Archive for the ‘Abortion’ Category
New Emergency Contraception Laws Now in Effect in California, Illinois
In Illinois and California, laws affecting emergency contraception — the so-called “morning after” pill — went into effect on January 1, 2002. In both states, the new laws are designed to make access to emergency contraception easier.
California took the biggest step, allowing women to obtain emergency contraception directly from pharmacists without first seeing a doctor to obtain a prescription. Jane Boggess, executive director of the Pharmacy Access Partnership which pushed for the change in the law, told the Sacramental Bee,
Women will now be able to go directly to their pharmacists for emergency contraception, which is a significant improvement over having to make an appointment with a doctor or clinic first. Time is of essence with emergency contraception. In order to prevent a pregnancy after unprotected sex, a woman must use emergency contraception within 72 hours.
Illinois, which already allows prescriptions for emergency contraception to be obtained over the Internet, added a mandate which requires hospitals to inform rape victims about emergency contraception. The legislature had originally considered forcing hospitals to provide such drugs to rape victims, but faced opposition from Catholic hospitals that opposed to emergency contraception on religious and ethical grounds.
Source:
New contraception law takes effect. The Sacramento Bee, December 31, 2001.
New state laws pending. Christopher Wills, Associated Press, January 1, 2002.
WorldNetDaily, Anti-Abortion Groups Wants Redbook to Spread Junk Science
Some anti-abortion groups are not happy with the September 2001 issue of Redbook. In an article, “Seven cancer facts you need to know,” Redbook raises the issue of whether a woman’s risk of cancer is affected by having an abortion. The article dismisses the claim as a “persistent rumor” that is not based on sound science.
Writing for WorldNetDaily.Com, Diana Lynne outlines what she apparently believes is a widespread conspiracy to hide from women the very real cancer risks from abortion. Lynne points to 28 studies published since 1957 linking abortion with breast cancer.
Those studies certainly exist, but Lynne leaves out an important point — none of them find statistically significant links between breast cancer and abortion. Most of the studies only include very small numbers of women, and typically only find increased risks of cancer in the 20 to 40 percent range.
That level of increased risk might sound impressive, but in epidemiological terms it is all but insignificant. Epidemiological methods simply aren’t able to reliably measure such very small levels of increased risk. If a large study found that women had a 100 percent or 200 percent increased risk, then there might be cause for concern and further research, but a 20 to 40 percent increase in such small studies is essentially the same as saying there is no link at all.
Meanwhile, Lynne reports that in north Dakota, a lawsuit is going to trial in which the plaintiff is trying to force the Red River Women’s clinic to inform women about studies linking breast cancer and abortion. The sad thing is that this might succeed since there is a long history in both the media and courts of treating such small increased risk levels as if they are capable of reliably implying causation (much of the research claiming that cell phones might cause brain cancer, for example, is based on similarly low levels of increased risk).
Source:
Redbook magazine ‘bending the truth’? Diana Lynne, WorldNetDaily.Com, September 11, 2001.
Feminist Majority Foundation on the Evils of Political Advocacy
Although I am pro-abortion, the inanity of much of the pro-abortion movement continues to astound me. The anti-abortion group, The Center for Bioethical Reform (WARNING: their web site contains graphical images of aborted fetuses) has created an unorthodox and controversial way to spread its message.
It uses large trucks that are painted with billboard-sized images of aborted fetuses. Overlayed on the images is a single word — “Choice.”
According to The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminist Daily News Wire, by sending these trucks throughout the country, the CBR is “continu[ing] to harass, endanger, and misinform the American public.”
How ironic that the same feminist movement which once urged frank and open discussion about reproductive health now apparently considers a photo of an aborted fetus to be nothing less than harassment.
Feminist Majority Foundation Vice President Katherine Spillar manages to be misleading in her attempt to describe the billboard trucks as misleading themselves.
“The typical abortion is done at eight weeks or less, when we are talking about a pre-embryo the size of a grain of rice,” Spillar said. “Women know from their experience that those photos aren’t what an abortion is.”
Huh? Even if a typical abortion is done at eight weeks, how is it misleading to portray the results of an abortion done at a much later period of a pregnancy? Is Spillar claiming that no later term abortions are conducted? Or is she uncomfortable defending late term abortions?
Who needs enemies when the right of a woman to have an abortion has friends like the Feminist Majority Foundation?
Source:
Misleading anti-abortion billboards causing congestion on freeways. Feminist Daily News Wire, August 23, 2001.
NOW Elects New President
In June the National Organization for women elected executive vice president Kim Gandy to take over the organization for outgoing president Patricia Ireland. The change at the top of NOW is unlikely to mean very little change for the direction of NOW as Gandy is definitely from the same mould as Ireland.
National Review Online recent ran a brief profile of Gandy including some interesting quotes. Like many of NOW’s ilk, Gandy believes that feminism and pro-abortion politics are largely one and the same thing,
To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction. They focus all their attention on this little bit of tissue in the womb, and ignore all the tissue surrounding it.
Not that the father of that bit of tissue counts either. When Congress was proposing to give money to nonprofits to encourage men to marry their pregnant partners Gandy said, “I think promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself is misguided.”
In fact Gandy slammed the a widely circulated statement by The Marriage Movement which said, among other things, that,
Nostalgia for the high hopes of the 1970s should not blind us to the hard truths discovered over the past thirty years: When marriages fail, children suffer. For many, the suffering continues for years. For some, it never ends. Children suffer when marriages between parents do not take place, when parents divorce, and when spouses fail to create a “good-enough” family bond. We recognize that there are abusive marriages that should end in separation or divorce. We firmly believe that every family raising children deserves respect and support. Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that not every family form is equally likely to protect children’s well-being.
Gandy simply kicked in her boilerplate anti-marriage messages saying, “The marriage movement is giving women the message that a bad husband and father is better than none at all. Single moms are being demonized. NOW is committed to exposing and organizing this deliberate return to the days of unchallenged male control.”
Apparently Gandy missed the paragraph in the statement that begins, “Supporting marriage does not require punishing single parents or their children. The Marriage Movement is a movement for a better marriage culture, not a movement of the smug marrieds for the smug marrieds. Many of us in the marriage movement are single parents or the children of single parents. We know firsthand how children suffer and parents struggle when marriages fail.”
But NOW long ago gave up any pretense of even a small sliver of objectivity or of rationally approaching complex social issues. Like others in the organization, Gandy campaigned for Al Gore and appeared on a number of talk shows defending the vice president. An appearance on CNN highlighted her (and NOW’s) love of extreme scare tactics. Gandy asked,
Why are elderly people eating dog food? Because our Social Security system doesn’t take into account all the years of unpaid caregiving that they contributed to society.
What a bizarre statement giving the huge redistribution of income from the young to the elderly that Social Security has created. I’d be ashamed to go on national television and use such an obvious scare tactic, but apparently that’s all in a day’s work for a NOW president.
Source:
NOW’s new gal. Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online, July 2, 2001.
The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. The Marriage Movement, 2000.
Tags: George W. Bush, Kim Gandy, National Organization for Women
Peter Singer’s Odd Take on Sex Selective Abortions
Salon.Com published an interview of philosopher Peter Singer conducted by freelancer Viktor Frolke. Singer is, to my mind, one of the most noxious human beings to hold such a prestigious academic position, and he confirms that view in this interview. Of particular relevance to this site is Singer’s views on sex-selective abortion.
Most people who are in favor of abortion are generally either in favor or opposed to allowing sex selective abortion. Singer is the first person I’ve come across to argue that it is okay to selectively abort boys, but not okay to selectively abort girls.
Frolke: What would not be a perfectly good reason for an abortion?
Singer: There’s a difference between early and late abortions. If you have a late abortion, where the fetus might feel pain, then I think you should have a good reason. Because then you’re inflicting pain. As you go through the third trimester, you need to have more serious reasons to end a pregnancy. For instance, I would not support ending a pregnancy only because you want a boy and you’re going to get a girl, because it would reinforce sex discrimination. But if you already have two boys and you want a girl, that could be enough reason for abortion.
I would think sex selective abortion is moral or immoral independently of the putative sex of the fetus and/or the number of siblings of any given sex the potential child would have. Leave it to an esteemed philosopher to set me straight.
Source:
“Professor Death”. Viktor Frolke, Salon.Com, June 25, 2001.
Some Harsh Words about the Equal Rights Amendment
Wendy McElroy recently wrote an article for Fox News (E.R.A.: R.I.P.) that had some extremely harsh — but accurate — words for feminists who have decided to resuscitate the Equal Rights Amendment. As she sees it, feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women are resurrecting the ERA because they have nowhere else to turn.
McElroy, for her part, has no use for the latest attempt to push the ERA,
THere are many reasons to oppose the new ERA, not the least of which is that the Constitution already applies equally to both genders. What organizations like NOW are hoping to achieve is not equality, however. They wish to sneak in some agenda items through the back door.
What sort of things would NOW like to sneak through the back door? As McElroy points out, NOW would almost certainly use the ERA to demand that all states fund abortions. Section 1 of the ERA says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (emphasis added). The Supreme Court has previously ruled that states may fund abortions if they choose, but cannot be compelled to do so.
But with the ERA in place, NOW and other groups would likely argue that when a state says it will pay for, say, an appendectomy but not an abortion, that this decision is a prima facie denial of a woman’s right to equality under the law.
Think this is some absurd right wing idea? NOW and others filed legal briefs in a New Mexico abortion which case which argued just this: that a version of the ERA adopted by New Mexico required state funding for abortions. The New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of this notion in 1998, and ordered the state to begin paying for abortions.
Like McElroy, I am pro-choice but against forcing taxpayer to fund of abortions, and the feminist duplicity on this point is difficult to stomach. On the one hand filing briefs in New Mexico arguing that ERA language means states can’t opt out of funding abortions, but simultaneously attacking as a right wing myth that the passage of the ERA means mandated funding for abortions.
On the other hand, the mainstream feminist movement has become its own worst enemy when it comes to preserving abortion rights. According to McElroy,
Eventually, gender feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon refused to share a stage with women who argued on any grounds for the right to publish pornography. At that moment, I knew the feminist movement would not be able to regroup should abortion rights ever come under sustained attack. The most innovative voices in the movement — most notably Camille Paglia — were relegated to the status of “anti-feminist” because they disagreed. What happened to the feminism in which every woman’s voice should be heard?
You can see this inability to defend abortion rights in the rhetoric that has been coming out of NOW ever since the election of George W. Bush. I expected to see a sophisticated, coordinate opposition to Bush’s initiatives on abortion, but instead NOW seems reduced to shrieking that Bush will create some sort of Afghanistan-style oppressive regime if we don’t all hit the streets in protest today. All NOW and other groups seem to have left when it comes to abortion is hyperbole and vicious ad hominem attacks — most pro-abortion groups, in fact, don’t even seem interested in actually defending the morality of abortion (which might not be so bad, since for the last decade they have been decisively outmaneuvered by abortion opponents on the rhetoric front).
But while they don’t seem to be able to make the case for abortion, they have no problem with regularly sending me fund raising letters/pamphlets that highlight their continuing campaign against Rush Limbaugh. I guess for NOW that’s enough of a consolation prize for the organization’s continuing irrelevance.
Source:
E.R.A.: R.I.P.. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, April 20, 2001.
Tags: George W. Bush, National Organization for Women, Wendy McElroy
‘Nuremberg Files’ Web Site Verdict Thrown Out
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.
Tags: Planned Parenthood
Genetic Engineering and Abortion
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.
Tags: Cathy Young
Eliminating Abortion through Regulation
The U.S. Supreme Court gave opponents of abortion a big shot in the arm in February when it refused to hear a challenge to abortion regulations in South Carolina. The Supreme Court’s decision will almost certainly open the floodgates of regulation directed at abortion providers.
Conservative opponents around the country have taken up a technique pioneered by liberal politicians — if you can’t outright ban something, simply regulate it to death. In the case that the Supreme Court refused to consider, a federal appeals court upheld South Carolina’s 27 pages worth of abortion regulations.
According to Reuters,
Among the many items covered by the regulation were airflow and temperature standards, hallway and doorway widths, making registered nurses assist in abortions, and requiring tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
The regulations also required that bathrooms be installed with alarm systems and that clinics give state inspectors access to patients’ medical records.
An article on WomensNet claims that South Carolina’s regulations could raise the cost of an abortion by as much as $368. Such regulations are currently pending in Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
Feminists will soon likely see their alliance with big government liberals rewarded by seeing onerous regulations drive abortion providers out of business.
Sources:
Justices reject abortion clinic rules appeal. Reuters, February 26, 2001.
Anti-choice tactics threaten abortion access. WomensNet, March 8, 2001.
Drug Addict Charged With Killing Her Fetus
South Carolina is on the cutting edge of a controversial practice that will someday be decided by the Supreme Court — can women who take illegal drugs during her pregnancy be charged with child abuse?
South Carolina considers a fetus in the third trimester to be a person. As such, the law considers a woman who takes an illegal drug in the third trimester to be administering drugs to a child — a form of child abuse.
In May, South Carolina plans to place Regina McKnight on trial for the second time on charges that she smoked crack cocaine throughout the third trimester of her pregnancy which caused her unborn child to be stillborn. Among other crimes, McKnight has been charged with homicide.
McKnight’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this year after jurors admitted they had performed searches on the Internet about homicide by child abuse.
Feminists argue that the statute, if interpreted in this way, is so broad that it could be used to charge any woman who doesn’t follow precisely what the state thinks is the best pre-natal care.
Writing for Women’s ENews, Siobhan Morrissey, notes a previous case in which a woman spent 40 hours in labor and yet still refused to undergo the Caesarian section operation that her attending physicians recommended. In that case, doctors feared the fetus might be put into distress and considered invoking the child abuse law to force the woman to undergo the surgical procedure. She gave birth to a healthy child, however, before the law could be invoked.
South Carolina has also engaged in some extremely questionable law enforcement activities. In a case taken up by the Supreme Court, a South Carolina hospital took urine samples from pregnant women seeking prenatal care without their consent or knowledge. The hospital notified police about any women whose urine test showed evidence of drug use.
And, of course, there is the ever-present fear among feminists that laws that treat a fetus — even a late third-term fetus — as a person is the first step on the way to outlawing abortion.
Certainly some of South Carolina’s actions seem questionable, but at the same time if late third term abortions are ethically questionable — and polls show that most Americans are extremely uncomfortable with such abortions except to save a mother’s life — then smoking crack while in the 8th month of pregnancy seems equally questionable. Moreover, illegal drug use can do irreparable harm to what is essentially a fully formed human infant capable of living outside of the womb not to save a mother’s life or health, nor to erase the stigma of rape or incest, but simply to satisfy an addict’s need for drugs.
Even many hardcore supporters of abortion have come out strongly opposed to something like sex-selective abortion, and one wonders how those folks will oppose mothers who want to abort a female fetus while defending those who would expose dangerous drugs to fetuses that they fully intend to carry to term.
Source:
Cocaine user charged with fetal murder. Siobhan Morrissey, Women’s Enews, February 20, 2001.