Archives for 2011

…Overrule ’em:

Planned Parenthood of Indiana expects to start offering services to Medicaid patients again Saturday after a federal judge ruled the state is not allowed to cut off the organization’s public funding for general health services solely because it also provides abortions.

A good article here on how being informed isn’t “anti” anything.

No one can call themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-woman” and stand in opposition to the Women’s Right to Know Act (House bill 854).  This piece of legislation requires that women receive a consultation with a doctor, are given information on alternatives to abortion, offered an ultrasound, and given a 24-hour waiting period before having an abortion. […]

Nevertheless, this bill has generated a series of protests from the pro-choice crowd with arguments that the legislation violates the doctor/patient relationship, it makes the decision to have an abortion more painful for the woman and it is just one more step towards making abortions more difficult to obtain.

But the arguments stem from a misunderstanding of the current situation for women seeking an abortion.  When all the facts are included, this bill is not polarized and does not seek a hidden agenda. […]

I was curious about how much doctor interaction was available to patients seeking an abortion so I called a Woman’s Choice center to schedule the procedure.  They informed me that I could come that same day and wouldn’t have to talk to anyone before my appointment; I could be “in and out.”

Regardless of your stance on abortion, this is not right.  No woman or young girl should be able to have an abortion without a doctor consult.  This is a decision and medical procedure that she will live with for the rest of her life; meanwhile abortion clinics treat patients as if they were customers at a drive-thru fast food restaurant.

This bill cannot violate the doctor/patient relationship because there is no doctor/patient relationship to speak of under the typical abortion procedure.

Emphasis added.

This could be another good reason to not go on birth control:

Women are more prejudiced toward male strangers when they are fertile, says a new U.S. study, which suggests bias is partly ingrained in human DNA.

Researchers at Michigan State University asked 252 female university students, both Caucasian and black, to look at photos of men’s faces, also both Caucasian and black. The women then had to link each face with either a physical adjective, such as muscular, or a mental one, such as brainy.

. . .

Their study found that fertile women were less accepting of the men they perceived as being muscular if the men were of different race than their own. And because that bias jumped when women were at the peak of their menstrual cycle, when they are most fertile, that prejudice appears to be partly innate, said lead study author Melissa McDonald said.

It’s nothing short of a miracle that I married and am having a baby with my husband. He’s a VERY strange man.

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Andrea adds: Or, it could be a good reason to not fund studies such as these. That was my first thought.

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Deborah adds: But THEN what would the government do with our money?

Big article in the National Post today, a book excerpt from Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada runs your life:

There were respectable legal arguments on both sides in the Morgentaler case. McIntyre and La Forest were no mean jurists, and they disagreed with the majority decision. There were three separate judgments from the justices in the majority, each significantly different from the other two. The conclusion may have been clear, but there was no clear reason for the conclusion. The decision was five to two. Richard Posner has written of the U.S. Supreme Court, “Many of the landmark decisions were decided by close votes and would have been decided the other way had the Court been differently but no less ably manned.”  The same is true of Morgentaler.

Parliament is where decisions of this sort should reside, not the Supreme Court.

I like this column about Toronto’s mayor not marching in the pride parade over Canada Day. But I’ll quibble with this point:

The knives that are out for Mr. Ford have nothing to do with this particular decision, though. The exaltation of homosexuality is second only to the reverence paid to unfettered abortion as a litmus test for political correctness amongst our cognitive and cultural elites. Rob Ford’s sin is that he does not believe in mixing politics with sexuality pride. Rob Ford is not a homophobe, but nor on the other hand does he think it is any particular honour to be homosexual. Many Canadians not schooled in the catechism of gender correctness agree with him.

You may remember that I grew up in Toronto and it’s the only city where I can find my way without a map. I further, for better or for worse, travelled in circles that included our cognitive and cultural elites. And while I’d probably rather not be the vocal pro-lifer at a downtown Toronto cocktail party, I am 100 per cent certain I would not want to speak in favour of Rob Ford on this one.

The exaltation of homosexuality in Toronto is second to absolutely nothing.

The “M” word (for morality) might even be slightly less popular than the “A” word. Nonetheless, we can’t escape it. More on the riots:

What Cacnio is telling us, then, is that, on a night in which she says she was so jumped up with adrenaline and booze that she found looting a store to be a perfectly rational thing to do, she was also morally aware and clear-headed enough to put her love of the natural world into action by saving some trees.

The same sort of morality is often on display in the abortion debate. I’ve met vegetarians/environmentalists who have had abortions. It’s a question of what you believe to be right and wrong, and I say that in a dispassionate tone. We teach today that the natural environment is sacred. We simultaneously teach that it is a choice to have an abortion.

It doesn’t matter that those two contradict each other or that our sense of morality is skewed. (People, not trees, anyone?) People respond to the teaching they have received. I don’t know anything about Cacnio, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had also learned that capitalists are immoral, and if that didn’t inform her choice to steal from the “greedy bastards.”

I’ve heard of the concept, but now the concept has a name, ‘Maternity Tourism‘.

NEW YORK, June 21, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Immigration has long been a hotly debated and divisive political issue. A recent Harris Poll sheds light on a new twist in the old debate–the question of “maternity tourism”, or birthing trips where pregnant foreigners travel to the U.S. to give birth, making any child born an automatic U.S. citizen.

[…]

This poll raises some interesting questions, yet the responses showing bi-partisan agreement across several issues and opinion statements is even more interesting. Although immigration has been a politically divisive topic, the issue of maternity tourism is slightly different – it is claimed that many foreigners participating in maternity tourism have no intention of permanently settling in the United States. Rather, they enter the U.S., obtain citizenship for their newborn baby, and then return (with the child) to their home country. While it’s unclear how widespread this practice is, this poll makes clear that Americans see it as an abuse of our system, which they would like to prevent. It will be interesting if legislators pursue this at all, or even if it can be determined how common the practice may be.

What are the motives of such an endeavor? Well, despite the notion that it’s an “abuse” of a system, the parents of these children don’t actually obtain any resident status or receive any services. In the U.S., these out-of-pocket services for traveling mothers-to-be would include medical care and hospital stays. While these women return home to their native countries, they wait and care for their American-born children until they turn 21. At 21, these children could then petition the U.S. government to allow their parents to become residents (a process not easily done and requiring quite a bit of money in your bank account). It seems like an awful lot of trouble for not much pay-off, but if this fraction of women are so desperate to have American children, what’s the problem?

The Center for Health Care Statistics estimates that there were 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year.

Liked this one. Because today we don’t remember the heroic and laudable qualities of men often enough: 

The feminist movement introduced an unbelievable amount of tension into the relationships between men and women. Feminism gave us women permission to nag and criticize our husbands, which most women can do just fine without any special permission. The legacy of the feminist movement has been to turn the home, which should be the place of cooperation, into a sphere of competition between men and women. And ironically, feminism, which was supposed to be about getting beyond stereotypes, supported the most negative of stereotypes about men.

I have my own pet theory about the stereotype of men dragging their feet about getting married. The socio-biologists claim that men want to invest their seed in as many women as possible, and therefore do not want marriage. I think this is only a dim shadow of the whole truth. The whole truth must include this great fact about men: They are capable of heroic loyalty. When men finally do marry, they are capable of committing themselves to the care of their wives and children. Many men spend a lifetime working at jobs they don’t like very much, for the love of their families. When men marry, they take it very seriously. It is women who initiate most divorces. It is divorced men who commit suicide at twice the rate as married men, while divorce has little impact on the suicide propensities of women.

The Susan B. Anthony List sponsors a pro-life pledge that they ask presidential candidates to sign. That’s fine, but in some cases, these sorts of pledges are political ploys. Point proven, here. Does anyone doubt that Herman Cain is pro-life, through and through? But he won’t sign the pledge:

I support right-to-life issues unequivocally and I adamantly support the first three aspects of the Susan B. Anthony pledge involving appointing pro-life judges, choosing pro-life cabinet members, and ending taxpayer-funded abortions,” Cain said in a statement. “However, the fourth requirement demands that I ‘advance’ the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. As president, I would sign it, but Congress must advance the legislation.”

“I have been a consistent and unwavering champion of pro life issues,” Cain added. “In no way does this singular instance of clarification denote an abandonment of the pro-life movement, but instead, is a testament to my respect for the balance of power and the role of the presidency.”

 To this I say, way to go Herman. I’m not looking for people to sign on the dotted line, I’m looking for action, which speaks louder than words. Oftentimes the pro-life groups pushing the pledges get so caught up in the legalism of it all that they fail to see the forest for the trees. It’s not wise politics.

Kathy Shaidle asks, based on this book review of Unnatural Selection:

There is so much to recommend in “Unnatural Selection” that it’s sad to report that Ms. Hvistendahl often displays an unbecoming political provincialism.

She begins the book with an approving quote about gender equality from Mao Zedong and carries right along from there. Her desire to fault the West is so ingrained that she criticizes the British Empire’s efforts to stamp out the practice of killing newborn girls in India because “they did so paternalistically, as tyrannical fathers.”

She says that the reason surplus men in the American West didn’t take Native American women as brides was that “their particular Anglo-Saxon breed of racism precluded intermixing.” (Through most of human history distinct racial and ethnic groups have only reluctantly intermarried; that she attributes this reluctance to a specific breed of “racism” says less about the American past than about her own biases.) (…)

Ms. Hvistendahl is particularly worried that the “right wing” or the “Christian right”—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself. She believes that something must be done about the purposeful aborting of female babies or it could lead to “feminists’ worst nightmare: a ban on all abortions.”

It is telling that Ms. Hvistendahl identifies a ban on abortion—and not the killing of tens of millions of unborn girls—as the “worst nightmare” of feminism. Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue. Yet, while she is not willing to say that something has gone terribly wrong with the pro-abortion movement, she does recognize that two ideas are coming into conflict: “After decades of fighting for a woman’s right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right.”