the women’s sphere — that’s some progress, eh? All that is right up there with health care for everyone and whatever “restored democracy” means, for me. (Energy, too, insofar as I’d like for us to find sustainable and renewable alternatives before we all bake, but I don’t own a car, so “gas prices are too high” is not really a motivation for me to advocate anything.)

Ah, but how do you get those pesky kids to vote?

One last link, while we’re talking about gender issues: Everyone’s favorite cabbage argues that girly books make boys not want to read. And we’re back on the whole “male and female brains are wired differently and so boys and girls excel in different subjects” nonsense debate. Last I checked, Brooks was not a scientist, so I don’t see how not liking Jane Eyre gives him the authority to make suppositions like that. And the whole debate ignores how kids and their teachers are socialized. But why am I so angry? I should not expect so much from the produce aisle.

When Mom’s away, the kids will play

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So my mother runs this here blog, and she sent me an email before she left for YearlyKos saying that I should post some links and things for you people so that you don’t get bored in her absence.

And you may already know me as the daughter partly responsible for last fall’s blog re-design (so, yes, you can blame all the display glitches on me, thanks) and the occasional subject of posts on diaper rash or whatever. I also blog, but I think the only people who read my blog are my friends, so it’s kind of neat to annex this blog for a few days, since it reaches a much wider audience. I hope I don’t blow my audition.

Yesterday’s big news was the death of Zarqawi, but I don’t really want to post about that, particularly since a) it won’t make much difference in the war effort, and b) we could have got him without going to war, and that whole debate makes me weary. Also, I generally don’t really feel qualified to say much about Iraq, since my knowledge of the subject is limited, so lets talk about things I am familiar with: women and science! (But feel free to talk about Zarqawi in the comments if that rocks your boat.)

I want to preface this by saying that this discussion has been kicking around on the feminist blogs for a while, but my perception here is that the demographic here skews a little differently, so I hope you learn something new!

The big story this morning is that the FDA approved the HPV vaccine. Under any other circumstances, a vaccine that prevents cancer would be cause of celebration and ticker tape parades and all that, but because the disease prevents a cancer caused by a sexually transmitted virus that mainly affects women, we have to stop and talk about it.

So first, congrats to the FDA for being less stupid about the HPV vaccine than they are about emergency contraception.

But second, boo! to the conservatives that would block the administration of the vaccine. Arthur Caplan at MSNBC points out:

[T]he best time to vaccinate is just before women become sexually active. And that is why this new cervical cancer vaccine is sure to be ethically controversial.

Some conservative religious groups and family-values advocates believe that the best way to prevent any sexually transmitted disease is to teach young people to be abstinent until marriage. They don’t want HPV vaccine offered to young women because it will encourage, in their view, sexual promiscuity. Or they only want the vaccine discussed by parents not in schools or in the doctor’s office. But there is a big flaw in this reasoning.

Even though a woman may remain chaste until marriage she may marry someone who wasn’t. She would still be at risk of infection. Given that risk, the case for getting schools, doctors, public health departments involved even if you are someone who wants to keep all talk of sex in the home starts to become very strong.

Not to mention the pressure a lot of girls feel to have sex anyway, regardless of how much abstinence is emphasized. A new study indicates a lot of teenaged girls have sex when they don’t want to, “and the result may be a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.” That’s a whole other post about how girls are socialized and expected to behave, but the study speaks to the point that teaching abstinence is not going to prevent the spread of STDs like HPV. (There’s been some buzz recently about teens breaking their virginity pledges as well. So much for that, eh?)

Further, there’s no reason to think access to the vaccine would encourage more girls to have sex anyway. Studies in countries where emergency contraception is available over the counter indicate that there was no rise in sexual activity once the pills became available, so there’s no reason to think an HPV vaccine would cause that either, especially since this one vaccine doesn’t really make women immune to, you know, every other STD plus pregnancy. More to the point, HPV is one of the least talked about STDs (AIDS kind of trumps most discussions) but is also the most common.

But there you have it, folks. For some conservative Christian groups, choosing between cancer and sex, sex is the greater evil.

The other problem is that the vaccine is expensive, and some groups are pushing for administration of the vaccine to be mandatory for pre-teen girls, which begs the question of who will pay for it. And there’s also an interesting ethical dilemma: should we treat a vaccine for a sexually transmitted virus the same as we treat the vaccine for the measles? Or are we framing the question wrong? The Times article I linked to above says that cervical cancer — almost all of which is caused by HPV — is the second-leading cause of death among women worldwide. If that’s the case, why not say we’re administering a vaccine for cancer? Isn’t that revolutionary? Take sex out of the equation.

Heh, my first post on my mom’s blog and I write about sex. Good thing she’s so cool! (Hi, Mom!)

At Least We Beat Latvia

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Or, on the road to becoming a Third World shithole …

Jeff Green reports at CNN that the U.S. has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world, according to a Save the Children/World Health Organization report.

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

In developed nations, most newborn mortality is a result of babies being born too small or too early. Prematurity and low birth weight correlate to poor prenatal care. Lack of prenatal care is associated with a 40% increase in the risk of neonatal death.

Japan was among a number of nations highly ranked mainly because they offer free health services for pregnant women and babies, while the United States suffers from disparities in access to health care.

Disparities. A delicate way to put it. Even though our hospitals generally are as well equipped as any to handle neonatal intensive care — better than most nations, possibly — a higher percentage of our babies are at risk when they are born because of those disparities. Tom Tomorrow:

Because of some unholy confluence of conservatism, free-marketism, and general head-up-ass-ism, this country has never made health care for all a national priority. Things like this are the result, and it infuriates me. Next time some right wing asshole starts talking about the scary, scary dangers of socialized medicine, just remember: among industrialized nations, only Latvia has a higher death rate for newborns than the United Fucking States of America.

For a nation as advanced and wealthy as we are alleged to be, that’s unspeakably obscene.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the right wingers to acknowledge this problem. Early last year Nick Kristof wrote a column about the shockingly high infant mortality rate in the U.S., and the righties attacked him for being unpatriotic and even “morally bankrupt.” I kid you not.

In the U.S. infants born to African American and poor, less well-educated mothers are disproportionately at risk. Which takes us to this Christian Science Monitor story from last week …

In 2001, US women living below the federal poverty line were four times as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy, five times as likely to have an unplanned birth, and more than three times as likely to have an abortion as women with income at least double the poverty line ($9,800). And these disparities are growing …

The article also notes that “the federal Title X program, which subsidizes women’s health clinics across the country, has experienced an annual decline in funding during the Bush years, when the figures are adjusted for inflation.” Title X clinics provide family planning services. Or, they used to. Three years ago the Missouri state legislature stopped funding birth control education and contraception in the clinics. From the Kansas City Star (April 10, 2006):

Missouri’s federally funded Title X clinics each year help about 30,000 low-income women, yet it’s estimated that more than 600,000 women in the state need contraceptive services. About half of these are low-income. State funding would help.

Lawmakers haven’t approved state money for birth control education and contraception for low-income women for three years. About $3.5 million was cut out of the budget in 2003. Last year legislators cut thousands of women off Medicaid, which had helped them pay for contraceptive services.

Some House members recently attempted to allow county health clinics to use state funds for contraceptive services. But most lawmakers didn’t go along. Instead they approved an amendment by Rep. Susan Phillips, a Kansas City Republican, that denied spending for contraceptives or any treatment not spelled out in the state budget. Phillips says contraceptives are not an appropriate use of tax dollars.

The editorial points out that “every dollar spent to prevent unwanted pregnancies saves taxpayers $3 in health-care costs.” But of course it’s not about cost, or even health care. It’s about wingnut morality. Bonnie Erbe writes in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

It’s no secret to those who follow Washington politics that birth control has been “next on the list” of anti-abortion, religious conservatives. Following the enthronement of President Bush’s Victorian coterie in 2001, their top priority — an imposition of “everything but” a ban on abortion — has been accomplished in five short years. Now there’s undeniable proof that abortion was not the home run they longed for, but more tantamount to first base in a long-range plan to ban birth control, too.

Erbe cites a long New York Times magazine article by Russell Shorto about the war on contraception that I’ve been meaning to blog about … so many outrages, so little blogging time. Shorto says that criminalizing birth control has been creeping up on the rightie to-do list. Opposition to birth control was pretty much a Catholic-only phenomenon twenty years ago; now the fundies and the more miswired elements among evangelicals are anti-contraception, also.

As with other efforts — against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide — the anti-birth-control campaign isn’t centralized; it seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled “Can Christians Use Birth Control?” he wrote: “The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies.”

I’d like some of these men “facing the hard questions” to have to face a nice 18 hours or so of back labor, followed by the joy of an episiotomy.

You’ll like this part:

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex.

Heart-warming, huh?

I’m not even going to go into the Bush Administration’s blocking approval of emergency contraception or the pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. I’ve ranted many times in the past that the only sure-fire way to reduce abortion rates is to provide easy access to birth control. Here I just want to point to how the way the fundies and Fetus People — excuse me, “social conservatives” — are trying to pull the whole bleeping country into a downward spiral that leads to more poverty, more dead babies, more repression, and more of everything else that plagues the Third World. Like I said, we’re on the road to becoming a Third World shithole. The fundies won’t be happy until we’re all wrapped up in burkhas.

But I’d like to provide one more example, which you may have heard before. Tristero asks why anyone would not approve of a vaccine that would prevent cervical cancer and save lives?

Well, as it happens, our morally-stunted fellow citizens on the right have the answer to the questions. Turns out the the best time to administer the vaccine is when the girl is between 10 and 12 years old. And Hal Wallace, head of the anti-fucking activist group that’s deliberately mislabeled as”Physicians Consortium,” believes that vaccinating an 11 year-old girl against cervical cancer would send a message “that you just take this shot and you can be as sexually promiscuous as you want.” And the equally loony Family Research Council (James Dobson’s band of self-righteous prigs) says “it would oppose any measures to legally require vaccination.”

They don’t call ’em the American Taliban for nothin’.