Just Like Home Made

Posted on April 3, 2006 by maha

Regarding this New York Times story about a baby who died during a home birth attended by a midwife — a few observations …

The fact is that most of the time you don’t need a doctor to have a baby. For that matter, you don’t need a midwife, either. The fact of the matter is that most of the time you could have your baby alone on the floor of a gas station restroom, and you and the baby will be OK. I’m not recommending that; I’m just sayin’. High maternal mortality rates of the past were mostly caused by postpartum infection, known as “childbed fever,” which these days can be treated with antibiotics.

My understanding is that most of the time good prenatal care is more important to a good outcome than what happens during the delivery. There are all manner of studies that show a correlation between how early a woman begins prenatal care and her chances of delivering a healthy, full-term baby. But most of the time hospital deliveries are medical overkill, and if you have to ask how much they cost, you can’t afford them.

The big argument in favor of going to hospitals is that the sorts of things that can go wrong often go wrong very suddenly and catastrophically, and the mother’s or baby’s life can hang on how quickly physicians with high-tech medical gizmos can address the problem. And you have to go to hospitals if you want the mostly effective and mostly safe anesthesias they have these days.

The argument against midwives with no medical training is that they might not recognize a serious problem as it develops and know when to call in the experts. Remember, even a midwife with no idea what she’s doing will be successful most of the time, because most of the time babies will be born just fine if nature takes its course. An untrained midwife with a few good deliveries under her belt might not realize how much she doesn’t know. I can’t tell from the article if the midwife in question did anything wrong, however.

Over the years, every now and then, somebody proposes that trained registered nurse-midwives work under the supervision of physicians. If the physician doesn’t believe the delivery will present complications the midwives can attend the births at home if the mother wishes to give birth at home. And they would be able to recognize potential problems and would know when to move the show to the hospital or call 911 for emergency assistance. This seems like the best of all worlds to me. I suspect the biggest reason this plan never seems to be implemented is medical liability.

Full disclosure — I had both of my babies in hospitals, with no regrets, mostly because I didn’t have to be concerned about cleaning up. Childbirth is messy.

There’s Got to Be a Morning After

Posted on March 10, 2006 by maha

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

Posted on March 10, 2006 by maha

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 Fathersâ€™ Voting on Womenâ€™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.

Under the Rug

Posted on March 8, 2006 by maha

I want to elaborate on this post by Digby, which links to this video in which anti-abortion protesters are asked if women should be punished for having illegal abortions. The film reveals that most of the protesters had never even thought about it. One young woman had a hard time understanding the question; it clearly had never occurred to her that women would continue to get abortions if abortions were illegal. (Upon being pressed she allowed that maybe a few women would get abortions, but she didn’t think it would happen often.)

In many nations where abortion is illegal, women really do face penalty of law for getting abortions. In this post from December I linked to Juan Forero, “Push to Loosen Abortion Laws in Latin America ,” The New York Times, December 3, 2005:

PAMPLONA, Colombia – In this tradition-bound Roman Catholic town one day in April, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room — then promptly arrested.

Like the sweetly innocent abortion protester in the first paragraph, the people of Pamplona are in denial.

Like much of Latin America, the people here in Pamplona have, until recently, talked little of the abortions that have taken place behind the town’s tranquil, buttoned-down facade. Yet, 68 students, most of them from the University of Pamplona, sought emergency treatment at the local public hospital last year after having abortions, hospital records showed.

Several students said that they had a liberal attitude toward sex. Condoms are readily available, and the so-called morning-after pill is sold over the counter in pharmacies.

Still, sex education focuses more on anatomy than behavior, and church and university officials preach abstinence. Shamed by the thought of having children without being married, many young women try to induce abortions by taking a drug called Cytotec, which is made for ulcers but also dilates the cervix.

Pharmacies in Pamplona are barred from selling the drug, but students can purchase it in cities nearby. It was Cytotec that the two young women took in April that left them bleeding and, ultimately, under arrest. But there have been others, court records showed.

Under questioning from prosecutors, all admitted their guilt and received suspended sentences.

Insisting that abortion was rare, Pamplona’s conservative leaders thought the case was over. Instead, the episode reverberated throughout Colombia and helped to galvanize a national movement to roll back laws that make abortion illegal, even to save a mother’s life.

Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the developing world’s highest rate of abortions — a rate that is far higher even than in Western Europe, where abortion is widely and legally available.

In fact, as I pointed out yesterday, western Europe as a region has the lowest rates of abortion in the world. In western Europe the very lowest abortion rates are in The Netherlands, Belgium, the Scandanavian countries, Iceland, Germany — the crazy liberal Nordic fringe, in other words.

Yet while Latin America has a shockingly high rate of abortions, “Pamplona’s conservative leaders” think abortion is “rare.”

Forero of the New York Times continues,

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.

The degree of denial among people opposed to legal abortions is stunning. Some of you might remember the recent Mahablog comment exchange with “Keith,” who dredged up a “scholarly work” underwritten by Americans United for Life insisting there had been fewer than 100,000 illegal abortions a year in the U.S. before Roe v. Wade.

Since we’re dealing with clandestine activity people didn’t exactly keep records; any number anyone comes up with is a guess. However, another estimate that relied in part on the number of hospital admissions for botched abortions, concluded there were 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions in the U.S. in 1967. In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to just one New York City hospital because of complications from illegal abortions. And emergency room admissions represented only a portion of the abortions being performed at the time. Thinking about this makes even the 829,000 number seem low to me.

And given the many innovations in abortion procedure since Roe, you know that if abortion became illegal in the U.S. there’d be a thriving underground abortion industry in place before you could say Mifepristone. Which I bet could be run across the border from Canada without too much trouble.

And there are coathangers in every closet.

So how will laws prohibiting abortion be enforced, exactly?

My internet access is cutting in and out this morning, so I’m going to post this while I can and will (I hope) elaborate on the punishment angle in the next post.

Abortions and Autonomy

Posted on March 7, 2006 by maha

William Saletan wrote a highly annoying article in Slate that argued “technology” would somehow resolve the abortion wars. I say “annoying” because it contains some misinformation — for example, he says that the gestational point of possible viability is earlier now than it was in 1973 when Roe was decided. It actually isn’t; the limit was 23 weeks in 1973, and it’s still pretty much 23 weeks now, “lifer” mythology to the contrary. Scott Lemieux has already written a good response to much of Saletan’s article; see also Amanda Marcotte.

For now, I want to pull out just one paragraph from the Saletan article to complain about. He writes of Roe v. Wade,

Politically, legally, and technologically, the 33-year-old court decision is increasingly obsolete as a framework for managing decisions about reproduction. But pro-lifers can’t launch the post-Roe era, because they’re determined to abolish its guarantee of individual autonomy, and the public won’t stand for that. Only pro-choicers can give the public what it wants: abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy.

What the hell does that mean? That pro-choicers have to be the grown-ups who find a compromise solution, because the little anti-choice children can’t?

Regarding reducing the number of abortions — it might be useful to take a look at which nations have the lowest abortion rates to see what they’re doing right. I found the chart below in this Alan Guttmacher report.

And look who has a way lower abortion rate than the U.S. — The Netherlands. Possibly the most liberal nation that ever was. I’m not sure if The Netherlands is still #1 as of most recent data (the chart dates from 1999), but on the whole the nations of western Europe have lower abortion rates than anywhere else on the planet. And the nations of eastern Europe have some of the highest rates, even though there isn’t a real big difference in abortion law between eastern and western Europe. As I argued here, there is no correlation whatsoever between abortion rate and abortion law.

The only effective way to reduce rates of abortion is to reduce rates of unintended pregnancies. Access to contraception is key. There is no getting around that. Limiting access to contraception is a sure-fire way to increase abortion rates, no matter how strict the abortion law is or how many clinics are closed down.

Somewhere there are probably lots of lovely social-psychological research studies, complete with p values and N squares, that show which values in a society might also lower abortion rates. Without those, however — if we look at The Netherlands and some of these other countries that are successful at reducing abortions we might form hypotheses. We might speculate that openness about sexuality is an abortion-reducing factor. People who are open about their sexuality are more likely to be prepared for it. This includes providing young people with factual information on contraception.

Hmm, so let’s see — who has been struggling for years to provide access to contraception and sex ed to young people? And who has been working against access to contraception and sex ed to young people (beyond “don’t do it”). Hmmm … Could it be that liberalism reduces abortion rates?

As Saletan points out, there have been some improvements in birth control methodology since 1973. But all the improvements in the world won’t help if the technology is banned, or if the local druggists won’t fill prescriptions, and young people become sexually active before they understand exactly how the baby gets into the cabbage patch.

Thus, I get a little tense when moralizers like Saletan wag their fingers and say you liberals are going to have to find a solution. I believe we already have. And I also believe there is no way to compromise with the anti-choice trogs and also lower abortion rates. So if that’s our assignment, we are doomed to fail.

Saletan says that we liberals must figure out how to achieve abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy. Seems to me the data indicate that’s the only way to achieve abortion reduction — within a framework of autonomy. Abortion reduction within a framework of authoritarianism and patriarchy ain’t happening anywhere, unless you count places like Ireland in which women who choose to abort are only a ferry ride away from British abortion providers.

Frankly, the only way to bring about the desired result –abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy– is to reduce the power of the trogs so that liberal reproduction policies might flourish throughout the land, unimpeded.

In recent years there’s been a lot of overheated rhetoric, much of it from Saletan, about how liberals can recapture the moral argument to abortion. But I think there’s an easier way. Just run the Bill Napoli virgin rant in television and radio ads, followed by a catchy closing line — something like “This guy wants to regulate your personal life. Is this OK with you?” Anyone who still cares about personal autonomy will get the hint.

Oh, the Humanity

Posted on March 4, 2006 by maha

Once upon a time — early 1970s, pre-Roe, I believe — I remember reading a newspaper column written by a fellow who had been opposed to legal abortion. I say had, because he had changed his mind. What changed his mind was a tragedy — his beloved granddaughter, a college student, had been raped.

The young woman didn’t become pregnant. But the episode had made the man think — what if she had. Before Roe, several states banned abortions even for rape victims. For the first time, he reflected on what a pregnancy from rape might do not only to his granddaughter, but to his entire family. Could the family accept such a child? Could he? How would it feel to give a grandchild away? Not just a hypothetical grandchild, but his real, breathing, flesh-and-blood grandchild?

And he considered, for the first, time, how such a pregnancy would prolong and deepen the trauma his granddaughter had already suffered. All his hopes for her — that she would finish college, that she would marry happily and have children — depended on her recovery from the trauma. How could a compassionate and just society not do whatever it took to help her? Yes, babies are precious, but so was his granddaughter!

As I remember it, the man remained uncomfortable with abortion. But he thought on, and he thought about teenagers with poor impulse control, and couples with as many children as they could afford already, and a thousand other circumstances in which people — real people — might choose to seek abortion. Suddenly, for him a woman who sought an abortion was no longer just a hypothesis or an archetype — Careless Woman, Selfish Woman, Woman in a Vacuum. Now he understood these women were real individuals with parents, siblings, husbands, children, and grandparents who loved them.

Today I thought about the man who cared about his granddaughter when I read two posts by Digby — “The Sodomized Virgin Exception” and, um, this other post. What comes through loudly and clearly in both posts is that the anti-abortion rights position is based on an assumption that women aren’t real people — especially women who get abortions. Oh, they’re human in a scientific sense, but they aren’t people. They are archetypes who live in the heads of the anti-abortion righters — Careless Woman, Selfish Woman, Woman in a Vacuum. The same people who imagine embryos can think and feel emotions — and therefore deserve protection — must believe a pregnant woman is just a major appliance.

There are copious anecdotes from abortion providers who say that often the same people protesting outside the clinic one week are patients (or parents of patients) the next week. These people assume that their situations are unique and should be the one exception. They often want the abortion staff to know they aren’t like those other women who get abortions. This inspired the bitter joke that the legitimate reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” Such people recognize their own humanity (or their daughter’s), but those other women who get abortions are just archetypes who don’t deserve respect or considertion.

I’ve long believed 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. Not archetypes, but real, individual human beings. Including women who get abortions.

See also: Amanda M., Echidne and the Wege.

Dangerous Women

Posted on March 2, 2006 by maha

In today’s New York Times Adam Liptak writes that many U.S. prisons keep female prisoners shackled while they are in labor.

Shawanna Nelson, a prisoner at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Ark., had been in labor for more than 12 hours when she arrived at Newport Hospital on Sept. 20, 2003. Ms. Nelson, whose legs were shackled together and who had been given nothing stronger than Tylenol all day, begged, according to court papers, to have the shackles removed.

Although her doctor and two nurses joined in the request, her lawsuit says, the guard in charge of her refused.

“She was shackled all through labor,” said Ms. Nelson’s lawyer, Cathleen V. Compton. “The doctor who was delivering the baby made them remove the shackles for the actual delivery at the very end.”

This is absurd on its face, but only two states — California and Illinois — have laws forbidding the shackling of prisoners in labor. But this is my favorite part:

Corrections officials say they must strike a balance between security and the well-being of the pregnant woman and her child.

“Though these are pregnant women,” said Dina Tyler, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, “they are still convicted felons, and sometimes violent in nature. There have been instances when we’ve had a female inmate try to hurt hospital staff during delivery.”

Listen, Dina, laboring women who are not convicts have tried to hurt hospital and delivery staff during delivery. (A couple of hours before my daughter entered the world I tried to get out of bed to strangle a nurse. True story. She wouldn’t bring me ice chips! What was I supposed to do?)

However, women in labor rarely become homicidal or escape from hospitals by tying sheets together and lowering themselves out of the window. This is especially true once the contractions are two minutes apart or less. Two minutes or less doesn’t give you time to accomplish much.

The shackles really are cruel, because laboring women need to be able to move around, sometimes even walk around. It helps.

On the other hand I wouldn’t hand a loaded gun to a woman in labor — especially while the baby’s father’s in range.

Control

Posted on January 6, 2006 by maha

The New York Times catches on to something I’ve been saying for a while:

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn’t reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia – where abortion is illegal even if a woman’s life is in danger – averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In all of our endless fighting over abortion law, one never hears the simple fact that making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. Indeed, as I argued in this post, we don’t know for sure if the rate of abortions in the U.S. is higher now than it was pre-Roe. Estimates of the number of abortions performed in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s put the number as high as 1.2 million per year. That’s the same approximate number of abortions performed annually in the United States right now, and in a larger population.

Studies of contraceptive practices in several nations before and after legalization reveal no indication that abortion replaces contraceptive use, as some anti-privacy activists claim. On the other hand, there is copious data that shows making contraceptives easily (and legally) available does lower abortion rates. (See “Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society & Abortion Worldwide” [Alan Guttmacher, 1999, PDF].)

The New York Times editorial continues [emphasis added],

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

According to the Center for Disease Control, in the U.S. 14 women died as a result of complications from known legal induced abortion in 1998 and 1999. The mortality rate related to abortion in the U.S. is <1 death per 100,000 abortions. This is a much lower mortality rate than for pregnancy — in 1999, says the CDC, there were 12 deaths resulting from pregnancy per 100,000 live births.

Every time news media carries a story about an American woman dying after an abortion you can count on the anti-privacy army to march forth screaming that abortions are medically risky and must be banned. This, of course, would make abortion a whole lot more risky, but try to explain that to the Fetus People. Just try. It’s like explaining algebra to spinach.

Back to the New York Times editorial:

Latin American women, who are increasing their participation in the work force and in politics, have also become more vocal. Their voice would be much louder were it not for the Bush administration’s global gag rule, which bans any family planning group that gets American money from speaking about abortions, or even criticizing unsafe illegal abortions. This has silenced such respected and influential groups as Profamilia in Colombia. Anti-abortion lawmakers in Washington can look at Latin America as a place where the global gag rule has worked exactly as they had hoped. All Americans can look at Latin America to see unnecessary deaths and injuries from unsafe abortions.

You aren’t going to budge the anti-abortion lawmakers with sordid tales of maternal mortality, of course, because they don’t care if women die. It’s more important to control women’s behavior and punish them for being sexual than to care about their health and well-being. But the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal. And making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. So, one might ask — what are we arguing about, again?

Here’s what we’re arguing about:

Next week the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Sam Alito will begin. NARAL is sending out a fact sheet on Alito and birth control saying that Alito considers some birth control methods — such as birth control pills, the contraceptive ring, the IUD (intrauterine device), and the birth control patch — to be “abortifacient” rather than contraceptive. He has also argued in favor of requiring women seeking abortions to be given misleading and counter-factual anti-reproductive-rights propaganda. Alito “appears to question the competence of women to make their own choices,” the fact sheet says. “Alito urges that the state become the moral guide of the woman facing a crisis pregnancy, that the bedrock principle of informed consent be twisted beyond all recognition into a political instrument.”

Alito is one more right-wing control freak who doesn’t trust you to live your own life. It’s not about babies (states with the most restrictive abortion laws tend to have higher infant mortality rates than more liberal states). It’s not about women’s health. It’s not about conscience. It’s about control.

Freedom’s Just Another Word

Posted on December 31, 2005 by maha

Last October Atlanta Journal-Constitution political cartoonist Mike Luckovich drew the word Why? made up of the names of 2,000 troops killed in Iraq. In response, a 17-year-old named Danielle Ansley used the names of the dead to render the word Freedom.

Naturally, righties find Danielle’s illustration inspirational and clever, while Lukovich is dismissed as a “moonbat.” So good with words, those righties.

I don’t want to be too hard on a 17-year-old, but I do hope eventually the child learns to think, and not just regurjitate. Not to sound like Tom Cruise, but freedom is too glib. The word has been just about stripped of all meaning and has become little more than a tribal totem, waved about by the likes of Michelle Malkin, an apologist for racially motivated imprisonment. Yeah, that’s freedom for you.

First off, the idea that any American should die deposing a dictator who was no threat to the U.S. is problematic of itself. There were no WMDs; there was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Our soldiers were sent to Iraq thinking they were defending America, and they were not. They were sent to fulfill some cockamamie political theory dreamed up by a pack of over-educated twits at the Project for a New American Century.

Second, whether the people of Iraq, right now, really are more free than they were before the invasion is debatable. Some Iraqis, certainly, are more free. There is more freedom to openly practice Shiia Islam, for example, which is fine. But this Christmas Iraqi Christians were afraid to go to church.

In spite of token rhetoric about women’s rights in the provisional constitution, women are less free than they were when Saddam Hussein was in power. They are less free to walk the streets without a veil. They are less free to marry as they choose. They are less free even to leave their homes. President Bush likes to brag that the invasion closed Saddam Hussein rape rooms; he doesn’t add that the lack of security leaves women more vulnerable to rape and kidnap than they were before. But I guess it doesn’t count if women aren’t raped in “rape rooms,” and the perpetrators are not agents of the state, but just thugs.

In any event, perhaps Danielle Ansley would like to explore the deeper meaning of the word freedom by living as a woman in Iraq (outside the Green Zone) for a while. If she survives, she might learn something about the gap between rhetoric and reality.

As Riverbend wrote,

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of our homes, with roads cut off indefinitely and complete areas made inaccessible. We are so free to assemble that people now fear having gatherings because a large number of friends or family members may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by American or Iraqi forces.

The bald, hard, bare-assed fact is that the deaths of 2,178 American soldiers (as of today) haven’t brought any measurable amount of freedom to anyone on the planet, except perhaps for the small cadre of men who are getting wealthy from wholesale corruption and war profiteering. In this country, the Bush Administration hides behind the “war on terror” to chip away at the civil liberties preserved in the Bill of Rights. In Iraq, it seems to me that one jackboot is replacing another. I don’t blame American soldiers for this, since most of the oppression right now seems to be Iraqi against Iraqi. One can, however, blame the flaming fools in Washington who sent U.S. soldiers to invade Iraq with next to no plans for post-invasion security.

But what about democracy? What about elections? The fact of the matter is that democracy and freedom are not the same thing. A country can be democratic and still oppress its people; the United States before the Civil War, when millions were enslaved, comes to mind. For that matter, the United States after the Civil War also comes to mind. A majoritarian republic allows the majority to oppress minorities any way it likes. The independent and sovereign Iraq now struggling to be born might technically be a “free” country, but if women must hide behind drapes and veils to avoid being murdered without compunction, then by no definition of the word are they free. Freedom takes more than democratic government; it takes a nation and society committed to the civil liberties of all.

It may be that in the fullness of time Iraq will become a truly free country. And it may have been that in the same fullness of time Iraq would have achieved that happy status without our “help.” We’ll never know what might have been.

But what we can see unfold before our eyes is the appropriation of the word freedom to mean “policies of the Bush Administration.” Perhaps the next word Danielle Ansley should learn is Orwellian.

Update: See also Kathy at Liberty Street.

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Category Archives: Women’s Issues