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Archives for February 2008
What Bill Clinton thinks about pro-lifers
Hear Bill Clinton lash out at pro-life students:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfmJeIJpns]
The sound is not great. I will spare you the joy of listening to bad audio several times. He says:
I gave you the answer. We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth, tell the truth, if you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison…
Is that a fact?
As a pro-life advocate, I find the issue of criminalization anything but straightforward. On the one hand, I do not share concerns about imposing my morality on others since the purpose of criminal law is to impose a minimal morality on those who might not have it. When we live law-abiding lives and expect others to do the same, we impose our morality on others. When John Robin Sharpe tells us that child porn is a valid form of self-expression, we impose our morality on him by not putting up with it. On the flip side, the Supreme Court of Canada imposed their morality on me in Morgentaler and again in Tremblay v. Daigle.
When people say that they don’t want to impose their morality on others in the context of abortion, what they really mean is that they don’t want to do it in that particular context. This is problematic because it recognizes abortion as a legitimate choice in some cases thereby seriously undermining the pro-life position.
On the other hand, I also find myself at odds with calls for the criminalization of abortion. Not because I think that abortion is a legitimate choice but because I believe that in our present socio-cultural environment, criminalizing abortion would further victimize women. And I am not talking about clothes-hangers. Bear with me:
I believe that criminal law serves its most important purpose as instrument of social ordering not by its coercive force but by the general sense that the limits it imposes on free choice are legitimate and necessary. Unfortunately, abortion has been seen as a necessary and legitimate choice in Canadian society for many years.
As things stand now, abortion is not seen as an anti-social act from which society needs to protect itself. Even worse, right now Canadian society benefits from the (induced) infertility of its women. We all benefit from the strong economy fueled by the presence of women on the labor market. We all benefit by the consumer prices driven down, in part, by not paying the real cost of having mothers in the labor force. And we will not pay the real cost of having women in our labor force as long as our fiscal and social policies cast childrearing as a personal choice that women must assume.
In Canada – indeed, in most Western societies – women who get abortions do not behave in an anti-social manner. I will go even further and say that women who have no children or few children act as our stuff-hungry, profit-making, economically-growing, materialist society expects them to.
Pro-life reader, we have some work ahead of us before abortion could be made illegal. It is simply not enough to say abortion is wrong. Women need to be convinced that it is.
Who’s looking to Thatcher?
When asked how the world would deal with a woman in the White House, Ms. Clinton urged her audience to look to the example of Margaret Thatcher…
Chelsea Clinton said Americans should look to Thatcher’s example–but shouldn’t her mom do that at least once, first?
“Yes we can.”
I have to admit that I find Barack Obama charming. But then, the author Rumer Godden described her first husband as “charming”, adding “I have mistrusted charm every since”.
In the same way, I find something compelling and catchy about this “yes we can” video. If nothing else (and I’m pretty sure there is nothing else), it’s catchy. At the same time, the rhythmic chanting of glassy-eyed, “I’m too cool to have facial expressions” celebrities is faintly creepy.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY]
My seven-year old summed the whole message up after about 5 seconds of viewing: “Yes, we can what? That’s dumb.”
But I have discovered a way of increasing the entertainment factor of the video exponentially: every time one of the celebrity-automatons echoes “Yes we can”, answer “No you can’t”. This provides good training for dealing with politicians with grand ideas for “change” and, incidentally, small children. After all, if you have to say a phrase eighty times a day, it’s good to have a catchy beat to go with it.
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Andrea adds: “Yes, we can” look profoundly serious and important while saying nothing of substance. Yes, we can. (From time to time I consider whether I could join a political party. Just when I start to think perhaps I could, I see something like this…and it’s back to square one. No, I can’t.)
Feeeeeeel the loooooove
Five minutes by phone to get married and gain legal entry into Canada? Dashed convenient, this Sharia stuff.
The ultimate sacrifice
He’s on to something:
At first there is a net increase in CO2 “costs” as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings on the CO2 account. “Short term pain for long term gain.”
Warning: No one is complaining about this…
…but they are complaining about this.
This picture was published in the Hill Times this week.
“It’s offensive.” “It’s fake.” “It’s exaggerated, changed through PhotoShop.” “It’s inappropriate because kids could have seen it.”
Come on, complaining people! Throw me a bone! You were in a tizzy over the image of the pregnant woman, and you’ve banned clubs because of strategies like this. This ad is as graphic as they come and the silence is hurting my ears.
NB: When the complaints roll in over anti-abortion campaigns it’s not because they are graphic. It’s because of the topic. We don’t like to see pictures of something so violent and yet so commonplace, happening not to puppies but to people.
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Brigitte adds: Reminds me of something Malcolm Muggeridge once said. “If Hitler had treated dogs the way he treated the Jews, the British people would have clamored for war two years earlier.” Though I would say that 1) I object to the mistreatment of humans and animals; but 2) I would no more run bloody pictures of mangled dogs as I would bloody pictures of mangled humans. Not right there in a newspaper. On a website, after a warming page, yes. But not where people stumble upon it unaware. I don’t think you need a warning in front of pictures of pregnant women.
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Véronique adds: Oh Andrea, don’t do this to me! I’m going to have nightmares now…
Okay, I will come clear: I have never seen pictures of aborted fetuses. Never. I don’t go to pro-life rallies because I hear that they are plastered everywhere, which could as well be a pro-abortion tactic to keep queasy people like me from pro-life rallies, who knows? I have a vivid imagination and I can hardly stomach medical – written – descriptions of abortion procedures. But that’s because I care about these tiny little human beings.
Which may explain why I don’t understand why we need to use graphic images. Are we stupid or what? If I write that when dogs fight they rip each others’ eyes out, why do people need to see what a ripped out eye looks like? Eye. Out of socket. Blood. Ouch. Isn’t it obvious?
Same thing with abortion. If I write that the baby, looking discernibly human, must be dismembered before being extracted in pieces through a woman’s vagina, what else needs to be shown? I don’t understand why people who don’t object to the words “dilation and extraction” and the medical reality they relate would object to an image of fetal parts being extracted through the said dilated cervix.
People don’t care. That’s the tragedy. But I’m not sure that shocking them senseless is the way to their hearts.
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Andrea adds: If you’ve seen the movie Amazing Grace recall the point where William Wilburforce has a boat cruise of well-heeled society types pull up beside a slave ship. He holds up the shackles, and as they raise their handkerchiefs to their noses because of the smell, he tells them not to, to breath it in, because this is what those slaves had to endure on those ships, and much worse. We are sensually motivated, and more and more everyday. People don’t care, this is true, and I’m not sure how to make a blasé, “pragmatic,” public care. Seems to me that words might work for some, images for others, a combination of both for others still. The latter worked for me: Words alone and images alone I could ignore. But I heard a presentation accompanying those images given by Stephanie Gray in Calgary, (she works for the Centre for Bioethical Reform) and that–alongside watching a video of an abortion–that I have not been able to forget, and will remember as long as I live. Sure, I have nightmares sometimes, but isn’t that the point? A macabre business, dealing strictly in death, goes on around me every day, and is easily ignored by the vast majority. I do agree with Paul Tuns here, however. Tactics ought not to be the focal point of the debate.
And I am sorry, Véronique. It was not a nice post for a Saturday morning.
Values voters and McCain
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2JoSo17Azk]
Barring something very strange between now and November, the next president of the USA will be Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Barack Obama. The Democrats are currently divided, along some very interesting lines, between Obama and Clinton.
By contrast, the Republicans fall into a number of different camps, most of which are lukewarm-to-actively-hostile to McCain. Fortunately, save for Ann Coulter (see YouTube clip) the petulant calls to sit out the election or cast a protest vote for Hillary have subsided. Still, there remains a lack of enthusiasm for McCain among social and fiscal conservatives.
Arguments that conservatives and Republicans will or ought to stay home on election day generally rest on one of three postulations.
The first is that McCain is not a “real” conservative, and hasn’t earned their votes.
The second is that McCain is so eager to reach across the aisle and be moderate that electing him is tantamount to electing Hillary or Obama.
Finally, some analysts suggest that the long-term health of the Republican Party requires a crushing defeat this year, so that the (perceived) heresies of compassionate conservatism, neoconservatism and big-government conservatism can be rooted out.
Each of these ideas is badly flawed. I’ll address each of them in turn.
On fiscal and social conservatism, McCain has repeatedly asserted he did not “manage for profit,” as did Mitt Romney, but rather “led for patriotism.” Fine. But if he is truly a patriot he must be able to see the connection between the nation’s economic and social health and its ability to carry out the ambitious foreign policy missions he has outlined. That means fiscal issues are intertwined with social ones.
America spends a staggering amount of money on its military. Such budgets are only sustainable by an ever-growing and thriving economy; to advocate keeping the military strong, or using it worldwide, without recognizing the crucial nature of a solid economy to back it up, is folly. An effective and muscular foreign policy requires both strong families and a strong economy.
As to the second argument, that McCain is such a moderate that he’s not much better than Hillary or Obama, values voters should know better. McCain is staunchly pro-life, and would prefer to permit abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening risk to the mother’s health. He is also in favour of traditional marriage. (He has not expressed an interest in settling these issues as President, but this is not because he opposes the idea, but rather that he considers that an inappropriate use of federal power in a federal system of government.) And for better or for worse, abortion law is made these days by the Supreme Court, so McCain’s thoughts on what federal abortion law should be are less significant than the judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court (and it is likely that up to three justices will be appointed between 2009 and 2012). Not only has McCain committed to originalist judges, but he even voted in favour of Bork at his confirmation hearings.
On the last point- that a stunning defeat would be a bracing and overall rejuvenating experience for the Republicans–there is some truth to this idea. The question we must ask is, what would the cost be? In the next four years, and possibly eight, what would happen as the Republicans rebuilt? The significance of a Supreme Court with three or more new hard-line liberal justices should be clear; major decisions that have a profound influence on life today, such as Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona, were decided in the 1960s and 1970s. And radical social change is always harder to reverse than to initiate. How much harder to reduce the number of abortions after two more terms of rulings striking down any laws about notification, parental consent, and third trimester abortions?
Exasperation and frustration with McCain are understandable. A moderate and a maverick he might be, but he is closer to mainstream Republicans and conservatives than any Democrat candidate, and Obama and Hillary in particular, could possibly be.
John McCain is perhaps not a values voter’s first choice, but he is certainly not a bad choice, and infinitely preferable to the other name on the ballot in nine months’ time.
Facilitating immaturity
Great article in today’s Globe by Margaret Wente, discussing the hows and whys of beautiful single women who would like to get married but can’t find a man. She cites Kay Hymowitz, author of Marriage and Caste in America, a smart book, which identifies how marriage is a great protector against poverty (to do the book no justice at all in one sentence). Says Hymowitz:
It is marriage and children that turn boys into men… Now that the single young man can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can – and will – try to stay a child-man…
Adds Wente:
In other words, why grow up, when you can get sex whenever you want and spend 25 hours a week playing with your Xbox 360?
Indeed. When sex has no ramifications at all and is a separate game entirely from pregnancy and children… Why grow up? It’s just one more reason why the friendly feministas who love abortion are, in a sense, preventing women from reaching their goals and facilitating more Xbox time for aging male adolescents. It’s not very pro-woman in my mind.
Some women don’t want to wed, and sleeping around may suit them fine. But those who do ought to know that sex without consequences is a poor way to get there.
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Véronique adds: Reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man about 12 years ago. I was 22, in my second year of law school and expecting my second child. He was asking me so many questions about the reasons why I “kept” my babies. I felt like an exhibit at the anthropology museum.
At some point, I asked: “You have sex with your girlfriend, don’t you?” He answered: “Yes, of course.” I asked again: “Haven’t you thought about these things?” “About what things?” “Well, what will you do if she gets pregnant?” “Well, I’m too young to be a father!” I replied, “Well, I’m too young to be a mother, but here I am. You didn’t answer my question: What will you do if your girlfriend gets pregnant?” “Well, she would get an abortion.” I asked: “What if she couldn’t? I always thought abortion would be an option until I got pregnant. I knew immediately that I would never be able to go through with it. I think that some women are unable to even contemplate getting abortions. What will you do if your girlfriend is one of them?” “Then it would be her choice. If I choose not to be a father and offer to pay for the abortion, she’s responsible for her choice if she doesn’t want to go through with it.”
Today’s knight in shining armor offers to pay for the abortion. How did our expectations get so low?
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Rebecca adds: I agree with both of you, but would add that it’s marriage and family that makes kids of any age into adults. (Well, ideally. We all know people who manage to be astonishingly adolescent despite spouses and children.) The perpetual adolescents of Friends, Sex and the City etc., generally concerned themselves with the anxieties an earlier generation consigned to high school years: Does he like me? What should I wear? Will he dump me? Should I ask him out? And so on, despite steaming merrily into their 30s and 40s.
Growing up is hard. Marriage and parenthood are hard. (For that matter, running a marathon or finishing a degree are hard. Not many major accomplishments are easy.) In a culture that values immediate gratification, and defines happiness as pleasure, rather than anything more substantial, we have essentially stopped asking people to live adult lives, which often requires foregoing transient pleasure in the short term (uncommitted sex, 40 hours a week of Xbox) for the sake of longer term happiness (building a solid family, being able to support that family.)
Hymowitz is always worth reading. Another author on the same topic is David Blankenhorn, who pointed out that if in the 1990s, fatherlessness led to a “feminization of poverty,” this only came about because of a corresponding masculinization of irresponsibility.
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Andrea adds again: What a fine Valentine’s Day discussion this is: The “feminization of poverty” versus the “masculinization of irresponsibility.” Love it. But perhaps not first date material for the unsuspecting male. (Wait until the second.)
“Did you feel this?”
A reader directed me to this New York Times article, which sent me on a research frenzy. As a lawyer/ethicist, I am out of my league commenting on the state of fetal neuro-science. But I have some observations.
Given what goes on during an abortion procedure, I am quite desperate to believe the American Medical Association when it tells me that fetuses – pardon my Latin – are unable to process a painful stimulus until the third trimester of pregnancy. I find it difficult to do so because:
The topic of fetal pain has received the same polarizing treatment as all other matters of abortion, meaning that whether or not fetuses feel pain now depends on where you stand on the pro-life to pro-abortion continuum. Which is scientifically and academically troubling since:
Brain structures are not political. Either fetuses feel pain and abortion hurts them or fetuses don’t feel pain and abortion doesn’t hurt them. The question is: does it matter? Is the legitimacy of abortion affected by whether or not fetuses feel it? Is abortion wrong because it hurts or is it wrong because it kills? Would those who don’t object to ending fetal life object to causing fetal pain? I wonder.
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