Monthly Archives: March 2001

Does New Research Lend Credence to Recovered Memory Theory?

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Research conducted by Michael Anderson and Collin Green at the University of Oregon is being touted as confirming Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression and, in turn, recovered memories of childhood abuse. But does the new study really provide support for recovered memories? Not really.

In the study, college students were asked to learn pairs of words that had loosely connected meanings. The students practiced the word pairs so that when they heard the first word they could recall the second word from memory.

Some of the students were asked to actively work to forget the word pairs, and in fact in later testing they had a much harder time remembering the word pairs than those students who were told to actively try to remember the word pairs.

What the researchers have demonstrated is hardly controversial — human beings can forget things. In fact we almost certainly have to forget things. Do you remember what you had for breakfast three weeks ago? Probably not. Could you forget what you had for breakfast this morning much more quickly if you actively tried to forget? According to this study, probably.

That, however, is a very long way from a full blown defense of Freudian repression (which has completely unscientific foundations to begin with), and light years from demonstrating that recovered memory is anything but a hoax.

The key with recovered memory, after all, is the claim that memories of traumatic events that have been forgotten can be recalled as long as decades later with incredible clarity and accuracy. When it comes to the accuracy of memory, there are dozens of studies demonstrating that memory is extremely malleable over time and that the process of remembering is an evolving, ongoing process rather than a straightforward sort of data retrieval envisioned by many advocates of recovered memory.

Source:

Some choose to lose memory. Helen Pearson, Nature, March 15, 2001.

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‘Nuremberg Files’ Web Site Verdict Thrown Out

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The Associated Press reports that a three-judge panel in the 9th District Court has thrown out the controversial civil lawsuit against the Nuremberg Files web site.

The Nuremberg Files was a web site set up by anti-abortion activists. Among other things, the site listed names and other personal information about doctors who performed physicians. It also included posters that mimicked wanted posters but included pictures of abortion providers and described as “baby butchers.”

Three doctors whose names appeared on lists maintained by the Nuremberg Files were murdered. Planned Parenthood sued the Nuremberg Files in court under provisions of the RICO statute claiming that the web site was essentially the focal point of a criminal conspiracy. That nobody involved with the web site had committed or even planned any acts of violence was irrelevant — the contents of the web site itself made the Nuremberg Files responsible, in part, for abortion-related violence.

A jury agreed with Planned Parenthood and the proprietors of the site were ordered to pay damages to Planned Parenthood and several abortion doctors.

The 9th District Court unanimously agreed that the jury was wrong — what the Nuremberg Files did was speech protected by the First Amendment. In the majority opinion, Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote,

If defendants threatened to commit violent acts, by working alone or with others, then their [works] could properly support the verdict. But if their [works] merely encouraged unrelated terrorists, then their words are protected by the First Amendment.

I suspect the Supreme Court will overturn the 9th District’s opinion, even if it ultimately sides with the Nuremberg Files, since the decision provides a gaping legal hole for people conspiring to commit murder to exploit.

Source:

Court: OK to Encourage Abortion Threat. David Kreats, Associated Press, March 28, 2001.

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Are Women Underrepresented In Medical Research?

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Feminists have long claimed that women were underrepresented in federally-funded medical research, but as the National Center for Policy Analysis recently pointed out, new information has punctured this claim as yet another myth.

Although the National Institutes of Health proclaimed in 1997 that “women were routinely excluded” from federally funded research, it recently retracted that claim because it wasn’t supported by the evidence.

NCPA points to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sally Satel noting that in 1979, 268 of 293 NIH-funded clinical trials included female subjects, while in 1998 68 percent of subjects in all federally funded clinical trials were women.

When it comes to diseases such as cancer, women vastly outnumber men in clinical trials due to the vast overrepresentation of breast cancer research in such trials as compared to other forms of cancer. The NCPA cites Cathy Young, for example, as pointing out that from 1966 to 1986 there were more than three times as many clinical trials for breast cancer as there were for prostate cancer.

Source:

Women and Medical Research. National Center for Policy Analysis, March 21, 2001.

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Should Abuse Victims Have to Pay for their Abuser’s Care?

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Should children be forced to subsidize care for parents who abused them? A couple of adults in New Jersey have been ensnared by a law which requires them to do just that, and the media spotlight on their case will likely result in a much needed change in the law.

Passed in 1918, the state law requires relatives to pay for any hospitalization that is the result of a court order. As a result New Jersey plans to ask Michael and Chrissy McMickle to pay for the state-ordered hospitalization of their father, Nelden McMickle, who went to jail for sexually abusing them.

Under a 1993 New Jersey law, the state can commit some sexual offenders to a mental facility after their prison term is completed rather than simply release the offender back into the community, if the offender is deemed a threat to the community (such laws, by the way, should be unconstitutional, but have, unfortunately, been upheld by courts).

After Nelden McMickle finished his prison sentence, the state deemed him a threat to the community and committed him to a state hospital — and began sending Michael McMickle a letter asking him to pay part of the annual $90,000 bill for his father’s hospitalization. If Michael refuses to pay, the state could pursue him in court to force payment. Barring a change in the law, Chrissy McMickle, now 18, will not receive such letters until she has finished college, if she pursues post-secondary education.

The McMickle case will probably spur a change in the law. Michael McMickle has already hired a lawyer to challenge the law and says he won’t pay a single dime to support the father who regularly subjected him to physical and sexual abuse. Meanwhile as Chrissy McMickle sums the whole case up, “I didn’t think I would have to go through this again. It’s like being victimized again.”

Source:

Law could force siblings to pay for abusive father’s treatment. Amy Westfeldt, Associated Press, March 26, 2001.

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Columbia’s Sexual Harassment Policies and Its Status as a Private School

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Wendy McElroy makes an interesting observation that I had not heard before about the controversy surrounding Columbia’s sexual harassment policy. If Columbia were a public university or college its policy would be clearly unconstitutional and the courts would take little time at all overturning it. Columbia is a private university, however, and so doesn’t have to abide by the Constitutional protections that a state institution would have to consider — the standard for private colleges is that it has to adhere to “fundamental fairness.”

But as McElroy points out, Columbia is using a federal grant to pay the university official in charge of administering the harassment policy,

Columbia’s Administration also points out that the University is a private institution and the courts have upheld its right to determine which procedures are appropriate to serve its needs. In short, students have no right to expect Constitutional protections from university procedures. Private or not, it is the government, which means the taxpayer, who will foot much of the bill for Columbia’s experiment with gender justice. As part of their Report, the Task Force mentioned that grant funding to finance a full-time officer responsible for disciplining sexual misconduct was available from the Department of Justice. The on-campus gender crusader is estimated to cost $125,000 of taxpayer money in the first year. Yet, according to Patricia Catapano, who chaired the Task Force, “The courts only have said that Columbia…has to have fundamental fairness” because it is a private institution.

If Columbia wants to maintain its Star Chamber-like system of student justice it may have the right to do so as a private university, but it certainly shouldn’t use taxpayer money to enforce a policy that would be unconstitutional at a public institution.

Source:

Gender Madness on Columbia’s Campus. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, March 20, 2001.

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Supreme Court Overturns Drug Testing of Pregnant Women

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The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a South Carolina program that administered drug tests to pregnant women without their knowledge or consent was unconstitutional. In the 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said hospitals who wanted to test women for the presence of cocaine need to get either a warrant or consent from the patient to do so.

South Carolina had argued the testing program was part of a legitimate need to get drug addicts into treatment programs, but the majority opinion rejected that argument,

Here, the policy’s central and indispensable feature from its inception was the use of law enforcement to coerce patients into substance abuse treatment. Respondents’ assertion that their ultimate purpose — namely, protecting the health of both mother and child — is a beneficent one is unavailing. While the ultimate goal of the program may well have been to get the women in question into substance abuse treatment and off drugs, the immediate objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes in order to reach that goal.

As a result the majority opinion holds that, “A state hospital’s performance of a diagnostic test to obtain evidence of a patient’s criminal conduct for law enforcement purposes is an unreasonable search if the patient has not consented to the procedure.”

The case now goes back to a lower court where South Carolina is expected to argue that the women did, in fact, consent to the drug tests which in turn might spawn another Supreme Court case.

Sources:

US drugs testing ruled unconstitutional. The BBC, March 21, 2001.

Court: Consent needed to drug-test pregnant women. The Associated Press, March 21, 2001.

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Taxing Video Games to Fund Sexual Assault Programs?

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The Associated Press reported that New Hampshire is considering adding a special tax on video games and movies to fund sexual assault programs in the state.

Under the proposed law, film and game rentals would be taxed 5 cents and video game consoles would be taxed $1. The taxes raised in this way would go into a fund to pay for sexual assault services on the theory that violent video games and movies contribute to sexual assault.

By depicting violence and/or portraying women as sexual objects, supporters say, video games and movies contribute to the problem and so should pay for part of the solution.

Source:

Video Game Tax To Support Sex Crime Victims. Associated Press, March 19, 2001.

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Columbia University Refuses to Defend Its Sexual Misconduct Policy

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that Columbia University is apparently refusing to publicly defend its controversial sexual misconduct policy. The new policy completely strips persons accused of sexual misconduct of any meaningful rights and has garnered a lot of unfavorable publicity for the university.

On February 23, the Columbia University chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union organized an event to discuss the policy. Along with opponents of the policy, such as Columbia Law professor Vivian Berger, the ACLU invited Charlene Allen, the administrator in charge of Columbia’s Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, as well as representatives from the campus group that pushed for the new policy, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER). SAFER declined the invitation, but Allen agreed to participate. Shortly before the event, however, Columbia issued a statement that Allen would not participate after all. Fox News recently aired a story about the policy, and again Columbia refused to comment on the policy.

FIRE’s Harvey Silvergate said,

Columbia cannot bear the public scrutiny. They didn’t show up at the ACLU event, nor for the television program, because there is no principled defense for their policy. How can they justify the stripping away of the due process protection deemed necessary for hundreds of years. HOw can they justify the stripping away of the due process protections deemed necessary for hundreds of years in a free and decent society? The policy is worthy of the kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union, the current People’s Republic of China, or Spain under Franco. It is not worthy of a world-class class university in a free country.

A good insight into the sort of thinking that went into this policy was given last year by SAFER co-chair Sarah Richardson. Asked by a reporter about the rights of individuals accused of a crime, Richardson asked, “Why are we so concerned about the rapist?” Guilty until proven innocent is at the core of SAFER’s claims and the “justice” meted out by the Sexual Misconduct Policy.

Sources:

Columbia University unable to defend policy in public; activist enemies of due process censor FIRE, then make a U-turn. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001.

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South Carolina’s Home Invasion Policy

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South Carolina’s Attorney General, Charlie Condon, has made national headlines for leading his state’s controversial anti-abortion efforts. Condon’s actions have made him enemy number one among some feminists. In January, however, Condon announced a new policy that should help women (and in fact already has in one case), and yet the media is raking him over the coals for it.

After hearing several reports of home invasions in South Carolina, Condon announced that the state would not prosecute individuals who killed intruders in their home. At the time Condon said,

The message needs to be sent loudly and clearly that the state is going to back the homeowner if their home is invaded. I’m putting home invaders on notice that if an occupant chooses to use deadly force, there will be no prosecution.

Apparently many in South Carolina thought Condon’s statement was a gimmick for public consumption — Condon made his announcement less than two weeks before beginning his campaign for Governor. But then a woman in South Carolina killed her boyfriend, and Condon stayed true to his word.

The case seems pretty straightforward. On February 17, Lisa Gant, 36, had an argument with the father of her child, William Brock, Jr., 39. Brock lived about 20 miles from Gant, but occasionally stayed at her house and had clothes and other possession in her apartment. Gant told police she argued with Brock and that he slapped her and put her in a headlock after she told him she wanted to end their relationship. She managed to get Brock to leave the apartment, slamming the door behind him and locking it.

Brock then proceeded to break down the locked door. When Brock entered the kitchen, Gant stabbed him in the chest with a filet knife. Brock staggered out to his car, and was found dead by police who arrived shortly thereafter.

Should Gant face prosecution?

Condon said no, and essentially ordered prosecutors, who had charged Gant with murder, to drop all charges. Local prosecutors and police would have preferred to place Gant on trial and let a judge and jury sort out whether or not she committed justifiable homicide.

In the absence of any evidence that Gant was untruthful about the events that transpired on February 17, 2001, what could possibly be served by putting her on trial. What is the point of asserting that people have a right to defend themselves only to put them before a jury to decide if Gant was really scared when her boyfriend broke down her door to get at her?

Condon nicely summed up the problem with viewing Gant and others like her as criminals who have to undergo an expensive trial to assert their right to defend themselves from intruders in their own homes,

You don’t want to put the homeowner in the position of saying, ‘If I use deadly force, I might be cleared after a trial.’ That’s tantamount to saying that people have rights, but there’s a huge cross attached to it. Most courts have a laissez-faire attitude about these things, figuring that everything will come out fine after a trial. But I think we need to send the messages that the home is sacred ground, period.

Source:

Home-invasion policy ignites South Carolina. David Firestone, The New York Times, March 16, 2001.

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Genetic Engineering and Abortion

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Cathy Young wrote an interesting analysis of the debate surrounding genetic engineering, Monkeying Around with the Self, for Reason magazine. Young basically argued that while we should not give in to the extreme opponents of genetic engineering, neither should we fail to realize that there are genuine moral quandaries raised by genetic engineering. But what intrigued me about the article was her discussion of recently announced plans to clone a human being.

Two Italian doctors, Panos Zavos and Severino Antinori — neither of whom are strangers to reproductive controversies — announced that they will attempt to create a viable cloned embryo and find a woman willing to bring the embryo to term.

Many people oppose such cloning, but mainly for reasons that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what cloning entails. Typically people think that a clone will be identical in every way to the donor of the genetic material, but in fact a cloned baby would be just another baby. There would not be anything more remarkable about a cloned baby than there would be about genetic twins who also share identical genetic material but are hardly exact copies of each other in terms of behavior, personality, etc.

There is one enormous problem with trying to clone a baby at this juncture, however. Scientists still are not very good at cloning animals. Most cloned animal embyros have so many birth defects that they spontaneously abort. Of the few that don’t spontaneously abort, a large percentage are still born or die within a few days after birth. Of those who don’t die shortly after birth, most have severe genetic defects including a tendency toward excessively large organs.

The number of cloned embryos who make it to relatively healthy living animals is exceedingly small. This is not much of an issue when dealing with animals, but presents a huge moral quandary when attempting to clone human beings. It strikes many people as morally repugnant to create a human being that is almost certain to have the sort of debilitating birth defects that are all but unprecedented in traditional sexual reproduction. Certainly sexual reproduction does carry such risks, but the odds of such a large collection of severe birth defects in one infant are almost negligible compared to the near certainty that a cloned infant would suffer from such defects.

As Young sums it up,

The real ethical problem of cloning, as REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues, is that at present, mammals cloned from adult cells appear to be at a high risk for congenital abnormalities. It would be immoral to expose a human infant to such risks. But if the procedure is perfected in nonhuman mammals to the point of being safe, cloning won’t change the basic character of human beings.

I agree with Young’s view, but wonder what effect grappling with these ethical issues will have on the abortion debate.

At the heart of the pro-choice movement, especially the pro-abortion views of many radical feminists, is the view that people do not owe any moral obligations to fetuses. Want to abort a fetus in the 8th month? No problem. Smoke crack right up until the hour before you go into labor? Don’t you dare call that child abuse. Feminists and pro-choice advocates rise up to smack down any attempt to infer that people could possibly moral obligations to fetuses.

And yet if you agree with Young that it would be unethical to expose an infant to the sort of risks that cloning currently would entail, that view is completely incompatible with the claim that there are no moral duties toward fetuses. After all the clever opponent of abortion will ask, “If it’s unethical to create a fetus that likely has a lot of birth defects, why is it okay to turn around and kill that fetus on a whim?”

Any answer to that question inevitably raises the spectre of potentiality. The reason it is unethical to intentionally create a human clone under current conditions is because the fetus will potentially be born with birth defects. But if people owe moral duties to potential persons, abortion gets ditched out the window since it presupposes that, in fact, we don’t have moral duties to potential persons (since every fertilized zygote is a potential person), unless someone wants to maintain that a fetus has an interest in not being born with birth defects but has no interest in being born, which seems bizarre on its face.

Although I am a supporter of abortion rights, both the standard legal and moral justifications of abortion remain extraordinarily deficient — which is why the pro-life movement is making strides while the pro-choice movement flounders.

Not that I have any great solution. I just wish abortion activists would sit down and actually think through these issues rather than simply launch ad hoc attacks that, taken together, don’t represent a consistent ethical position on abortion.

Sources:

Monkeying Around with the Self. Cathy Young, Reason, April 2001.

Baby cloning plans under fire. The BBC, March 10, 2001.

Human cloning: The ‘terrible odds’. Donald Bruce, The BBC, March 9, 2001.

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