There's a Reason it's Called Reproductive Freedom

"Pro-life" my ass:

The Irish Times:

Two investigations are under way into the death of a woman who was 17 weeks pregnant, at University Hospital Galway last month.

Savita Halappanavar (31), a dentist, presented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st, was found to be miscarrying, and died of septicaemia a week later.

Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar (34), an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms Halappanavar asked for a medical termination.

This was refused, he says, because the foetal heartbeat was still present and they were told, “this is a Catholic country”.

She spent a further 2½ days “in agony” until the foetal heartbeat stopped.

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Not a Good Night for Mitt Romney

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
-President Barack Obama, remarks on the deaths of US embassy staff in Benghazi, delivered in the Rose Garden on September 12, 2012.

It's the moment that will probably be best remembered from last night's debate. Mitt Romney took the opportunity to once again exploit the deaths of Americans for political gain -- and got it all balled up and wrong. Kevin Drum has the exchange (full transcript here):

ROMNEY: I think it's interesting the president just said something, which — which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That’s what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

When the president told Romney to "please proceed," he clearly saw where this was heading. He might as well have said, "You go ahead and take all the rope you think you need." Then came all the beauty:

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Logically Speaking, the War on Women Must Be a War Without End

I think I've narrowed down the reason for the War on Women -- this whole childbirth thing freaks conservatives right out. Watching the video above, I can't come up with a better explanation. In it, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos denies that women are paid less than men, despite the plain, indisputable fact that they are. As always, Republicans hate math and math hates them right back.

But Castellanos backs up his assertion with creative accounting -- women run off and do crazy things like have babies, so if you count that time off, the pay gap disappears. Therefore, women should take the hit for their frivolous hobby of, you know, perpetuating the human race. You don't see men running off and having babies. Because men are serious and grown up.

This is all about as silly as it gets and it demonstrates how weak the conservative arguments are in defense (and denial) of their War on Women. But consider this argument in relation to the other fronts in the war -- abortion and contraception. In Conservative World, women should be punished by law for avoiding childbirth and punished economically for engaging in it. Republicans are busy reinforcing a no-win situation for women, where both pregnancy at its avoidance have negative -- but in their minds, completely justified -- consequences. We've already established that women who use birth control are sluts. The less said about women who seek abortions the better. And women who get pregnant are bad workers. I guess the logical conclusion to all this is that women are just naturally bad people.

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Pro-Lifers Discover Reality

The right has been stringing their voters along for decades with the wedge issue of abortion. Few Republican candidates get their campaigns off the ground without taking a position as close to the right pole of the issue as they can get away with. Even John McCain, who didn't seem comfortable with the issue, described himself as "proudly pro-life" and expressed a desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the final presidential debate, McCain treated the question of a woman's health as an excuse to get an abortion. "That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, 'health,'" McCain said, making air quotes with his fingers.

But the thing is, Republican candidates have talked a good game on abortion. While Bush claimed to want to foster a "culture of life" in America, he got right to work creating a culture of death. We absolutely needed go to war and kill people and, if you wanted to stop killing people, it would be an insult to those who had died. If we quit after it became clear the Iraq war was pointless, Bush argued, the dead would have "died in vain." Not only did we have to spread death and misery around the world, but we then had to worship that portion of the dead who were American. The glorious culture of life was only mentioned when throwing a bone to the anti-abortion folks, mostly through actions that wouldn't reduce the number of abortions performed in any way -- a ban on funding embryonic stem cell research, for example. The ban didn't stop a single fetus from being aborted. Not one.





Of course, it was never designed to. It was designed to create another wedge issue between the anti-abortion types and the rest of us, just in time for the 2004 election. Bush had "discovered" one more way that the secular forces of science had come up with to kill babies. In the end, Bush accomplished nothing but getting re-elected. Stem cell research was set back, no abortions were avoided, and the war over abortion was fresh as a daisy and basically unchanged -- just the way the Republican party likes it.

It's been sort of an ongoing theme of mine that the GOP uses the pro-lifers as pigeons. They use abortion to get people to vote for them, then don't do much to address it. Republicans are pro-life activists on the campaign trail and pro-corporate politicians in office -- it's all about abortion on the stump and all about capital gains tax cuts and deregulation once in office.

It's also been my long-standing argument that sooner or later these voters are going to wise up. You can only pull the same trick over and over so many times before people stop falling for it. But these are mostly people of faith -- with "faith" meaning "unquestioning belief despite evidence to the contrary" -- so it takes a while for them to catch on. In this case, about four decades. Remember, many of these people are still fighting over the 150 year-old theory of evolution. This process of enlightenment takes a while.

But, in the case of abortion, it seems to be taking about forty years. The Washington Post's Jacqueline L. Salmon reports that some of these pro-lifers are changing their tactics to match reality.

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education -- services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies.

Actually working to reduce abortions. What a novel concept. Well, it would be a novel concept if the pro-choice movement hadn't beat them to it. Making abortion illegal would never have eliminated abortion; the way to do that is to make it unnecessary. As Bill Clinton once put it, the goal should be to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare."

"Abortions did become rarer during Clinton's time in office, dropping by 11 percent," columnist E.J. Dionne wrote last week. "But since Clinton made no major public moves on abortion reduction, many pro-lifers who had been inclined his way felt he ignored the third word in his motto." If they had watched the numbers, rather than anti-abortion propaganda, they'd have had reason to celebrate Bill Clinton's accomplishment. Instead, they considered him the devil. And some see this new approach as equally evil.

"It's a sellout, as far as we are concerned," said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League, told Salmon. "We don't think it's really genuine. You don't have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions." Others see a reasoned approach to abortion as problematic as well.

The Archbishop of Denver Charles J. Chaput says that these new efforts to reduce abortions "undermined the progress pro-lifers have made and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue." Excuse me, but what progress? Roe v. Wade has practically become a founding document and most Americans want it to remain that way. A July Quinnipiac poll asked respondents "In general, do you agree or disagree with the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that established a woman's right to an abortion?" 63% agreed, 33% disagreed. There hasn't been any progress for the anti-abortion types.

I suppose the lesson here is that some people will wise up after being played for chumps for decades. They'll abandon a total ban and work with reality.

Others won't and will continue to devote their lives to a fight the Republican party has no interest in letting them win.

-Wisco

Abortions are Down -- So Let's Lie About Why...

It's the typical bad headline from the mainstream media. In reporting on new study by the Guttmacher Institute -- an organization that tracks reproductive health issues -- ABC News offers us "Why Abortions Are Down in America." Except, they don't really tell you why. As I say, typical.

See, the Guttmacher study tells us that "the U.S. abortion rate declined to 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, continuing the downward trend that started after the abortion rate peaked at 29.3 in 1981" and that this marks "its lowest level since 1974."

In telling us "Why Abortions Are Down in America," ABC basically says, "Who knows?" Bait and switch, anyone? Still, it gives us a starting point by narrowing things down to three possibilities -- fewer abortion clinics, the success of phony "family planning clinics" run by anti-abortion activists, or better access to birth control methods and emergency contraceptives like Plan B.

The first doesn't seem to be supported by the facts. While there are fewer abortion clinics in the US than in the past, we're not seeing other signs that would accompany women without access to abortion. I've written about it before -- when women don't have access to abortion, maternal death rates rise sharply. This hasn't happened.

In fact, the study's lead author, Rachel Jones, "told NPR that though there is such a direct link in some regions, it doesn't account for the overall decrease in abortions. In fact, the decline in abortion providers is significantly smaller than in previous years," according to Salon.

The second seems unlikely as well. Back to ABC News:

Opponents say more women are coming to grips with the horror of abortion, in part because of the increasing numbers of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which set up near abortion clinics and offer services like ultrasounds to convince women to keep their babies.

"This is a very powerful tool," anti-abortion activist Chris Slattery said of ultrasounds. "Now it's much harder for them to actually think of destroying a child."

The problem with this explanation is that it requires that women be freakin' morons for it to work. "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" are basically places that pose as clinics, but where the entire focus is to convince women not to have an abortion. The methods are a textbook example of passive-aggression and are hopelessly hamhanded:

Anti-Choice "Crisis Pregnancy Centers": A Personal Account, Planned Parenthood:

...The woman then ushered me into another room, saying that a nurse would do an ultrasound for me. I wasn't sure what to expect; I'd never had an ultrasound and I didn't know much about the procedure. But even if I had, I couldn't have been prepared for what came next.

After administering the ultrasound, the nurse turned the screen to show me the sonogram results. She said, "This is the fetus." Below the photo of the fetus, someone had typed in the words "Hi Mommy!" I couldn't believe it.

I was totally shaken but I tried to play it cool and appear calm. The receptionist made an appointment for me to come back in two weeks, and I thanked the woman for her "help." I didn't want to make a scene because I felt so unsafe -- and I didn't want them to know that I was considering terminating the pregnancy.

Not only didn't it work in this case, but it's really hard to see how it could work in any case. If it weren't so incredibly dismissive of women's intelligence, it'd be hilarious in its absurdity. She didn't leave that office convinced that she'd give birth, she left seriously creeped out. The gross dishonesty of these phony clinics can only leave women feeling insulted. There's no way I can credit these people with any decrease in the rate of abortion. It would just make no sense at all. The average woman isn't that dumb.

So, by the process of elimination alone, we're left with increased availabilty of birth control. The problem here is that the anti-abortion movement is against that, too. The American Life League spells it out -- while attempting to spin their position as the exact opposite of what it is. In a page on "Countering Pro-Abortion Arguments," we're shown their answer to "The pro-life movement is really a group of religious fanatics whose goal is outlawing contraceptives."

The pro-life movement's legislative goal is passage of the Paramount Human Life Amendment. This would establish legal personhood for all human beings from the moment of fertilization.

The fact is that some so-called "contraceptives" are abortifacient in action and kill already existing human beings (e.g., the "pill," lUD, RU486). Of course, we are against these devices. Every abortion kills a human being, whether accomplished chemically, surgically or by other means.

So not all contraceptives, right? Just the most effective ones.

Well, no. Not really. It doesn't take long for them to prove they are "a group of religious fanatics whose goal is outlawing contraceptives." ALL tells us, "We cannot condone contraceptives as a 'solution' to any troubling facet of human sexuality. In virtually all areas, the contraceptive culture and mentality must be viewed as part of the problem," and that, "The acceptance of contraception fostered acceptance of abortion. Margaret Sanger, who desired legal abortion, foresaw this over 50 years ago."

In fact, their literature shows a shocking -- and likely willfull -- ignorance of the facts. In answering the obvious conclusion that without contraception, people will still have sex, they answer, "Of course people are going to have sex! Lets be more specific. For clarity's sake, we should deal with premarital, promiscuous or 'at-risk' sex, not monogamous sex within marriage."

If we go back to the Guttmacher Institute, we see that "The majority of U.S. women who have abortions (61%) have children." The image of the unmarried teen, pregnant for the first time as the average abortion-seeker is a mythical one.

"We found that consideration of motherhood issues in abortion decision-making falls into two broad areas: responsibilities for existing children and the 'ideal' conditions of motherhood," says Rachel Jones. "Among those women with children, the most commonly cited reason for choosing to have an abortion was the concern that having another child would compromise the care given to existing children. Women felt that they were already stretched thin financially, emotionally and physically -- and they wanted to put the children they already had front and center..."

This is the problem with the anti-abortion movement -- it's not anti-abortion only. It's the Anti-Sex League. ALL tells us, "If people can be educated to use contraceptives, they certainly can be educated to abstain. Let's attack the true problem, promiscuity."

"Contraceptives increase promiscuity," they go on. "And promiscuity increases crisis pregnancies, abortions, AIDS victims and the prevalence of sexually transmitted disease. Not to mention adultery, divorce, rape, and child sexual abuse -- i.e., the overall decay of the family and our moral fiber."

None of which is true. All of this is just stuff they're pulling out of their butt.

Which gets me to the real problem with the anti-abortion movement and the religious right in general -- they lie. Often.

Imagine your thought processes if you were absolutely certain you were on God's side. Who would it be that was fighting against you? When your political and cultural enemies are the Devil and those who fight on the side of the Devil, what actions would you rule out? There's no reason to fight fair with Satan, since -- no matter what you do -- your cause is just and holy. You can lie and you can cheat, since you're not really fighting these poor, deluded forces of darkness -- you're saving them. If saving them from themselves requires you to make stuff up and lie, then making stuff up and lying is the most ethical thing you could do. You don't get an alcoholic to come over if you say you're going to stage an intervention -- you tell them it's going to be a party. If you have to trick people to get them to do the "right thing," then there's nothing wrong with lies.

So, with the news that abortions are declining, the best possible thing they can do is lie about why it's happening. But the problem here is that they're lying to women about what women think and what motivates them. It's hard to see how that's going to work. Where ABC News fails to tell us "Why Abortions Are Down in America," a little reasoning gives us the answer. Abortions are down because the reasons for abortion are now fewer. The widespread availability of contraceptives and reproductive health gets the credit, not a bunch of passive-aggressive religious whackos with made up "facts" and phony "clinics."

Women just aren't that dumb.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; religious right; health; women's rights; "Abortions are down," say the religious right. "Let's lie about why."

Romanian Roulette

Abortion is often cast as a matter of life and death. But this idea of life beginning at the point of conception -- a purely philosophical view -- brings us to impasses over other issues like stem cell research. In his first veto of stem cell legislation -- at that point, his only veto -- President Bush said, "...we must also remember that embryonic stem cells come from human embryos that are destroyed for their cells. Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value."

People like myself wondered how Bush could get all bent out of shape over human life that was entirely theoretical, while blowing the crap out of real, non-theoretical human life in Iraq. Consistency has never been his strong point. But this was just one example of how the hypothesis that life begins at conception could be taken to absurd extremes.

When we talk about abortion as a matter of life and death, somehow we've become convinced that there's only one life involved -- the hypothetical unborn one. But there's another, actual life involved -- one that no one argues doesn't actually exist -- that of the woman.

Unfortunately, we have a real world example of what happens when abortion is illegalized. It's one that's so well documented that we can actually call it a clinical experiment, with countries with liberal abortion laws as the control.

In 1965, Romania had the highest rate of legal abortion in the world -- one in four pregnancies in women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four ended in abortion. Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu came to power and, in an attempt to increase the population, banned abortion in 1966.

As a result, the legal abortion rate fell, but maternal mortality rates (MMR) went through the roof. Complications due to illegal abortion became by far the most common cause of death in pregnant women, accounting for 85 percent of all maternal deaths. The reason that we know the cause was unsafe abortion was that the romanian ban may have been the most restrictive in the world. Women were under police surveillance with mandatory pelvic exams and routine pregnancy testing. Pregnancies were monitored closely. In the US, it's impossible to say how many women actually died because of unsafe abortions before Roe v. Wade, since family embarrassment and shame would often cause people to claim another cause of death. In Romania, every dead pregant woman and every miscarriage was investigated as a possible crime. Logic would dictate that in a society where abortion was illegal, but easier to get away with, the MMR would be even higher.

MMR rose throughout Ceaucescu's reign, beginning at 86 per 100,000 live births in 1966 to 170 per 100,00 in the eighties. Romania had the highest rate of maternal mortality in Europe.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of Ceaucescu, executed by firing squad after he refused to step down. Abortion was legal again and, within one year, maternal mortality had dropped 50 percent and continued to fall. According to the World Health Organization, "Between 1990 and 2002, Romania's MMR (three-year moving average) fell by almost 73%..."

So what we see is that when abortion is illegal women -- who are indisputably alive -- die. And, since these women are pregnant, that hypothetical unborn life would logically be dead too. The math doesn't really work. As a lifesaving measure, banning abortion sucks.

You can make unsupported -- and unsupportable -- arguments that a blastocyst becomes 'ensouled' with conception, that abortion should be illegal in order to save lives. But the best evidence we have shows that illegalizing abortion creates a public health crisis. Women don't abort because pregnancy is merely inconvenient -- the fact that abortion continues even after it becomes a game of russian roulette proves that. Women abort because they feel they have no choice. When abortion is illegal, that lack of choice can be disastrous.

If you've got a problem with abortion, making it illegal is demonstrably the exact wrong thing to do. The thing to do is to make abortion unnecessary. As long as the term "crisis pregnancy" means something in our world, women will abort -- legally or illegally.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; health; women's rights; reproductive rights; pro-choice; pro-life; Romania proved that when abortion is illegal, women die

Since When Does Bush Get to Talk About the 'Sanctity of Life?'

Is there anyone on Earth who wants George W. Bush to make their medical decisions for them? I hope not. The president has a long history of making exactly the wrong decisions. From Iraq to Katrina to deciding Harriet Miers was a shoe-in for the Supreme Courts Bush has proved the lousiness of his decision making skills over and over.

So it was without great joy that american women received the news that Bush and the Supreme Court had made a medical decision for them. The Supreme Court's decision that a ban on intact dilation and extraction -- misnamed by opponents and a compliant media 'partial birth abortion' -- is constitutional means that, male or female, you no longer have the right to be healthy. It's not protected by the Constitution.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America:

"The Court has disregarded the medical opinion of leading doctors who oppose the ban. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists -- which represents 90 percent of the OB GYNs in this country -- says the ban is harmful to women's health and interferes with medical decision making.

"This case is about more than abortion. This decision means the Court is willing to partner with the Bush administration and uphold laws that interfere with personal decisions that should be left up to a woman and her family.

"Indeed, this is a setback for all Americans who believe politicians should not make private, personal medical decisions for the rest of us. Many pro-choice lawmakers, including presidential candidates, opposed the Bush Federal Abortion Ban. These leaders are right to remind the public that President Bush's appointees to the Court are taking women's reproductive rights in a dangerous direction."

The law bans the procedure, even in the event that pregnancy would affect the woman's health. Bush, Congress, and the Supreme Court have determined that the procedure is never medically necessary, despite the fact that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that it is. Nothing, not even the freakin' facts, will stand in the way of the anti-choice ideology. The people who think that evolution is a bunch of crap and God made you out of dust get to make medical decisions for you from now on. Bring on the witch doctors and faith healers.

But that's not what's eating at me most. It's the smug arrogance, the bald faced hypocrisy of those who cheer on a pointless slaughter in Iraq with one side of their mouth and cry about their damned 'culture of life' with the other. "I applaud the court for its ruling today, and my hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation's laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life," said Minority Leader John Boehner on receiving the news that the Supreme Court had finally gone back to believing that women were too retarded to make their own decisions.

And Bush's response was infuriating. "The Supreme Court's decision is an affirmation of the progress we have made over the past six years in protecting human dignity and upholding the sanctity of life," he said in a statement. "We will continue to work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law."

Unless, of course, that child happens to be iraqi -- then we'll blow it all to hell. The idea of Bush lecturing me on the 'sanctity of life' is galling. This bloodsoaked bastard doesn't have a moral leg to stand on and he's putting himself up as the standard of morality. If Bush is the moral yardstick by which we're to measure ourselves, then we're completely screwed.

And the man who thinks that torturing people at Guantanamo until they confess to crimes they may or may not have committed gets to talk to me about 'protecting human dignity?' The man who sent all those troops off to die for his lies gets to tell me that he's the protector of human dignity and life? In what bass ackward world?

I went looking for photos to accompany this post and I found hellish ones. Babies split open like bananas, with only portions of faces. Mothers holding the bodies of children who's limbs are only connected by thin strings of shredded meat and ligament. A living child who's just a head and torso wrapped in bandages. I could've shown you images that would've made your breakfast a waste of money. But I came up with the one above. The bent SOBs who stand outside of abortion clinics with their photos can use images to sicken us -- but the only reason they do it is because they don't have much of an argument.

Bush can babble on and on about how he respects life, but no one's forgetting his and Alberto Gonzales's roles in making Texas the top executing state in the nation. He can talk about human dignity, but the photos from Abu Ghraib will follow his legacy forever. He can cry over the poor fetus, while he destroys entire schools.

He can do it, but that doesn't make it right. And it's not going to make people forget who he is and what he's done. Monsters don't get to lecture us on morality -- not without posts like this following the lecture.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; propaganda; religious right; civil rights; SCOTUS; Hey Bush, if abortion is murder, then what the hell do you call the war in Iraq?