Archive for the ‘Abortion’ Category
Abortion=Suicide Bombers
Star Parker has a column in USA Today in which she compares women who have abortions to suicide bombers.
Parker opens up her column by claiming that,
After Sept. 11, some evangelical ministers suggested the moral state of our country might have helped provoke the attacks — and they were condemned for saying so. But their basic point — that a moral accounting should be part of our national assessment of what went wrong and what needs fixing — is correct. That so many Americans don’t see this as relevant is an indication of the problem.
Count this writer as one of those who did not see the point in watching Americans investigating their alleged sinfulness. Frankly, I’ll take American-style decadence over the sort of morality that religious extremists of various faiths would prefer.
To recap, what went wrong on Sept. 11 was that a bunch of Muslim extremists used box cutters to hijack several jets and crash them into buildings. It had nothing to do with abortion, pornography, divorce, school prayer, gambling, or other alleged social ills.
Parker goes on to compare women who have abortions to Palestinian suicide bombers,
The claim that “I own myself,” that I am the ultimate arbiter of life and death, defines the common ground of the suicide bomber and the abortionist.
This is not a matter of defining at what point a fetus is a human being. This is a question of the attitude of the mother-to-be who says what is most important is that I choose, and not what the choice is.
It saddens me that Palestinians kill themselves and innocent civilians because they don’t like the choices they have. The Palestinian people have been given many choices, from the considerable territory given them in 1948 to the major territorial concessions made at Camp David. They choose death instead.
The same politicization of human life that produces suicide bombers has crept into our own society. More than 1.3 million fetuses are aborted each year.
This is the worst sort of argument by analogy — and terribly unconvincing to boot.
Source:
Countries in glass houses shouldn’t … Star Parker, USA Today, June 27, 2002.
Man in China Sues Wife for Having an Abortion
The BBC reports that in March a man in China became the first to file a lawsuit under a new law in that country that guarantees both men and women equal say in having children.
As part of its extreme family planning policies, China approved a law that makes both spouses in a marriage equally responsible for family planning decisions. In this case, a man his wife because she aborted her pregnancy despite his desire to see her carry the pregnancy to term.
The law was apparently passed due to concern that the brunt of enforcement of China’s one-child policy was falling largely on women. Health experts called on men to take more active of a role, and the government responded with a law granting men and women equal legal status in making decisions about when to have children.
The BBC reports that a Chinese court recommended that the man’s lawsuit be allowed to proceed.
Chinese man sues wife over abortion. Vickie Maximova, The BBC, March 20, 2002.
Our Bodies, Ourselves? Of Course Not!
On March 19, 2002 a group made of liberal, pro-choice advocates held a press conference in Washington, DC, to speak out in favor of a proposed ban on cloning for research purposes. Once again, pro-choice advocates demonstrated that they really do not believe that women have the right to control their bodies and make their own reproductive decisions.
A group calling itself the Center for Genetic and Society has obtained 100 signatures on a petition in support of the bill which includes some prominent pro-choice feminists and liberals. There’s Judy Norsigian, author of Our Bodies, Ourselves; Alice J. Dan of the federally-funded Center of Excellence in Women’s Health at the University of Illinois; Barbara Dudley, former executive director of Greenpeace USA; Todd Gitlin, the former radical activist and now a professor at New York University; Tom Hayden, former radical activist; left wing radio commentator Jim Hightower; and a host of others.
The petition they signed not only calls for an outright ban on bringing a cloned human to term which makes sense given the limits of the technology at the moment, but also calls for a moratorium on the cloning of human embryos for research purposes. The petition says,
Second, the United States should enact a moratorium on the creation of clonal human embryos for research purposes (often prematurely called “therapeutic cloning”). The widespread creation of clonal embryos would increase the risk that a human clone would be born, and would further open the door to eugenic procedures. Fortunately, important research on embryonic stem cells does not yet require the use of clonal embryos. A moratorium would allow time for alternatives to research cloning to be investigated, for policy makers and the public to make informed judgments, and for regulatory structures to be established to oversee applications that society might decide are acceptable. A moratorium on research cloning is a middle ground between the two positions of an immediate permanent ban and an unconstrained green light.
So much for my body, my choice. Norsigian is the grossest offender. According to The New York Times, “She fears the science will place an undue burden on the women who donate their eggs for the experiments.” Of course isn’t this simply a rewording of the case against abortion, that society will put pressure on women to abort their fetuses? Norsigian is simply reverting to the anti-abortion claim that women cannot possibly make free choices about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.
Similarly, a lot of the signers of this petition are clearly uncomfortable with what they mistakenly call potential “eugenics” — manipulating fetuses to have one characteristic or another. But wait a minute — I though pro-choice advocates did not think that fetuses had any rights at all. All of a sudden, it is still okay to kill an embryo but not for scientists to clone that same embryo to conduct research? These folks are trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths.
This is why the pro-choice movement is doomed in the long run. Too many people in that movement do not have any sort of philosophical view that informs their beliefs on abortion, but rather simply have a gut reaction in favor it (in many cases, I suspect, simply because the Right generally opposes abortion). Contrary to the rhetoric, few people in the pro-choice movement really believe that men and women should have complete control over matters of reproduction.
The only difference between the pro-choice movement and the pro-life movement is merely a minor disagreement over which group gets to control men and women’s reproductive options.
Sources:
Some for Abortion Rights Lean Right in Cloning Fight. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, January 24, 2002.
Liberal anti-cloners up to bat. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, March 19, 2002.
Open Letter To U.S. Senators On Human Cloning And Eugenic Engineering. Center for Genetic and Society, March 19, 2002.
NOW Celebrates Abortion Doctor’s Release
Dr. James Pendergraft is about to be released from prison, and the National Organization for Women is celebrating the release of the man it says was wrongfully imprisoned. Why doesn’t NOW speak up about other men who have been released after their convicitons were overturned?
Pendergraft was convicted as part of a bizarre case in which he was accused and convicted of extortion. The case is complicated, but it boils down to this — Pendergraft was angry that police in Marion County, Florida apparently refused to allow their officers to moonlight as security guards at his abortion clinic after hours. In a meeting, Pendergraft threatened to sue the city claiming he would bankrupt it if they did not meet his demands.
Prosecutors construed that as attempted extortion and managed to convict the abortion provider in May 2001. Pendergraft’s sentence was overturned on February 27, 2002, however, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ordered him to be released immediately.
NOW sent out a press release a couple days later saying, among other things, that,
The charges against him were based on the flimsiest of evidence and appear to be just another attempt to limit reproductive health services in the state. …
Both the imprisonment and release of Dr. Pendergraft underscore the need for fair judges and prosecutors at every level of the judicial system. NOW’s Judicial Justice Project is keeping a close eye on Bush’s nominees to the federal courts. We’re also mobilizing activists to demand that their senators only vote to confirm nominees who will rule with fairness and to firmly oppose those who seek to promote their ultraconservative agendas.
This is a bit odd. With the advent of sophisticated DNA testing, more than 100 convicted criminals have been released from jail after it turned out that they could not have committed the crime that they were charged with. A significant number of those cases involves men who served often very long jail terms for rapes that they did not committ. Moreover, looking back at many of those cases it is apparent that, like Pendegraft, those men were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence in trials whose fairness was questionable at best.
And yet I do not recall NOW sending out a press release in any of those instances to decry the systemtic injustices in the system. In fact, NOW has generally supported such injustices.
Oliver Jovanovic was originally convicted of rape based on an absurd interpretation of rape shield laws by a New York judge. Jovanovic claimed his sexual encounter with a young woman was consensual, while his accuser said it was rape. On the stand, his accuser testified that she had never told Jovanovic that she was interested in sadomasochistic sex, but, in fact, she sent him numerous e-mails before their meeting describing in detail her sadomasochistic fantasies and experiences. A judge ruled those e-mails inadmissable based on New York’s rape shield laws, and Jovanovic was convicted.
Eventually his conviction was overturned. Did NOW celebrate the righting of such an injustice? Are you kidding? A man serving time for a rape he did not committ? That sort of injustice isn’t even on NOW’s radar.
Source:
NOW President Applauds Release of Wrongfully Imprisoned Abortion Provider, Says Case Underscores The Need For Judicial Justice. Rebecca Farmer, National Organization for Women, Press Release, March 1, 2002.
Tags: National Organization for Women
Upcoming Abortion/Breast Cancer Trial in North Carolina
Women’s eNews recently reported about an upcoming trial in Fargo, North Dakota, in which a judge will be asked to weight the claims and counterclaims about whether or not abortion contributes to increased risk of breast cancer. Not only are anti-abortion advocates relying on junk science, but they’re own claims are deceptive. Rather than urge women not to have abortions, their advice would be more accurate if they said: have a child before you are 22 or face increased risk of breast cancer. Lets look at the epidemiological evidence before moving on to the biology of abortion, pregnancy and breast cancer.
Anti-abortion advocates always cite the same weak epidemiological data. There are quite a few studies showing that women who have induced abortions have increases risk of breast cancer anywhere from 20 to 30 percent higher than women who do not have induced abortions. The proper reaction to such studies is — big deal.
Those are very low increased risk levels for epidemiological studies — they are so low that it is difficult for even well-designed studies to accurately measure such low levels of risk.
This problem is compounded by the fact that most of these studies suffer from a number of flaws. The most obvious of these, which Womens’ eNews does an excellent job of explaining, is recall bias. Women’s who have breast cancer are far more likely to tell researchers that they had an abortion than are women who do not have breast cancer. A Swedish study, for example, found that women with breast cancer were 50 percent more likely to report having had an abortion than were women without breast cancer. Women’s eNews quotes Lancet Oncology editorial as saying that, “healthy control women have been more reluctant to report on a controversial, emotionally charged subject such as induced abortion, than have patients with breast cancer.”
Of course, a major study involving 1.5 million Danish women that relied on medical records rather than women’s recall. The results? No increased risk of breast cancer at all for women who had abortions compared to women who did not.
The claim that abortion increases risk of breast cancer is nonsense. Sort of. An interesting possibility is that some women may in fact increase their risk of breast cancer if they do something that is increasingly common in the Western world — delay the age at which they have their first child.
A recent study of 100,000 French women, for example, found that women who gave birth to their first child in their 30s were 63 percent more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women who gave birth to their first child by the age of 22. The study also found that women who started having periods the earliest also had a higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who began having periods the latest.
Why should the age at which women have their first child or begin menstruating have anything to do with breast cancer? Dr. Steven Austad offers an excellent summary of the link in his book, Why We Age,
Simply put, estrogen and progesterone increase the risk of breast cancer because they cause the cells lining the milk ducts in the breast to divide prolifically during the latter part of the menstrual cycle, when the body is preparing for pregnancy. When no pregnancy occurs, these newly formed cells die, returning the breast to its original condition. During the next cycle, there is another round of cell division and cell death if no pregnancy occurs.
And of course, the more this cycle occurs, the higher the risk of a mutation that might later develop into breast cancer. But once a woman gives birth, this cycle stops — the cells become permanently differentiated and the monthly division/death process comes to a halt.
So women who want to really reduce their risk of breast cancer should have a child as soon as possible after menstruating. Or if you want to do even better than that, go for a hysterectomy — studies have found that young women who have been forced to have hysterectomies for one reason or another have much lower rates of cancer than do healthy women. This applies to men as well — studies of men who have been sterilized find that they have far lower rates of cancer than men who have not.
If there is any increased risk of breast cancer attendant with abortion, it almost certainly is due to the women using abortion to delay the age at which they first give birth. Women who are on birth control or celibate will also experience the same risk, though this writer has to wonder if abortion activists are prepared to warn all childless women that they are endangering their lives. Would they require the Roman Catholic Church to inform childless women who want to become nuns that they are imperiling their health? Somehow I suspect now.
Sources:
Cancer risks for older mothers. The BBC, February 13, 2002.
Judge to Rule on Abortion, Breast Cancer Link. Margaret A. Woodbury, Women’s eNews, February 17, 2002.
Why we age. Steven N. Austad, 1997.
Anti-Abortion Groups Challenges Morning After Pill in Great Britain
Since January 2001, women in Great Britain have been able to buy the emergency contraception drug levonelle from pharmacists without a prescription. Now an anti-abortion group is mounting a legal challenge to this policy that could also threaten the availability of other forms of contraception.
The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Children is challenging the law based on Great Britain’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act which makes it a crime to sell any “poison or other noxious thing” in order to cause a miscarriage.
Levonelle acts by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself in he womb — essentially causing a spontaneous miscarriage. SPUC agues that on that basis the drug should be illegal under the 1861 law.
Of course commonly used birth control drugs operate on the same principle, so if the court agreed with this line of reasoning all chemical birth control might be illegal. As Anne Weyman of the Family Planning Association told the BC,
Their case is about the provision [of emergency contraception] in pharmacies but in fact the same argument would apply to all methods of contraception which can prevent implantation and that would affect every method except barrier methods, sterilization or natural family planning.
So we’re talking here about something like 4.5 million women being told overnight that their method of family planning is illegal.
And beyond that, what exactly would be the legal status of abortion?
This is in the courts now, but a better approach would be for the British Parliament to pass new legislation overturning that part of the 1861 law being used here.
Sources:
Legal challenge to morning-after pill. The BC, February 12, 2002.
Head to head: contraception challenge. The BC, February 12, 2002.
France Overturns Controversial Right Not to Be Born Ruling
Earlier this month I noted that French gynecologists were refusing to do ultrasound scans for new patients after a French judge ruled in favor of a child who sued on the grounds that he never should have been born. An ultrasound scan failed to catch the boy’s birth defect, and he argued successfully in court that since his mother would have aborted him had she known about the birth defect, he was due compensation from the gynecologist who performed the scan.
France’s parliament passed a bill just a few days after the announced strike that affirms that “nobody can claim to have been harmed simply by being born.” The bill will still allow parents to seek damages, but only if they can prove that a doctor made a “blatant error” in interpreting the ultrasound scan.
Source:
France rejects ‘right not to be born.’ The BBC, January 10, 2002.
Tags: France
Utah Judge Upholds Fetal Murder Law
Utah Judge Michael Allphin this week upheld a 1983 state law that allowed people to be charged with murder for killing a fetus, even if the fetus was killed well before the time when it was viable.
The specific case involved 47-year-old Roger MacGuire who is accused of killing his ex-wife, Susan MacGuire. Susan was 13 to 15 weeks pregnant with the child of her fiance. Prosecutors maintain that the pregnancy enraged Roger, who actually aimed directly at the fetus before shooting Susan MacGuire.
Roger’s defense lawyers argued that the law was unconstitutional because the point of viability is usually defined much later in reproductive law cases. Judge Allphin ruled that the standard for viability in reproductive law was irrelevant in the context of criminal law, ruling that, “Reproductive rights cases are simply inapplicable to restrict the state’s interest in protecting unborn life.”
Source:
Utah judge rules on fetal murder. The Associated Press, January 8, 2002.
French Gynecologists Refuse to Perform Ultrasounds in Wake of Abortion Ruling
Last summer, France became the first country to my knowledge to rule that there was such a thing as a right not to be born. Now, French gynecologists are refusing to do ultrasound scans of pregnant women out of fears they will be held liable if they make a mistake.
In the case that set this precedent, a gynecologist doing an ultrasound did not notice that the fetus had Down’s Syndrome. The child sued the doctors on the grounds that his mother would have aborted him if she had known he would have Down’s. The child won in court and France’s highest appellate court upheld the verdict.
Since then, three other cases have been allowed to proceed where doctors are beings ued on behalf of children with birth defects that may have been detectable in ultraound procedures.
In response, gynecologists are refusing to perform ultrasound scans on any newly pregnant women (though they will perform scans on pregnant women who are already under their care). The doctors rightly note that even when performed correctly, there is no guarantee that a potential birth defect will be detected by ultrasound techniques. It is a very useful tool, but hardly a magic bullet for detecting things like Down’s Syndrome.
According to the BBC, the French government plans to offer some sort of protection from liability for gynecologists, but when this might happen remains to be seen. In the meantime, the odd result of the “right not to exist” cases is that they will likely put many more children at risk by turning a useful diagnostic tool into a weapon with which to bludgeon and bankrupt doctors.
Source:
Scan strike by French doctors. The BBC, January 3, 2002.
Tags: France
The Latest Round in the Abortion/Breast Cancer Debate
In early December 2001, the anti-abortion group LIFE released the results of an independent study that claimed to find overwhelming evidence that abortion contributes to breast cancer. Upon closer examination, however, this study does not offer any new information.
If the study’s supporters are to be believed, the research by Populations and Pensions Research Institute is a smoking gun that abortion and breast cancer are causally related. Researcher Patrick Carroll told the BBC, “There is no doubt there is a causal relationship.” Carrol want on to claim that fully half of new breast cancer cases in Great Britain were directly attributable to abortion.
But the study’s methodology does not warrant such claims. All the researchers here did was compare breast cancer rates and abortion rates for Great Britain, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic. They found an association — namely that both the abortion rate and the breast cancer rate have been rising, and conclude that, therefore, the increase in the abortion rate is responsible for the increase in the breast cancer rate.
This is completely specious reasoning — correlation is not causation, no matter how much Carroll and others would like to think it is.
Sources:
Anger over abortion cancer study. The BBC, December 5, 2001.
Abortion link to rise in breast cancer. Michelle Nichols, The Scotsman (UK), December 5, 2001.