Security Moms Weren’t A Myth After All
Before election, Anna Greenberg wrote an analysis claiming that the existence of security moms — married women who would vote for Bush because of their concerns about terrorism — was largely a myth. But after the election, even the National Organization for Women seemed to concede that such women played an important role in George W. Bush’s re-election.
The bottom line is that John Kerry did horribly with women, especially if you believe as the National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy does that, “Our health, our rights, and our democracy are teetering on the brink” due to Bush’s re-election.
Whereas Al Gore won 54 percent of the vote in 2000, Kerry managed only 51 percent to Bush’s 48 percent among women. In four years in which Bush, according to NOW, placed the very health and rights of women at risk, Bush improved his share of women voters by 5 percent.
What explains the increase? NOW issued a press release shortly after the election blaming security moms,
The gender gap did, in fact, decline from its 10 point spread in 2000 for Al Gore. Women’s leaders speculate that the Bush campaign’s intense focus on security, and their active courting of women voters, drew additional support to the Republican ticket. However, the research shows that, for women, security is more than averting terrorist attacks:
“We need to broaden the dialogue about security,” said Lake. Issues such as preventing violence against women, equal pay, health care and social security are all of vital interest to women and progressive voters.
The shift of a small percentage of women’s votes to Bush occurred most notably among white women, married women and older women. Still, within these groups, women demonstrated less support for Bush than their male counterparts.
As the Washington Times noted in an op-ed, however, the very idea of a gender gap is a bit silly since it is, in fact, largely a racial gap. As the Times notes, except for Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election, Republican candidates have won a majority of white women in all presidential elections beginning in 1980, but Democratic candidates receive the overwhelming percentage of votes cast by minority women.
So, to get a more precise understanding of how women have responded to the Democratic message, let’s examine how white women have been voting since 1980. In the seven elections beginning with 1980, Democratic presidential candidates have received an average of 46 percent of the white-women two-party vote. Republicans have collected an average of 54 percent. Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 was the only time a Democratic candidate received a majority (53 percent in 1996) of the white-women two-party vote. Mr. Reagan received 57 percent in 1980 and 62 percent in 1984. (Mrs. Smeal’s dream ticket of Mondale-Ferraro captured a mere 38 percent of the white-women vote.) George H.W. Bush got 57 percent in 1988 and 50 percent in his 1992 losing campaign. George W. Bush received 51 percent of the white women’s two-party vote in 2000 and 55 percent in 2004. Thus, beginning with the 1980 election, Bob Dole has been the only Republican candidate who has failed to win a majority of the white-women two-party vote. Since white feminists comprise the largest voting bloc based on gender and race, the repeated failure of Mrs. Smeal and her cohorts to deliver helps to explain why Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections.
So why do white women vote majority democratic? After all, John Kerry tried to make sexual inequality a theme of his campaign late in the campaign, citing the wage gap between men and women in one of his debates with Bush. Conservative critics of feminism suggest that the problem is that feminists are out-of-touch with the mainstream,
Another conservative analyst of women’s issues, Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum, said feminists “have increasingly marginalized themselves” by embracing an agenda that doesn’t reflect most American women’s priorities.
“They see government as the answer to all problems - as the national health care provider and day care provider,” Lukas said. “And they have made unfettered access to abortion the absolute centerpiece of their movement… Their ‘March for Women’s Lives’ last year seemed like a celebration of abortion.”
I’m not so sure about women rejecting big government, but suspect she’s on to something about the feminist movement’s obsessive focus on abortion. Groups like NOW often seem to focus almost exclusively on abortion, but the issue is surprisingly not a big factor in women’s voter preference. In an open-ended question in exit polls in the 2000 election, for example, only 4 percent of women listed abortion as an important factor in determining who they voted for.
In exit polls in 2004, surprisingly large numbers of pro-abortion supporters actually voted for Bush, although Kerry won the vast majority of pro-abortion voters. Bush won 25 percent of the votes of people who believe that abortion should be legal in all cases, and 38 percent of the votes of people who believe that abortion should be legal in most cases.
Sources:
Gender gap myths and legends. The Washington Times, December 18, 2004.
Feminists face tough time after election. David Crary, Associated Press, January 9, 2005.
Gender Gap Persists in the 2004 Election. Votes for Women 2004, Press Release, November 5, 2004.
Women Voters Maintain Gender Gap in 2004 Elections. Lisa Bennett, National Organization for Women, November 12, 2004.
The Security Mom Myth. Anna Greenberg, September 30, 2004.
Tags: Uncategorized
Will Fertility Tourism Increase as the UK Adopts New Fertility Treatment Regulations?
An article in The Scotsman suggests that new regulations the United Kingdom is imposing on fertility treatments there are likely to force couples to travel abroad for fertility treatments, which would have the unintended consequences of diminishing the availability of fertility treatments for less wealthy women and couples.
Beginning in April 2005, fertility clinics are required to permanently retain the identity of all sperm and egg donors. When the children produced from donated eggs and sperm reach 18, they will legally be able to force fertility clinics to divulge the identity of the egg or sperm donor.
The likely result, not surprisingly, will be a severe downturn in donors. Already, according to The Scotsman, many clinics are “reporting severe shortages of donors” ahead of implementation of the regulations. Dr. Gillian Lockwood, medical director at Midland Fertility Services, tells the newspaper,
The waiting list for donor eggs has gone in my clinic from about six months to 18 months to two years. If you’re 39 and you know that your only chance of having a baby is by using donor eggs, what are you going to do? Wait two years or go to Spain?
Spain, which protects donor anonymity, is likely to be one of a number of popular destinations for “fertility tourism,” where women can travel and obtain treatment quickly and then return to the UK. In essence, if these fears pan out, there will still be donor anonymity, it will just be very expensive for patients.
Something similar happened in Sweden which abandoned donor anonymity in 1985. Many Swedish couples simply travel to Denmark as sperm and egg donors fell after the end of anonymity. The trend is driven, in party, by the parent(s)-to-be’s preference that the sperm or egg donor remain permanently anonymous. In recent years, more Swedish women have conceived through artificial insemination carried out in Denmark than in Sweden.
Source:
Couples turn to ‘fertility tourism’ as crisis hits IVF. Rhiannon Edward, The Scotsman, December 31, 2004.
Sperm donors ‘want to keep anonymity’. Matthew Hill, The BBC, October 15, 2002.
Tags: Great Britain, Spain
Elizabeth Loftus Named 2005 Winner of Grawemeyer Award for Psychology
Elizabeth Loftus, who was instrumental in leading the public debunking of the false memory/satanic ritual abuse hysteria in the 1990s, was recently named as the winner of the 2005 University of Louisiana Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. As the press release announcing the award notes,
The fifth awarding of the $200,000 prize for outstanding ideas in the field of psychology is to Elizabeth Loftus, whose research on false recollections and the reliability of eyewitness reports and memories “recovered” through therapy has affected the way law enforcement agencies and the court system view such testimony.
The psychologist has shown that people not only forget but also falsely remember, meaning that they sincerely and vividly can recall events that never happened when information suggested to them becomes entwined with their memory of what actually happened. She points out that the individual may not be able to separate the real threads of memory from the added strands of suggestion.
Loftus’ research has implications for law and for psychotherapy’s methods of probing memory. Interest in both has led to her popularity as a speaker, author, journal editorial board member and expert trial witness. She has testified or consulted in many nationally publicized cases, including trials involving Michael Jackson, Rodney King and the Oklahoma City bombing. Her many honors include both of the American Psychological Society’s top awards and an American Psychological Association award; she also has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Loftus paid a high person and professional price for standing up for good old fashioned science and standards of evidence at a time when many preferred to continue to take at face value wildly improbable stories of widespread satanic cults. She deserves this award and so much more for her work.
Source:
Psychology award criticized. Associated Press, December 1, 2004.
2005 - Elizabeth Loftus. Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, Press Release, November 30, 2004.
Tags: Elizabeth Loftus
Do Breast Implants Increase Risk of Suicide — Or Are Suicidal Women More Likely to Choose Breast Augmentation?
U.S. News reported this month on a Danish study designed to examine the effect of breast implants for cosmetic suicides on suicide rates.
The researchers studied the records of more than 10,000 women — 2,788 who had cosmetic breast implants; 7,071 who had breast reductions; and 1,736 who had cosmetic surgery other than breast implants.
Of the 2,788 women who had implant surgery, 14 had committed suicide. Of those, half had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems before having implant surgery. In comparison, only a quarter of the women who had breast reduction surgery and committed suicide had a history of being hospitalized for psychiatric problems. According to U.S. News and World Report,
This supports the hypothesis that breast implants don’t drive women to commit suicide but that women who choose to have breast implants may be more likely than the average woman to have underlying psychiatric problems, the authors write.
Unfortunately, U.S. News and World Report doesn’t put that small number of suicides in context. The suicide rate of women in Denmark is only about 11 per 100,000. The suicide rate among the women with breast implants in this study was a whopping 502 per 100,000. So even the rate of suicide among women who had not been previously hospitalized was still an incredibly high 251 per 100,000 — over 22 times the overall level of female suicide in Denmark. It is possible, of course, that the women who had not been previously hospitalized nonetheless had a higher rate of emotional/psychological problems, though it would be impossible to say one way or another with this study’s methodology.
The study also found an overall much higher death rate among women who had breast implant surgery, largely because those women were far more likely to be smokers.
Source:
Breast implants: Are women who have plastic surgery more likely to commit suicide? Helen Fields, U.S. News and World Report, January 12, 2005.
Australian Politicians: Put Your Sperm Where Your Legislation Is
I recently mentioned that Great Britain will soon do away with anonymity for sperm and egg donors — fertility clinics in the UK will soon be required to reveal the names of donors to children once they turn 18. This has led to dire predictions of a steep fall in donors.
Australia passed a similar law in 1998 and has seen those predictions come true. Now a Melbourne fertility clinic has written to all male politicians under the age of 45 asking them to put their sperm where their legislation is and serve as donors.
The Monash IVF clinic reports that whereas in 1998 it had about 20 donors a year, in 2004 it could only round up five such donors. So the clinic’s medical director, Gab Kovacs, wrote a letter to male politicians in Victoria saying,
We hope that if some of the leading role models within our community become donors, others may follow suit.
Kovacs says he was inspired by recent drives to improve organ donation in Australia.
Apparently this isn’t the first clinic to think outside the box to obtain sperm donors. According to the BBC, in December an Australian fertility clinic offered Canadian students a free two-week vacation in Australia if they’d agree to be sperm donors.
Source:
Australian MPs’ sperm in demand. The BBC, January 13, 2005.
Tags: Uncategorized
Why Is Birth Control Use Declining in U.S. Women?
In late 2004, the National Center for Health Statistics released a report analyzing contraceptive usage in the United States from 1982-2002. The report discovered an interesting statistic — the percentage of adult women who had sex in the previous three months but did not use contraception rose from 5.4 percent in 1995 to 7.4 percent in 2002.
The increase was statistically significant and occurred only in adult women over the age of 20 — contraceptive use by teens was unchanged.
The Washington Post reported on the increase noting,
Because the survey is so large (more than 7,600 women) and known for its accuracy, “an increase of even two percentage points is worrisome,” said John S. Santelli, a professor of population and family health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Even as he cheered the news that a growing number of teenagers are using contraception, Santelli wondered whether doctors are neglecting women.
“Maybe we’re failing with women over 21,” Santelli said.
Much of the speculation about the increase centered around the possibility that women are finding the cost of birth control to be too expensive,
Jeffrey Jensen, director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at Oregon Health and Science University, said he regularly encounters patients who have trouble affording birth control, even if their private insurance covers it.
“It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free,” Jensen said. Drug companies “have cut way back” on free samples and many women turn to less effective types of birth control because of cost, he said, “running a greater risk of pregnancy as a result.”
Not sure why Jensen feels the need to turn this into a men vs. women thing (men “get off scot-free”). The last time I checked, no major insurance company covers the primary male contraceptive — condoms.
Another speculation is that there was a decline in comprehensive sex education as the abstinence movement gained steam in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the Washington Post,
Several recent studies found that as the abstinence-until-marriage movement surged, there was a “considerable drop” in comprehensive sex education from 1988 to 2000, Santelli said. “Women in their twenties have probably gotten less effective information about contraception,” he said.
Or it could simply be a one-time outlier in the sample. After all, the difference between 1995 and 2002 women who had sex without using contraception was only 129 out of the 6,493 women 20 or over interviewed in the survey.
Sources:
More women opting against birth control, study finds. Ceci Connolly, Washington Post, January 4, 2005.
Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing, 2002. Joyce C. Abma, PhD.; Gladys M. Martinez, PhD.; William D. Mosher, PhD.; and Brittany S. Dawson, M.P.P., Division of Vital Statistics. December 2004.
Should Men and Women Receive Different Sentences for the Same Crime
Imagine a man and a woman convicted for committing separate but identical crimes. Would it be fair or moral to explicitly sentence the woman to more time in jail simply because she was a woman? Or to do the same to the man?
The New York Times recently reported on Virginia’s experiment at doing just that. Essentially what Virginia has been doing is collecting data on recidivism rates for non-violent crimes. It knows, for example, how likely a single male vs. a married male is likely to become a repeat offender. It knows how likely a married male vs. a single female is to repeat an offense as well. And it encourages its judges to sentenced based on this data.
According to the Times,
Using these factors and a few others, including a defendant’s adult and juvenile criminal records, Kern designed a simple 71-point scale of risk assessment as an aid for judges. If he scores 35 points or less, a defendant who would have otherwise gone to prison under Virginia sentencing guidelines is recommended for an alternative sanction like probation or house arrest. Anything above 35 means a recommendation of jail time. “Judges make risk assessments every day,” Kern said. “Prosecutors do, too. Our model brings more equity to the process and ties the judgments being made to science.”
The result is clear — a single male and a married female who commit identical crimes and have identical criminal records might be receive vastly different sentences. Is this fair? Is this just?
University of Pennsylvania law professor Paul Robinson raises the point that there seems to be something very wrong with determining criminal penalties on matters that have nothing to do with the blameworthiness of the individuals in question,
“If you’re punishing people because of a bunch of factors that have nothing to do with blame, well, you’re not in the business of doing justice anymore,” said Paul Robinson, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As he and like-minded legal thinkers see it, a woman in her 40’s who deals drugs hasn’t done anything more to earn trust or deserve a break than a male dealer in his 20’s charged with the same offense. She has just gotten lucky, by falling into a group whose other members have generally proved a good public-safety bet.
In fact, Virginia currently uses a numerical scale that recommends prison for anyone who scores over 38 points. According to The Times, simply being young, single and male is enough to earn 36 points out of the gate.
It is telling that there is one factor which Virginia doesn’t include in its scale — race. Despite the fact that African Americans commit crimes at higher rates than whites, race is explicitly excluded from formula on the rather flimsy grounds that race is simply a proxy for socioeconomic status. But that’s not much of an argument given that being young or old, married or unmarried are also simply proxies for other underlying social phenomena, at least when considering criminal recidivism.
Virginia’s scheme would seem to be a blatant violation of the 5th amendment rights of convicts.
Source:
Sentencing by the numbers. Emily Bazelon, The New York Times, January 2, 2005.
Tags: Uncategorized
Iran Threatened by Waves of Mini-Skirts
The Middle East Media Research Institute has an interesting transcript of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei complaining that his country faces a threat from . . . miniskirts.
MEMRI quotes Khamenei as saying in an address (emphasis added),
More than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption. They have said this many times. I recently read in the news that one of them, a senior official in an important American political center, said: “Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.” He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.
Source:
Iranian Leader Khamenei: Iran’s Enemies Want to Destroy it with Miniskirts. MEMRI, January 6, 2005.
Tags: Iran
Nobel Prize Winner — Abortion Is Wrong
Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Nobel committee, “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Maathai also has strong opinions about abortion and Kenyan fathers who shirk their responsibility, denouncing both in strong language.
When it comes to abortion, Maathai, who is currently Kenya’s deputy minister of the environment, told Norway’s Dagen newspaper,
Both [the woman and the aborted fetus] are victims. There is no reason why anybody who has been conceived, shouldn’t be given the opportunity to be born and to live a happy life. The fact that a life like that is terminated, is wrong.
. . .
When we allow abortion, we are punishing the women — who must abort their children because their men have run away — and we are punishing the children whose life is terminated.
Maathai goes on to identify a particularly bizarre aspect of the Kenyan legal system that she believes drives women there to abortion. Under Kenyan law, mothers alone are responsible for the maintenance of children born out of wedlock. No, that’s not a misprint or an exaggeration — in Kenya, a man who fathers a child out of wedlock has no legally enforceable requirement to financially support that child.
Maathai told Dagen,
I want us to step back a little bit and say: Why is this woman and this child threatened? Why is this woman threatening to terminate this life? What do we need to do as a society? A part of that answer lies in this House [the Kenyan Parliament].
. . .
Now I think we are too lenient on men. We have almost given them a license to father children and not worry about them. That is part of the reason why women abort, because they do not want to be burdened with children whose fathers do not want to become responsible.
Source:
Abort er galt, sier Maathai. Jostein Sandsmark, Dagen, December 12, 2004.
“Abortion Is Wrong” says Nobel Prize Winner Maathai. LifeSiteNews.Com, December 7, 2004.
Tags: Kenya
Women In United Arab Emirates Sentenced to Flogging and Imprisonment for Becoming Pregnant Out of Wedlock
Amnesty International recently reported that two foreign women working as servants in the United Arab Emirates were ordered flogged after they became pregnant out of wedlock in that country.
Rad Zemah Sinyaj Mohammed, of India, was sentenced to 150 lashes to be administered over two flogging sessions. She will then be deported back to India.
Wasini bint Sarjan, of Indonesia, was sentenced to 100 lashes and a year in jail, after which she too will be deported back to her home country of Indonesia.
Both women are currently pregnant, and Muslim Shari’a law forbids the flogging of pregnant or nursing women. Instead the court will appoint a medical officer to determine when the women have given birth and/or weaned their respective children, at which point the sentence will be carried out.
Amnesty International notes that the UAE is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women which prohibits gender-based violence, including torture, but since the UAE also uses flogging to punish men, its unclear how that convention would apply to this case.
Amnesty International also claims that criminalizing private sexual conduct penalize women more than men, but does not elaborate on how or why this is the case.
It is really quite simple, though — criminal punishment of adult men or women for consensual, non-marital sex is barbaric. The use of flogging further ratchets up (or down) the level of barbarity involved here.
Source:
United Arab Emirates. Amnesty International, December 23, 2004.
Tags: United Arab Emirates