Archive for the ‘Abortion’ Category
Camille Paglia on the Pro-Choice Movement
Camille Paglia is pro-choice but, like me, she is troubled by the extremism of much of the core of the pro-choice movement. In her regular column for Salon.com, Paglia rips into groups such as Planned Parenthood which often seem more concerned with being adjuncts of the Democrat Party rather than providing reproductive health services. Paglia writes,
…As a member of Planned Parenthood, for example, I am outraged by the obscene waste of assets by abortion rights organizations whose leaders have become shills for the Democratic Party. The funds diverted to endless “emergency” ads and mailings calling for political action should directly support women’s health care instead. If all the pro-choice men and women in this country would donate their money to needy women instead of to politicians and fancy fundraisers, government support for abortion services would be less critical.
Bush’s cutoff of funding for overseas abortion counseling, virtually the first act of his presidency, hardly made a ripple in public consciousness (though the Philadelphia Inquirer tried to whip things up by making it the lead headline). If national support for choice is starting to slip, as has been reported, it’s because of the arrogant insularity of the feminist elite, who for 20 years have ridden roughshod over the legitimate ethical objections and arguments of abortion opponents. Though I firmly support unrestricted access to abortion, I feel the nation has been polarized and doctors endangered by an intolerance and extremism that began on the secular left.
Well put.
Source:
Crying wolf. Camille Paglia, Salon.Com, February 7, 2001.
Tags: Camille Paglia, Planned Parenthood
Are Bush’s Pro-Life Views Extremist?
Feminists from the National Organization for Women and other feminist organizations claim that George W. Bush’s pro-life views are extremist. In fact whether you agree with Bush or NOW, Bush’s anti-abortion views are very mainstream. One of the biggest problems feminists are creating for themselves is exaggerating the level of support there is for abortion, and more specifically vastly overestimating the public support for the sort of restriction-free abortion that NOW and other groups advocate.
A poll conducted by the Gallup organization in October 2000 found 47 percent of Americans described themselves as “pro-choice” while 45 percent described themselves as “pro-life.” Although polling data on abortion varies widely over time, probably due to the controversial nature of the procedure, that is a marked change from 1995 and 1996 polls by Gallup that found 56 percent of those polled described themselves as “pro-choice” and only 33 percent described themselves as “pro-life.”
Still, every poll Gallup has conducted in the past 5 years has found a majority of people in the “pro-choice” column. Unfortunately for NOW and Planned Parenthood, what many Americans consider to be a “pro-choice” view is close to what those groups consider “pro-life.”
Although 46 percent of respondents said that abortion laws shouldn’t be made any stricter, when asked about specific procedures overwhelming majorities favored additional restrictions on abortions. Only 28 percent of those polled by Gallup said that abortion should be “legal under any circumstance.” Forty-nine percent said it should be legal only in “most circumstances”or “only in a few circumstances” while 19 percent said it should be “illegal in all circumstances.”
In what sort of circumstances shouldn’t abortion be legal? For one, most Americans oppose so-called “partial birth abortions.” When asked whether they would personally vote for a law to ban “partial birth abortion except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother,” 63 percent of those polled said they would vote for such a law. This level of support has remained relatively consistent over time, with 57 percent of respondents in a 1996 poll telling Gallup they would vote for such a law.
These sort of results indicate a public that is generally in favor of abortion, but on the other hand believes that strong regulation and restrictions on the procedure are also a good idea, especially when it comes to late term abortions.
Source:
Majority of Americans Say Roe v. Wade Decision Should Stand. Joseph Carroll, Gallup News Service, January 22, 2001.
Tags: George W. Bush, National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood
Abortion Foes Are Winning
Being pro-abortion, I do not want to see the right of a woman to obtain an abortion disappear. It is clear, however, that this is what is slowly happening and the road map is clear — conservatives are finally embracing the paternalistic, Big Brother solutions of their liberal counterparts. A case in point is the nomination of Tommy Thompson to head Health and Human Services.
Thompson is anti-abortion and was asked what, if anything, he would do about RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. RU-486 suppresses a hormone required to continue a pregnancy in the early stages.
Rather than wax on about unborn children and abortion as potentially being a murderous act, Thompson had a ready made answer. He would review the drug to make sure it was “safe.” According to Thompson,
I do not intend to roll back anything unless they are proven to be unsafe. It’s a new drug. It’s contentious. It’s controversial. And the safety concerns, as I understand it, are something that’s in question. And I think it’s my role to review the safety concerns for women in the United States on that drug (and) all drugs.
This is a clever repackaging of traditional anti-abortion views. Having lost the debate over whether or not it is moral to ever abort a pregnancy, anti-abortion activists will emphasize safety and health concerns and gradually chip away at support for legalized abortion. The beauty is that liberals, who otherwise support abortion, have laid the groundwork for this assault on abortion rights.
Liberals have established a very amorphous standard of “safety,” for example, and proclaimed that the state has a moral duty to intervene to afford citizens such safety, even when they don’t want such protection. Conservatives are preparing to deftly turn the regulatory state against abortion rights, and when the dust is cleared they will probably succeed in establishing a good deal of onerous restrictions on the procedure.
Source:
Bush Cabinet Nominee Says to Review Abortion Pill. Adam Entous, Reuters, January 19, 2001
Some Universities Announce They Won’t Carry RU-486
In several weeks, the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 drug will hit pharmacy shelves — but not at the pharmacies of health centers at many colleges and universities. Already, Emory University, The University of Georgia, Boston University, and the entire Florida public university system have announced that their health centers will offer RU-486.
There are several reasons for these decisions, perhaps the biggest begin the ridiculous restrictions that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration slapped onto the drug. Health facilities that are very close to hospitals might be able to meet the strict requirements, but most university health systems simply don’t have the sort of facilities to meet the FDA’s requirements.
An option not mentioned, but certainly on the minds of universities must also be the possibilities of lawsuits. RU-486 has a number of occasionally severe side effects and university systems might be afraid of becoming the deep pocket victims of lawsuits.
And, of course, some colleges and universities simply want to avoid getting caught up in the abortion controversy. You can bet that many state legislatures will consider bills in the coming years to withhold funds for state-sponsored universities and colleges that offer RU-486, along with heightened abortion-related protests at institutions regardless of what decision they make (with the pro-lifers being outraged if they offer it, and the pro-abortion contingent outraged if it’s not offered).
Source:
Many Campuses Won’t Offer Abortion Pill. Kris Osborn, Fox News, October 24, 2000.
Should Men Have A Right to Choose Too?
Cathy Young has a very long, very well written piece in Salon.Com about an idea originally propounded by the men’s rights movement that is likely to be tested in courts within the decade — do men have unequal rights when it comes to issue of abortion that should be solved via a legal remedy?
The basic argument simply turns pro-choice argument on its head. If women should be able to have control over entering in to parental obligations, why not men as well? The idea seems inane at first, but most of the arguments against it, in one way or another, rely on claims that abortion rights activists already say are preposterous when used by pro-lifers. Typically feminists reply that if men don’t want to have to pay child support they should keep their pants on, which is a crude version of an early argument against abortion — if women don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t sleep around. As Young notes, there is a “willingness to liberate women but not men from the unwanted consequences of sex…”
Young quotes from a Planned Parenthood pamphlet, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal,” which says, in part,
At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?
Young essentially wants to know that if they are serious about the rhetoric, why shouldn’t men have the same opportunities. And if not, why not?
Most people of the folks who support the so-called men’s right to choose typically have some scheme whereby either parent is able to forego parental obligations — women can obviously abort a fetus as a remedy, and typically the remedy for men would be to renounce parental obligations during the pregnancy.
Does this sort of thinking make sense? Up to a point there are some important insights to be taken away from this sort of argument, but ultimately it has no chance of being accepted by courts and is suspect morally. The problem for feminists, however, is that the reason most people will find the men’s right to choose arguments fallacious is the persistent sexual stereotypes which see men as economic providers for children. The idea of father simply being able to renounce their parental obligations is probably revolting non-feminists and feminists alike (who, when contemplating it, might get a hint of how pro-lifers feel about the idea of a woman being able to abort a fetus) largely because of expectations society has of fathers.
Personally I think that’s, on balance, a very good thing. Besides technological solutions on the horizon such as the male birth control pill are likely to put men and women on more equal technological footing when it comes to controlling reproduction, and a massive change of the sort proposed by those advocating for a man’s right to choose would be a very bad idea.
On the other hand there is a subset of cases of forced fatherhood which Young cites which probably does deserve additional looking into. Namely, how should the law handle the responsibilities of a man when he is forced into being a father thanks to nonconsensual sexual activity?
Young finds a couple of doozies that are stunning. In one case a woman seeking to get pregnant took advantage of a male co-worker who had passed out drunk at a party, and subsequently bragged to friends that she saved a trip to the sperm bank. In another, a woman had oral sex with a man and requested he use a condom. Afterward, unbeknownst to him, she used a syringe to retrieve semen and inseminate herself. In both cases, the mothers sued for and won child support payments from the involuntary father.
And of course there was a much-reported case of a woman convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 12 year-old. Even though the state concurred that this was in fact a criminal sexual act, the young boy was forced to pay child support when he was 18.
Some sort of legal remedy is in order for those sorts of bizarre cases, but otherwise dramatic legal changes in the way parental obligations are established would be a very bad idea.
Source:
A man’s right to choose. Cathy Young, Salon.Com, October 19, 2000.
Tags: Cathy Young, Planned Parenthood
As If RU-486 Needed Any Additional Controversy…
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally approved RU-486, it would not release the name or location of the company that would manufacture the drug for the U.S. market citing safety and security reasons. In fact it looks like it wanted to avoid a public relations problem that it’s going to have to deal with anyway — Hua Lian Pharmaceutical Company in Shanghai, China, will produce the drug.
Clearly the FDA was less concerned about safety concerns than getting attacked by anti-abortion activists for awarding the contract to China with its repressive dictatorial regime and history of extreme population control measures.
National Right to Life’s Douglas Johnson quickly attacked the FDA after the Washington Post revealed where the drug would be manufactured, telling the Associated Press,
They said they wanted to protect the company from violence or protests, but it’s ludicrous to say that it is an issue in China, where demonstrations aren’t permitted. It’s a public relations problem they want to avoid — they don’t want the association with Chinese coercive abortion practices.
This is just going to increase the level of controversy surrounding the drug and create a public relations nightmare for anti-abortion groups to latch on to. This FDA decision is likely to prove a disaster, and the FDA should seriously try to find a manufacturer in a more democratic nation to produce RU-486.
Source:
China plant to make U.S. abortion pill. The Associated Press, October 12, 2000.
RU-486 Becomes A Hot Political Issue
The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.
Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”
Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.
For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.
On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).
RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.
Source:
Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.
Tags: George W. Bush
FDA Approves RU486 — With Restrictions
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today finally approved the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 after more than 12 years of battles between pro- and anti-abortion forces. Unfortunately while they approved it, the FDA attached ridiculous restrictions to the drug that will make obtaining the drug more of a hassle for women.
The drug, originally developed in France, blocks a hormone, progesterone, which in turn causes the lining of the uterine wall to thin resulting in a spontaneous abortion. The drug is more than 90 percent effect in causing an abortion if taken within 49 days of the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual period.
In a bizarre, though not unexpected, move, the FDA placed numerous restrictions on RU486 approving it only for distribution by doctors who, as the Associated Press described it, “can operate in case a surgical abortion is needed to finish the job or in cases of severe bleeding — or to doctors who have made advance arrangements for a surgeon to provide such care to their patients.”
This is ridiculous. This would be like saying that only surgeons able to preform back surgery should be able to dispense medication for back pain. Millions of people see non-surgeons for heart and other ailments which might later call for surgery without having to find a doctor who himself is a surgeon.
The Associated Press story on the approval speculates RU486 might become an issue of debate in upcoming presidential election, but oddly claimed that
Republican candidate George W. Bush opposes abortion; his father’s administration banned RU-486 from this country in 1989. The pro-choice Clinton-Gore administration worked for seven years to bring mifepristone here.
No, actually, Clinton-Gore did absolutely nothing for the past 7 years while the FDA stood around and dragged its feet on a drug approval that should have been extraordinarily routine, and apparently did nothing to try to dissuade the FDA of the ridiculous conditions they attached to the drug.
Source:
FDA approves abortion pill. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.
Tags: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush
Mexico’s Guanajuato Bans Abortion for Rape Cases
Just a few weeks after National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vincente Fox stunned Mexican politics by unseating the PRI party in presidential elections, PAN legislators in the state of Guanajuato raised long-standing concerns about the party by voting to ban abortion in the cases of rape. PAN has a history of being closely allied with the Roman Catholic Church and of being very socially conservative.
In a statement issued by the PAN legislators, they said, “As legislators, we have to consider not only the damage and pain of a woman who has been raped, but the greater evil that would occur with the death of an innocent minor.”
In most of Mexico’s 31 states, abortion is legal in instances of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger, but in some states it is outlawed and punishable by up to five years in jail for the mother and 10 years in jail for the doctor who performs the abortion.
This April a controversy errupted in the state of Baja California when a 14-year old who had been raped was refused an abortion at a hospital. When the mother and daughter went to complaint to the state’s attorney general, he took the mother and daughter to a Roman Catholic priest who tried to talk the girl and mother out of having an abortion.
Source:
Mexican northern state bans abortion in rape cases.
Why Are Men More Likely than Women to Support Abortion Rights?
Chris Weinkopf, in an article (Leaving No Child Behind)originally written for the Los Angeles Daily News and reprinted at FrontpageMag.Com, thinks George W. Bush is making a mistake by not emphasizing abortion as a campaign issue. Bush might be afraid of alienating the women’s vote, Wienkopf posits, but that calculus might be erroneous. Weinkopf writes:
They can begin by realizing that, contrary to popular mythology, women are more likely than men to agree with them on the abortion issue. A July 23 ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that while 56 percent of men favor some degree of legalized abortion, that number drops to 50 percent for women.That’s probably because women, many of whom have experienced the miracle of a child growing and developing within them, can more readily recognize that child’s humanity. Men not only lack that biological connection, but often think of abortion as an insurance policy against the unintended consequences of casual sex.. After the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, many men decided that their offspring — now the woman’s choice — were no longer their responsibility. A sharp increase in the numbers of single mothers and deadbeat dads followed.
Weinkopf doesn’t give the margin of error for the study, so the difference could be just a statistical fluke, but even if that’s the case it is surprising that about half of women say they don’t favor some degree of legalized abortion, especially since most feminists have made abortion rights a lynchpin of their fight for women’s rights.
Weinkopf’s explanation of the difference in attitudes is, unfortunatley, jsut a rehashing of stereotypes that today are promoted by tboth traditionalist anti-feminists as well as mainstream and radical feminists. I suspect a lot of feminists would find Weinkopf’s description of women somewhat pandering, but he is solidly in the mainstream of contemporary feminist thought when he ascribes to women a wholly different thought process than men. The real explanation, I suspect, is far simpler.
First, the abortion rights movement has really hurt itself with an ineffective response to the “partial birth” abortion issue. To their credit, anti-abortion foes have done a very good job of transforming the issue of abortion away from women’s rights and more toward a debate over when personhood begins. Surprisingly many feminists and abortion supporters don’t seem to have a clue how to handle abortion once it becomes an issue of personhood rather than an issue of women’s rights.
Second, by being so closely identified as a feminist issue for so long, the abortion rights movement is carrying a lot of the baggage of the feminist movement. This is similar to the problem with another worthy cause — the movement to abolish capital punishment which is also bogged down largely by the poor choices made by organizations and individuals within that movement.
The abortion rights movement would likely have more success if it were grounded in a general theory of individual rights that was consistently applied, but most feminists and feminist organizations are notoriously picky about women’s choice — it usually begins and ends with abortion. Many of the feminist who run around shouting “pro-choice, pro-choice” whither and disappear whenever women start wanting to make choices that the feminists disagree with (such as write books that Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon don’t like).
Instead although they have won many battles, the abortion rights movement is on the verge of losing the war with an extremely high likelihood that the next president of the United States will be solidly anti-abortion and likely end up with a solidly anti-abortion Supreme Court within a decade.
If feminists can’t even convince more than half of women to support abortion rights, they’re in a world of hurt.
Tags: George W. Bush