What I’m Reading, March 24, 2014

Posted on March 24, 2014 by wellsdc

Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Big Bang (with sunglasses)

Via imgflip.com

Neil deGrasse Tyson Squashes Creationist Argument Against Science on National TV, Dan Arel, AlterNet, March 17, 2014

Watching the Christian Right, especially the creationist wing, struggle to counter “Cosmos” each week is like watching a frightened, cornered animal that knows it is about to die. What else could explain the weekly grasping at straws, and the unremitting blasting of social media links meant to reel their following back in as their eyes are opened to the scientific method’s greatness.

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Creationism’s days are numbered. “Cosmos” frightens the conservatives more than anything has in a very long time. Every day their numbers grow smaller and their grasp on America becomes weaker.

The time is now for a scientifically literate America to return, for scientific innovations to flow out of our borders and spread around the world. We can no longer take a backseat to the world of science and must return once again to the driver’s seat.

Terrifying Precedent: Woman to Be Tried for Murder for Giving Birth to Stillborn When She Was 16, Nina Martin, ProPublica, March 19, 2014

The case intersects a number of divisive and difficult issues — the criminal justice system’s often disproportionate treatment of poor people of color, especially in drug prosecutions; the backlash to Roe v. Wade and the conservative push to establish “personhood” for fetuses as part of a broad-based strategy to weaken abortion laws. A wild card in the case — Mississippi’s history of using sometimes dubious forensic evidence to win criminal convictions over many years — could end up playing a central role.

Ignoring Fox News’ Racism is Good for Democrats but Bad for the Country, Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic, January 27, 2014

Fox still has, as far as cable news is concerned, a giant audience among all Americans—especially Republicans, conservatives, and influential businessmen and businesswomen. It still has major power within the Republican Party. To say that Fox’s bigotry should just be discounted is therefore odd. I am sure Rich has spent some time watching Fox News, so he must be aware of how toxic it is. Putting aside its top-down class warfare, segment after segment is meant to scare its white audience into believing that African Americans, or Muslims, are out to get them. This is not some random nut on Twitter: no, this is real bigotry transmitted to a large audience, and it must be combatted.

Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison, April M. Short, AlterNet, March 16, 2014

Alexander said she is “thrilled” that Colorado and Washington have legalized pot and that Washington D.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she said she’s noticed “warning signs” of a troubling trend emerging in the pot legalization movement: Whites—men in particular—are the face of the movement, and the emerging pot industry.

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Alexander said for 40 years poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs.

“Black men and boys” have been the target of the war on drugs’ racist policies—stopped, frisked and disturbed—“often before they’re old enough to vote,” she said. Those youths are arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses that would go ignored in middle-class white neighborhoods.

Tell John Peter Smith Hospital Where to Send Their Bill

Posted on February 4, 2014 by wellsdc

John Peter Smith Hospital, the Fort Worth hospital that interpreted Texas law to require them to keep a pregnant woman on life support long after she was medically considered dead, and against her family’s wishes, might now be trying to bill the family for several months of unconsented and unwanted treatment.

For what it’s worth, sign this petition if you don’t think that’s right (h/t Jennifer).

You might also tell Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and your state legislators how you feel.

The law in question is a 1999 addition to the Texas Health & Safety Code, § 166.049:

PREGNANT PATIENTS. A person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.

The key there is “life-sustaining.” Part of the dispute was whether the hospital should keep a patient who, it was generally agreed, was brain dead on life support.

Not at all surprisingly, Rep. Bill Zedler, R-Arlington, doesn’t get it.

Why hasn't Erick Munoz been asked "why wouldn't you keep your wife on life-support UNTIL your child is born?"

— Bill Zedler (@Bill_Zedler) January 30, 2014

I’d say shame on you, Rep. Zedler, but we both know it wouldn’t do any good, don’t we?

Did Someone Say Slippery Slope?

Posted on January 30, 2014 by wellsdc

Murder in the House by Jakub Schikaneder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons In case you were worried about all those religious exemption cases (e.g. Hobby Lobby, etc.) creating some sort of slippery slope towards justifying all sorts of otherwise-unlawful acts in the name of sincere religious beliefs, you might be on to something: convicted (and admitted) murderer Scott Roeder wants his murder conviction reduced to voluntary manslaughter because, basically, of his religious beliefs.

Almost five years ago, the life of a man – a physician and father of four widely regarded as kind, compassionate, and dedicated to his patients – was abruptly ended. On a Sunday in late May of 2009, while Dr. George Tiller handed out flyers at his church in Wichita, Kansas, he was shot in the head at point blank range by Scott Roeder. What had Dr. Tiller done wrong? He was a doctor who provided legal, constitutionally protected medical care to women. But all Scott Roeder saw was an abortion provider, and Scott Roeder believes that abortion is wrong.

So he killed him.

Roeder has already been convicted of first-degree murder. But today the Kansas Supreme Court will hear further arguments about Roeder’s crime. Though he fully admits to killing Dr. Tiller, Roeder appealed his conviction, and is asserting that he should be guilty only of voluntary manslaughter. In Kansas, voluntary manslaughter, an “imperfect self-defense,” allows a defendant to argue that he truly believed in the moment that he was justified in using deadly force. In this case, that means that Roeder is asking for a lesser sentence for killing Dr. Tiller because Roeder truly believes that abortion is wrong. As my colleagues have written before, Roeder is asking the court to conclude that “vigilantism is okay if you really mean it.”

Under Kansas law, “voluntary manslaughter” is defined in part as: Continue reading →

Unacknowledged Bodily Autonomy in the Reproductive Rights Debate

Posted on January 16, 2014 by wellsdc

(The following was my response to a comment on Facebook about how people calling themselves pro-life view abortion as murder, the same as if a woman shot and killed her husband. I disagree with that analogy on many levels. I owe some hat-tips to a few people for some of the ideas expressed here. I’ll try to update if I can find those posts.)

Except that, in your hypothetical, it’s probably safe to assume that the woman’s husband was not physically occupying space inside her abdomen (no sex jokes, please). I understand that people think abortion is murder–I think they’re wrong, and I don’t think that simply calling it murder ends the conversation. The problem with calling it murder in a way that makes it equivalent to killing a separate, autonomous human being for whatever reason is this: if you are experiencing kidney failure, and I am the only known person on earth who is a match to you, no one can legally force me to give you one of my kidneys, whatever the medical consequences for you or the social consequences for me. The same goes for a blood transfusion or any other use of any part of my body. If I am brain-dead, but my kidney is viable for organ donation, no one can take my kidney unless I consented to be an organ donor. In short, I have complete and utter legal authority and control over how to use my body, even if it means that someone else dies. The alternative is that I could be forcibly anesthetized for kidney removal, resulting in a possible lifetime of medical complications against my will. From a legal standpoint, it doesn’t matter why I refuse to consent to organ donation. Calling abortion murder as though it is merely a decision to end the life of another person (and I disagree that an embryo or fetus is a person in that sense, but that’s a slightly different topic) ignores completely the fact that said embryo or fetus is occupying space inside another person’s body. No one can be compelled to donate a kidney, and no one can be compelled to give up their body for an embryo or fetus. Otherwise, a corpse has more bodily autonomy than a living pregnant person.

Now, at this point, the conversation usually (not always) turns to the circumstances of the pregnancy–i.e. the woman (or transgender man, or genderfluid person, and so forth) had sex, knowing that pregnancy is a possible result, etc. etc. The problem there is that you don’t know, unless you investigate the circumstances of the pregnancy, whether it was the result of willful sexual conduct or not, and even if it were not the result of voluntary behavior (e.g. rape), so what? You already said that you believe a fetus is a person with the right to life and so forth, so it shouldn’t make a difference how the pregnancy occurred. It’s just that telling a rape victim that they have to endure the multitude of difficulties presented by pregnancy seems morally abhorrent to many people. That shouldn’t matter if you truly believe what you originally said–so we come back to the beginning, and still have to contend with the fact that the pregnant person has bodily autonomy that still has not been recognized.

There are other arguments too, such as a right of self-defense if a pregnancy threatens someone’s health, but it still comes down to the right to bodily autonomy. Whatever you believe about an embryo’s or fetus’ rights, a separate, living, breathing human being–who was viewed as such up until the moment their pregnancy was discovered–is sitting right there, being ignored.

I See Someone Else Already Said It

Posted on December 23, 2013 by wellsdc

I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw a sort of reverse synergy between the right wing’s general reaction to the A&E/Phil Robertson affair and the ongoing Hobby Lobby case (h/t PZ Myers).

The people saying A&E has no right as an employer to control what an employee says (Despite a contract) are the same people saying that Hobby Lobby, as an employer, has the right to control an employee’s birth control.

Y’all need to decide which way you want it.

SIGNAL BOOST: “Every Reason for an Abortion Is a Good Reason”

Posted on December 21, 2013 by wellsdc

This article by Amanda Marcotte is from July 15, 2013, but it hasn’t gotten any less relevant or important:

While spouting a series of lies, Bill O’Reilly whined recently on Fox News that women in Texas are providing what he considers insufficient reasons for getting an abortion. The exchange between him and Fox’s official fake feminist Kirsten Powers went like this:

Powers shot back: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

“Yeah!” O’Reilly jabbed. “For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!’”

“Yeah,” Powers said. “For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

To hear O’Reilly and Powers talk, one would think that in order to get a safe, legal abortion under the standards set out by Roe v Wade, one has to go in and provide a “reason” that you “deserve” this abortion, and some kind of authority figure determines if it’s good enough before you get an abortion—their only concern is that women are supposedly not giving good enough reasons. Obviously, these two pundits know better and are just being dishonest with the viewers, but that they are engaging in this rhetoric in the first place speaks to a serious problem in how abortion is discussed in this country.

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The confusion between how ordinary people talk about abortion in terms of deserving-ness and how the law handles abortion, as a matter of rights, is why so much polling data on abortion is bunk. Gallup is notoriously bad on this front, showing that somehow half of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but a majority still want abortion to be legal. In other words, a lot of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but disagree with the “pro-life,” i.e. anti-choice movement about abortion access. I believe that speaks to a longing a lot of people have for women to be able to access abortion, but only if they provide a good reason for it. Of course, there’s no legal way to determine the difference between a good and a bad reason, to separate the “good girls” who just “made a mistake” from those deemed unrepentant sluts.

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Unfortunately, I fear that pro-choicers may be making this problem worse by our rhetoric. Every time anti-choicers try to restrict abortion, we trot out women who’ve had abortions to put a face on the situation. It’s a good idea, but as Jessica Grose of XX Factor writes, the women in these stories almost always feel the need to justify their abortions, to explain that they are deserving—which in turn implies that others are not.

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Because of this, I have to sign off on Grose’s suggestion: Tell your abortion stories, but don’t try to justify yourself! We need to get the message out that, as with every other medical intervention out there, pre-viability abortions don’t need to be earned. You don’t need to be a “good girl” who is full of remorse. The woman who slept with 30 guys and accidentally got pregnant because she foolishly took her chances without a condom deserves her abortion just as much as the loving mother of two who has discovered a fetal defect incompatible with life. We believe this to be true, and we can only start convincing the public that it’s true if we start talking about this belief more straightforwardly.

READ MORE…

Taking the Fight Where It Belongs on Reproductive Rights and Ideologically-Based Medical Decisions (UPDATED)

Posted on December 6, 2013 by wellsdc

The problem many women have with access to accurate, professional reproductive health care is not because of the doctors, other hospital staff, or even annoying protesters, but rather the administrators and ideologues that employ the medical professionals. It is therefore refreshing to see some pushback on that front.

The ACLU is suing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over its hospital directives that allegedly led a Michigan hospital to give inaccurate medical information to a woman in order to avoid discussing abortion with her. The woman, according to the ACLU, was only in the 18th week of pregnancy when her water broke. The hospital kept sending her home, even though she was in terrible pain, the pregnancy had almost no chance of surviving, and the delay in treating her put her at ever-greater risk. Note that the lawsuit is not against the hospital or the doctors who allegedly denied her adequate care, but rather the religious organization that pulls the hospital’s strings.

You can have whatever religious beliefs you want, but you cannot force those beliefs onto others, especially when their life is at risk. Seriously, what is so hard to understand about that???

Several organizations have filed a complaint against the government of El Salvador with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, claiming that the government’s refusal to allow a woman to undergo a life-saving abortion violated her human rights. The woman, identified as Beatriz, was 26 weeks pregnant with a “nonviable, anencephalic fetus.” Her prior health problems made it unlikely that she could survive the pregnancy, according to her doctors, but the Supreme Court of El Salvador denied her request for an emergency abortion in May 2013.

In June, the court reportedly allowed her doctors to perform an “emergency cesarian” that was pretty much a glorified hysterectomy. It saved her life, but the 22 year-old woman obviously will not be having any more children. All of this was apparently in the cause of maintaining the country’s absolute ban on abortion because of reasons.

Feminist organizations assert that Beatriz’s story reflects the consequences of the absolute criminalization of abortion and the institutional violence that is exercised against Salvadoran girls, adolescents, and adult women. According to data gathered by the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, between 2000 and 2011, a total of 129 women in El Salvador have been charged with abortion or aggravated homicide, with sentences ranging between two and 40 years in prison. Currently there are at least 30 women serving prison such sentences, the majority having suffered the loss of their pregnancies for various obstetric complications.

I don’t get it.

UPDATE (12/10/2013): Astute reader Kathleen directed my attention to a 1987 court case, In re A.C., 573 A.2d 1235 (D.C. Cir. 1990), in which the USCCB was one of only two organizations (along with Americans United for Life) to defend a hospital’s decision to perform a C-section on a terminally-ill cancer patient without her consent. The fetus survived about two hours after the procedure, and the mother survived a few more days. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the lower court ruling that allowed the procedure, finding that the woman had the right to make decisions regarding her own and the fetus’ health care. A report from the ACLU written ten years after oral arguments in the case recounted:

When an attorney for the hospital argued that it was appropriate to sacrifice a dying woman for her fetus, one judge replied incredulously, “Are you urging this court to find that you can handcuff a woman to a bed and force her to give birth?” Instead, the court resoundingly concluded that in virtually all circumstances a woman — not doctors or a judge — should make medical decisions on behalf of herself and her fetus. The opinion emphasized an argument made in the American Public Health Association’s friend-of-the court brief, that court-ordered intervention “drives women at high risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth out of the health care system to avoid coerced treatment.”

Photo credit: By dbking (Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Corporations Don’t Go to Church

Posted on December 2, 2013 by wellsdc

Rick Santorum was defending the right of self-proclaimed Christian corporations to deny reproductive healthcare coverage because First Amendment:

“I mean, the idea that the First Amendment stops after you walk out of church, that it doesn’t have anything to do with how you live the rest of your life, I don’t know very many people of faith that believes that their religion ends with just worship.”

Someone needs to remind the ex-senator that this whole kerfuffle is about the supposed religious rights of corporations, not individuals. Unless people are attending church services specifically in the capacity of a representative of Hobby Lobby, corporations do not “walk out of church.” I’d say that Santorum doesn’t understand the distinction, but I suspect that he actually just doesn’t care.

He also had some odd words about the imposition of religious values:

“And President Obama is saying, ‘No, once you step outside that church, I get to impose my values on you, your religious values don’t matter anymore, it’s my values that I can impose on you,'” the Pennsylvania Republican continued. “I don’t think that’s what the First Amendment stands for. And I don’t think that’s what the court will say.”

See? It’s freedom of an employer’s religious beliefs, not freedom from an employer’s religious beliefs! I mean, that’s in The Federalist Papers, I think in the footnotes somewhere.

Signal Boost: Anti-Choicers’ “Shocking Amount of Entitlement”

Posted on September 4, 2013 by wellsdc

From “The Deeply Disturbing World of Modern Anti-Abortion Activism” by Amanda Marcotte, on anti-choice efforts in Kansas:

What all this bespeaks is a shocking amount of entitlement on the behalf of anti-choicers. It makes sense; the underlying premise of being anti-choice is believing that you have the right to control the reproductive decisions of perfect strangers and that your beliefs about what sexuality is “for” should be imposed on others by government fiat. Once you get into that headspace, all other kinds of shockingly entitled attitudes follow, including the belief that you get to misuse the medical records of underage rape victims and that clinics, and not you, are to blame if your protesting is an irritant to the rest of the community. The anti-choice movement, at its heart, is imperious and cold-hearted, but the situation in Kansas shows how an insular, radically anti-choice community can take the already grossly entitled attitudes of anti-choicers and blow them up into grotesqueries.

As I have stated many times in the past, I do not believe for a second that the higher-ups in the anti-choice movement have any serious interest in reducing the number of abortions. At best, it is about removing any legally-sanctioned access to abortion so that they can claim a clear conscience and place the blame for continued abortion on “criminals” (which really is quite the feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand). At worst, of course, it is just yet another effort at imposing archaic notions of control over women.

Kansas Abortion Opponents Try Out a “Look What You Made Me Do” Strategy

Posted on August 20, 2013 by wellsdc

By Anthony Appleyard (talk).Anthony Appleyard at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons Wichita, Kansas had been abortion-clinic-free for several years, ever since someone shot and killed George Tiller in church. Now, however, a new clinic, the South Wind Women’s Center, has opened in the same spot, and it has anti-choice forces all up in a tizzy. They are taking a novel approach this time, however. They are asking the city to change the area’s zoning to “non business” so that South Wind cannot operate there, because they say the clinic will cause noise disruptions.

According to the Wichita Eagle, abortion opponents are citing several reasons that the clinic shouldn’t be allowed to operate in the community: several gun incidents that occurred when Tiller practiced there, the lack of communication between the clinic’s security staff and the anti-abortion activists to “defuse violence” before it occurs, the level of “antagonism” between the the clinic’s escorts and the anti-choice protesters, and the fact that it may be “inappropriate” for school children to see graphic signs and protests affiliated with the clinic.

So basically, the very same people who would be causing the noise are complaining about the possibility of noise. Don’t get me started on the “defuse violence” argument. This strikes me as a classic diversion tactic used by abusers: “Look what you made me do.” They regard loud, disruptive protests—complete with “graphic signs”—as some sort of natural result of a clinic opening in their town. Some (not all) even seem to regard violence as a likely outcome, with little to no thought of the moral agency of the people committing the violence:

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: What about showing some personal responsibility, anti-choicers? What about accepting that a clinic’s mere existence is not actually provoking you to do anything, whether it’s shoot someone or merely yell invective at them as they go about their business? But personal responsibility is so 2012 (unless you are black). We’re in a new era now, where the mere existence of free birth control means you have to take it and abortion providers are making you harass them just by existing. Willpower is dead.

Photo credit: By Anthony Appleyard (talk).Anthony Appleyard at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

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