What I’m Reading, April 14, 2014

Posted on April 14, 2014 by wellsdc

Not credited. May be work of U.S. Public Health Service (1918 ad) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Dear Parents, You are Being Lied to By Living Whole, Avicenna, A Million Gods, April 11, 2014

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to make the same mistakes. I predicted that an anti-vax backlash would occur when the anti-vax got so successful that they destroyed the herd immunity of a western nation to the point that common diseases could return. If you won’t learn by the carrot then unfortunately it is the stick. The price of Andrew Wakefield and the likes of Sherri Tenpenny, Mercola, Adams was increased disease. We are seeing record increases in common diseases that we were on the verge of eliminating.

How to Talk to Vaccine-Hesitant Parents, Keith Kloor, Discover, April 8, 2014

The smart folks at ThinkProgress seem to have missed all the media coverage of this recent study, which found that, for those already suspicious or concerned about vaccines, images of sick children and dramatic, cautionary narratives “actually increased beliefs in serious vaccine side effects.” This is a known as the “backfire effect,” a phenomena defined concisely here:

When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

Jenny McCarthy, Who Still Promotes Misinformation About Vaccines, Now Says “I Am Not ‘Anti-Vaccine,'” Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, April 13, 2014

McCarthy rejects the science — and thinks she deserves credit for just asking questions. Even though those questions were answered a long time ago and she just wasn’t happy with the responses. If Jenny McCarthy is not “anti-vaccine,” then Ken Ham must be the greatest advocate of evolution we’ve ever seen. In the meantime, the Jenny McCarthy Body Count will continue to rise until she comes to her senses and rejects the harmful beliefs that she still holds.

GOP Lawmaker Compares Abortion To Buying A Car, Laura Bassett, Huffington Post, April 9, 2014

A Republican state lawmaker in Missouri defended his controversial bill forcing women to have ultrasounds before abortions by comparing abortion to purchasing a new vehicle. “In making a decision to buy a car, I put research in there to find out what to do,” state Rep. Chuck Gatschenberger (R) told colleagues at a hearing on the bill Tuesday. *** The major problem with Gatschenberger’s analogy, of course, is that people are not required by state law to do research before buying a car. State Rep. Stacey Newman (D) told Gatschenberger that his car analogy was “extremely offensive to every single woman sitting in here.”

Photo credit: Not credited. May be work of U.S. Public Health Service (1918 ad via [1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

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.

About That Whole Adoption Thing

Posted on August 14, 2013 by wellsdc

Adoption is often promoted as an alternative to abortion by people who seem to think that pregnancy and childbirth are no big deal. Okay, maybe that was a loaded statement, but it certainly seems as though the people who promote adoption in this way don’t understand (or don’t care) that people seek abortions for reasons other than not wanting or being able to raise a child. Medical issues making pregnancy risky or difficult come to mind.

Now, Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio, who had the distinction of being the only Democrat in the Senate to vote for HB2, is pushing a new type of abortion restriction. Prior to obtaining an abortion, a person must complete a three-hour adoption course. I think the Feminist Justice League said it best in their open letter to Sen. Lucio:

Requiring this class will place undue burden on people who are geographically marginalized and lack internet access. More importantly, however, it gives the impression you think women are stupid. I certainly hope I’m correct in assuming that’s a false impression.

Whether Sen. Lucio actually thinks people are stupid or not, his proposal is part of a long line of assumptions that people don’t know how pregnancy works or what is inside their uteri. This is the attitude underlying all those mandatory ultrasound laws.

This seemed like a good opportunity to look at how many children are awaiting adoption in the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ (DFPS) care. This is the state agency that operates Child Protective Services, or CPS. I spent a couple of years representing parents, and occasionally kids, in CPS cases, so while I’m far from an expert on the subject, I have some understanding of how complicated a subject “adoption” can be. Continue reading →

Oh No You Don’t, Republicans!

Posted on July 18, 2013 by wellsdc

file6461281015948 A few Texas Republican representatives apparently don’t feel that HB2 was enough embarrassment and grief for our state, so they’ve decided to expend more taxpayer money to pursue even more egregiously unconstitutional restrictions on abortion rights (h/t Evin).

The text of HB59, introduced today in the Texas House of Representatives, is not yet available online. The bill’s caption is “Relating to a prohibition on abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat; providing penalties.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, the heart may begin beating as early as six weeks. It is not clear if HB59 would prohibit abortion after a specific number of weeks, or if it would prohibit doctors from performing an abortion if they can detect a heartbeat. Regardless, the law is just a bad idea.

North Dakota’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law in March, is based on the idea of a fetal heartbeat. That law did not give a specific time frame either, but it has been interpreted to ban abortion at around the six-week mark. That law has also been ruled unconstitutional, which of course is the goal for proponents of these bills, who know they’ll be struck down but keep hoping they can get a case before the Supreme Court in order to reverse Roe v. Wade. A Kansas anti-choice advocate admitted as much earlier this year, according to Huffington Post: Continue reading →

Signal Boost: Kurt Eichenwald on “the Murderous Cruelty of Conservatives”

Posted on July 16, 2013 by wellsdc

Vanity Fair published a column yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald entitled “My Family, Our Cancer, and the Murderous Cruelty of Conservatives,” in which he recounts his wife Theresa’s struggle with breast cancer, the top-shelf medical care she received, and the fact that many Americans have no chance at all of receiving remotely similar care. He lays this right where it belongs, at the feet of Republicans (and their occasional blue-dog Democratic allies), who refuse to support health care measures that nearly every nation in the industrialized world now takes for granted, and who refuse to acknowledge the impact their policies have. The whole article is excellent, but here are a few quotes that stuck out for me:

Many Republicans, either out of self-delusion or deceit, deny they are causing any such thing. But there is no question that, in their obsession with zygotes, embryos, and non-viable fetuses as part of their supposed pro-life stance, they are effectively murdering real, walking, talking women—mothers and daughters, grandmothers and sisters, all sacrificed on an altar of Pecksniffian hypocrisy and contemptible disregard by people who have the insurance, connections, and available health care to feel certain their politics won’t kill their loved ones. Perhaps Theresa and I are re-directing our anger from the cancer, but so be it; our rage has focused on the financially comfortable, morally blind, and arrogantly self-righteous who tyrannically conspire to rob poor women of years of life they might otherwise have. It is for this reason that Theresa is willing to disclose her condition, in hopes that, in doing so, we will help highlight how politicians are blithely choosing to kill women who are not as fortunate as she is.

And this:

Like a boy trying to justify what he wants to believe, rather than forming belief around demonstrable facts, the Texas legislators and their mostly G.O.P. counterparts around the country aren’t making arguments. They’re just saying things based on a woeful ignorance of the issues involved.

And this:

Since you don’t understand the issue beyond your desire to limit abortions, Rep. Laubenberg, let me put the meaning of what you have done in clear terms: through your ignorance or incompetence or general lack of interest in the well-being of people who don’t look like you or have your size bank account, you will be responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of Texas women. You, Rep. Laubenberg, will be a murderer, no different than some street punk who shoots up a liquor store. His weapon is a gun; yours, a smug satisfaction with your limited understanding of health policy. If Theresa and I were among the rural poor, she would now almost certainly be one the many people you would kill as a result of her inability to gain access to breast screenings. And for that, you deserve not only our contempt, but the contempt of every decent human being with the humility and intelligence to recognize the impact of the legislation you have “written,” yet aren’t bright enough to understand.

“She has more rights over her own body dead than alive.”

Posted on July 15, 2013 by wellsdc

The following is from a July 10, 2013 post at Positive Guidance Parenting. It presents a perspective that self-proclaimed pro-lifers refuse to acknowledge. The whole post needs to be read by everyone on earth, but here is the part that hit home for me:

I read a perspective that I want to share with you. Let’s say you go into renal failure. For whatever reason, your kidneys are shot. Hey, we’re the same blood type, and I could give you a kidney to save your life. But I don’t have to. It’s my kidney, and I get to decide whether you can have it or not. If I choose to keep my kidney, you die. Corpses have the same rights – no matter how life saving their organs are, no living person has a right to those organs unless consent was given by the individual prior to his or her death. A fetus requires the mother to act as a host – putting her body and all of her organs on loan while he strives for viability. Without it, the fetus dies. Saying that a mother cannot choose whether to offer up her body as a life support system is saying that both that fetus and any corpse have more rights than a living, breathing woman. Let that settle in – Texas is pushing laws that strip living women of rights that we respectfully give to her corpse. She has more rights over her own body dead than alive.

Regardless of where you fall on the issue, currently in the United States of America, women have a constitutional right to an abortion prior to viability of a fetus. Viability is defined as between 24 – 28 weeks of gestation. Texas is passing a ban on abortions at 20 weeks, following the footsteps of a handful of other States. These laws are a direct challenge to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and are systematically being overturned by higher courts because they are blatant violations of women’s reproductive rights. Way to be an aggressive abuser of women, Texas. And I don’t say that lightly. This is an abusive relationship. There is no being respectful of each side’s opinions. Women will fight for their human rights, and this bill will be overturned, despite Texas legislature’s misguided dominance.

(Emphasis added.)

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