USA Today has an interesting article comparing the terms of assisted-suicide legislation in various countries.

Oregon: The Oregon Death with Dignity Act (ODDA) passed in 1994, applies only to people who have reached the age of majority (legal age) and have been diagnosed as being terminally ill. It offers the successful applicant assisted suicide; a doctor gives the patient a prescription for a fatal dose of barbiturates that the patient can take. The law is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Netherlands: In 2002, the government legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia (the doctor administers a fatal injection of drugs). The law is not limited to adults, nor does an applicant for euthanasia have to be terminally ill. The main basis for a request is hopeless and unbearable suffering, regardless of life expectancy.

All cases are reviewed by medical committees, and instances of suspected wrongdoing are referred to judicial investigators. The Dutch government is reviewing a protocol to allow euthanasia, with parental consent, for infants born with terminal and painful illnesses.

Switzerland: Article 115 of the Swiss Penal Code exempts people who assist in a suicide for honorable motives, such as to help bring an end to suffering. Switzerland also allows voluntary organizations to help people, including foreigners, end their lives. Where lethal medication is required, a doctor’s prescription is obtained. All acts of assisted suicide are reported to the police and investigated.

Belgium: The Belgian Act on Euthanasia, passed in 2002, defines euthanasia as “intentionally terminating life by someone other than the person concerned at the latter’s request.” Assisted suicide remains illegal. Requirements include that the patient should have attained the age of majority, that the request be “voluntary, well-considered and repeated” and the patient be “in a futile medical condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated.” All acts of euthanasia must be reported to the authorities.

Britain: A bill was introduced this month in the House of Lords that would allow a competent and terminally ill person who has reached the age of majority and is suffering unbearably to request either assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia. It sets requirements including an assessment by an attending physician that the patient is likely to die of natural causes within a few months, that the patient is competent to make the request and that he or she is suffering unbearably. The patient must sign a written declaration of intent. If this has not been revoked within 14 days of the date on which the request was first made, the patients can receive the means to take his or her own life or, if the patient is physically unable to do that, have his or her life ended through voluntary euthanasia. A medical committee would review all cases.

The major differences have to do with a requirement for terminal illness or unbearable physical pain. (Belgium is interesting, though, in allowing voluntary euthanasia by a second party, while banning assisted suicide - the reverse of the usual distinction when distinctions are made.) This gets to the heart of whether voluntary euthanasia is seen as an act of beneficence from a somewhat paternalistic standpoint, or an exercise of patient autonomy. The requirement for a terminal diagnosis or severe pain is a requirement that the subject be in one specific - out of the many possible - conditions that might motivate suicide, and one that is objectively verifiable by persons other than the subject themselves in such form that those others personally approve of the individual’s decision. (The determination that a patient is in “severe” pain, or “unbearable” pain, is nothing more than a determination that the patient’s pain is great enough to warrant suicide, in the doctor’s opinion - else the pain is merely “moderate” by definition.) Alternatively, the requirement that the subject merely be of sound mind, without requiring that they have any specific motivation for their request, or that others ratify the subject’s opinion that that subject’s life is no longer worth living, is a recognition of autonomy - the patient’s right to control their own future according to their own values. Some countries take one route, some take the other - and both justifications are heard in the ongoing debate over voluntary euthanasia.

Exactly what we are doing in honoring requests for assistance in dying - or just why we should honor them if we do - is still not a matter of agreement.

Hat tip: And Rightly So!

Apparently Planned Parenthood gives off some sort of persistent contaminating miasma, or bad vibes or something. At any rate, they exude such a powerful pro-choice aura that anti-choice Catholics not only must shun their presence but even locations where Planned Parenthood members have once gathered.

The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix has barred a mass at a private events center that was recently rented out for a Planned Parenthood event. . . .

The Reverend David Sanfilippo calls Planned Parenthood “one of the largest abortion providers in the nation.” He said it would be inappropriate for a Catholic Mass to take place at the same location it used.

Note that this was a private hall simply rented for a meeting by Planned Parenthood. Locations like this abound, and are used by all sorts of groups. If Catholics have to avoid any location that once hosted a gathering by anyone who fails to live up to C atholic doctrine, they’re going to have to avoid an awful lot of places (including, possibly, some Catholic churches!).

Interestingly, Planned Parenthood has no proscription on gathering in locations where Catholics once met, so it’s obvious who’s got the greater mojo.

Wendy at Pound#! has the perfect revenge for Target, Wal-Mart, and other pharmacies who choose whether you get to have emergency contraception when you need it - bring them the kids they’re so eager for you to have!

But where can you take your kids, relax a little, and impose your own values on strangers? Forget those twee little bakeries with their overpriced scones and tin ceilings: Why not take your kids to the pharmacy at Target instead? Or Rite Aid? Or Walgreen’s? Any pharmacy, in fact, with a policy of employing pharmacists who believe children are so special, they think it’s a shame when you try to not conceive them. These nice people in white coats will be thrilled to host your rambunctious toddlers for a couple hours while you shop. Sure, they make it hard for you to get Plan B, but you can always count on them for a big dose of Plan Wheeeee!

Who says a pharmacy isn’t a kid-friendly place? Some of these pharmacists like children so much, they want you to have the ones you didn’t even mean to have! And when you think about it, pharmacies are awesome places for young children to run and play, especially behind that door marked PRIVATE (Go on in! These folks don’t care about privacy!) which leads to a wonderful land of bottles and jars to shake shake shake. Plus plenty of childproof caps to challenge them, hundreds of colorful little beadies to count, lots of new words to learn (Say it: “Meth-o-trex-ate.”) and no shortage of arthritic elderly friends to trip up. Really, it’s like a Montessori school with Muzak.

Some folks think the kind of pharmacists who refuse to fill emergency contraception prescriptions are judgmental and stodgy, but that’s just not true at all. They’re actually spontaneous and fun, always encouraging you to embrace the unknown! Hey, take a chance on that broken condom!, they’ll say, or aw, what’s another baby? or just because he’s a date rapist doesn’t mean he can’t be a good daddy! This whimsical approach to life means they won’t mind at all if your 3-year old wants to repeatedly kick the glass case where the razor blades are kept, stick Nicorette patches on Mrs. DeSimone’s leg while she waits to pick up her heart medication, or see what’s inside Mr. Thermometer. In the meantime, especially if you’re at Target, you can shop for thongs, or liquor, or wholesome toys, content in the knowledge that someone with moral values is looking out for your children, even the children that don’t exist yet.

[emphases original]

Good plan.

Hat tip: Reproductive Rights blog

Wesley J. Smith is, as usual, all het up about animal rights activism - this time on Constitutional Law grounds. I can hardly understand what he’s trying to say, but it makes little sense (again, as usual).

A few years ago, animal rights/liberation activists successfully convinced Florida voters to grant pregnant pigs the state constitutional right to have enough space within which to turn around. Now, that may be a perfectly fine and humane animal husbandry policy. But, pigs do not belong in human constitutions.

Human constitutions should be about guaranteeing human rights and establishing our democratic methods of governance. Animal protection measures belong in legal statutes. In this way, it isn’t the animals having a “right,” but rather, humans having the affirmative obligation to act toward them in appropriate ways.

But, of course, protecting pigs was not the point of that exercise. Blurring the crucial distinction between animals and humans was the real agenda.

Though I agree with Smith that animal-rights groups often go too far, I’m having a hard time seeing this as some sort of conspiracy. But Smith is aghast at the potential consequences. In the post linked above, he quotes his own editorial on the same subject:

If we are to avoid “speciesism,” [animal rights advocates’] thinking goes, we must give up our belief that life has ultimate value simply because it is human. This objective standard, in their thinking, being steeped in religion or outmoded notions of natural law, must be replaced by a “rational” approach that accords value to each individual — animal or human — based primarily on the level of the individual’s perceived level of consciousness or the ability to feel pain.

One expression of this view is the bioethical theory of “personhood,” according to which rights are based on whether one’s “quality of life” is sufficient to qualify for membership in the “moral community” made up of sentient, self-aware “persons.” Since value is based on gray matter and not genome, non-sentient humans — including newborn infants, Alzheimer’s patients, the severely retarded, and the comatose, among others — would be excluded from this community. At the same time, some “nonhuman animals” would be included in the moral community, including dogs, pigs, elephants, dolphins, whales — perhaps all mammals.

The consequences of such a radical shift in core societal beliefs would be profound. As animal rights author and lawyer Steven M. Wise recently told the Village Voice, establishing legal personhood for animals would grant them “the [same] fundamental rights that we humans have.” This would mean, according to Wise, that “If you wanted to do something to violate the animals’ rights, at the very least they should have a guardian appointed to represent their interests, the way a human child or any severely impaired human would.”

Of course, it is a long way from granting limited constitutional rights to pregnant pigs to expanding coverage of the Bill of Rights to all animals. But it would definitely be a first step on the proverbial thousand-mile journey.

This is a fair characterization of the thinking of some animal-rights advocates (and of many bioethicists who do not go so far as to include animals in the sphere of personhood). But it is a far cry from accepting mental capacity as a criterion for moral personhood to imagining that writing animal rights into a state Constitution will establish animals as persons in the legal sense. Though this is a much-honored tactic of the anti-choice right wing, who have been feverishly writing fetal-protection statutes into the law wherever they can manage it, in the expectation that calling a fetus a person will make it a person, it is just as irrational in the case of fetuses as it is in the case of animals. The entire enterprise (if indeed this is what animal-rights activists are attempting to do, as Smith imagines) is logically backward: for “rights” for these entitities to make any sense, you must first demonstrate that they are moral persons; then you can talk about what legal status they ought to have. But merely imposing certain legal regulations on the treatment of a given entity does not make it a moral (or a legal) person. You can mandate legal protections for non-persons (and we do so all the time: flags, parklands, national monuments, dead bodies, etc.). You can demand “humane” or non-harmful treatment for non-persons as well, as again we do in many cases (pets, farm animals, etc.). But simply declaring that we think certain entities should be treated in certain ways does not mean we think those entities are persons. Even declaring that we think they should be treated in the way that they would have to be treated if they were in fact persons does not make them persons. (You can treat something as if it was a person even when it’s not one.) The claim that a given entity is a person is logically prior to the claim that the entity enjoys the rights of personhood by virtue of being a person, and nothing can change that.

Strangely, Smith seems to believe that legal constitutions must not contain anything that does not pertain to specifically human rights.

Granting animals constitutional rights would cheapen these charters. Indeed, it would undermine constitutions as exclusively establishing and protecting human rights.

But it’s clear that constitutions do much more than that. They establish the structures of government and the law, stipulate terms, powers, and privileges of offices, decree relations between the constitutional entity and other entities, declare and regulate the rights of subjects, and many other things. Democratic government may embody certain notions of human rights, but nothing about human rights is invoked in stipulating that a President shall serve for 4 years, or 6, or 7, or what have you. Whether the government includes a unicameral or bicameral legislature is of great political significance but has nothing to do with personhood and almost nothing to do with rights. Smith states that animal-protection is all right in the statutory laws, but takes on some sort of ominous moral significance if written into the constitution; this seems not only a distinction that makes very little moral difference, but one founded on a delusion about what a constitution is. And the fact that many US states use their constitutions as a kind of repository for laws passed by referendum (California’s state constitution is over 200 pages long and has been amended over 400 times), without trespassing on any grave moral concepts in doing so, makes it clear Smith is working from assumptions that have nothing to do with legal reality.

A case from Peru, brought before the UN Human Rights Committee, resulted in a ruling that the Peruvian government had violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by denying a 17-year-old pregnant woman access to abortion services and forcing her carry her anencephalic fetus to term and breastfeed it until it died.

Today, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) decided its first abortion case, KL v. Peru. The decision establishes that denying access to legal abortion violates women’s most basic human rights. This is the first time an international human rights body has held a government accountable for failing to ensure access to legal abortion services. The Human Rights Committee monitors countries’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“We are thrilled that the UNHRC has ruled in favor of protecting women’s most essential human rights,” says Luisa Cabal, Director of the International Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Every woman who lives in any of the 154 countries that are party to this treaty – including the U.S – now has a legal tool to use in defense of her rights. This ruling establishes that it is not enough to just grant a right on paper. Where abortion is legal it is governments’ duty to ensure that women have access to it.”

The ruling also provides for reparations for the woman, and requires the Peruvian government to establish regulations that will provide for access to legal abortion services.

I have to admit I don’t fully understand the legal implications of this ruling. If I understand correctly, the UN is not taking a position on abortion per se, only that the government may not arbitrarily deny its citizens the free exercise of rights they otherwise have under the laws of their nation. In other words, the problem in this case was not that abortion was or was not legal, but that, given that it was legal under the circumstances, the government had no right to prevent her from obtaining one.

If that is the correct interpretation, it actually provides little protection for women. Governments that seek to block access to abortion can merely make it illegal or procedurally unobtainable (as many US states have done); the treaty does not demand that governments guarantee abortion rights, but only that they enforce their own laws equably. As to what those laws may be, governments are free to institute either pro- or anti-abortion laws. And, if pressed on the issue, governments are free to withdraw from treaties simply by giving notice - as the Bush administration has already done with the International Criminal Court and the (non-UN) Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (as well as by holding the Kyoto environmental protocol in continual limbo).

However, this at least puts the weight of a major international treaty - ratified by over 150 countries, including the US - behind enforcement of women’s rights to abortion where they exist, and against the practice of reactionary governments’ cynical refusal to obey their own laws in the case of abortion. How much legal impact this will have remains to be seen, though it clearly has implications for the United States, where some states have declared official anti-abortion policies above and beyond the legal restrictions on abortion rights that they have enacted. Where the state has discretionary authority and uses it to block women’s rights, or where they violate the access rights allowed under their existing laws, they are now on notice that they are in violation of a UN treaty guaranteeing due process for abortion rights as well as other aspects of the law - and the US government is now obligated by treaty to guarantee the enforcement of laws granting access to abortion, under a treaty obligation to protect all civil rights, whether they like it or not.

One persistent scare-tactic of the anti-abortion crowd for years now has been touting the supposed “link” between abortion and breast cancer. (The idea is that breast cancer is hormonally triggered, and is made more likely by hormones present at the beginning of pregnancy, and less likely by hormones triggered by childbirth. Thus, women who carry a birth to term get a wash - no net effect on their likelihood of breast cancer, while women who terminate a pregnancy get all the bad effect and none of the good.)

This is a vaguely plausible theory that suffers from a complete lack of evidentiary backing - they just made it up. However, the “Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer” has done a good enough job publicizing their delusion that they have made “ABC” a a linchpin of anti-choice strategies that pretend to be rooted in concern for women’s best interests. (They have also launched a movement, backed by right-wing legal foundations, to bankroll malpractice lawsuits against abortion providers on grounds that the failure to tell patients they were at risk of breast cancer if they had an abortion was a failure of informed consent. This is an attempt to intimidate providers and scare patients away from exercising their abortion rights on the basis of unfounded claims. The right-wing lawyers have essentially unlimited funds, while the doctors already face heavy malpractice premiums, so it does not matter if the lawsuits have a chance of succeeding - they accomplish their purpose just by harrassing providers.) They have garnered enough attention that they convinced over two dozen right-wing members of Congress to sign a letter demanding that the NIH investigate the so-called “ABC” effect. Which it did.

Repeated meta-studies have shown the same result: though individual studies occasionally show a positive link between abortion and breast cancer - taken as “proof” by anti-abortion activists - many more do not, and cross-study summaries show no link. The National Cancer Institute of the NIH reported that, although full-term pregnancy, especially when young, does reduce the lifetime risk of cancer, “Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk”, nor are miscarriages. And just last year, an immense, 16-country meta-analytical data review in The Lancet revealed that, among women followed prospectively (from before they had had either an abortion or breast cancer), those who went on to have abortions actually had a slightly lower risk of breast cancer than the others. (This study also found that, among women with who were asked later in life whether they had previously had an abortion, there was a slightly higher risk of breast cancer among those who reported they had - but, as the researchers pointed out, this was likely due to the distorting effect of the “retrospective” study: women who had had serious health problems were likely to give a fuller health history than others, while those who had no reason to be completely frank with their doctors may have concealed prior abortions. This is the reason for prospective studies, and the likely reason for the distinct difference in results between the prospective and retrospective arms of this meta-study.) Famed breast cancer researcher Susan Love says, about the latter study in particular:

The findings from this large international study are important for two reasons. One, they should reassure women that having an abortion does not increase their breast cancer risk. Two, they loudly dispute the lobbying and public relations efforts of groups like the Coalition for Abortion/Breast Cancer Risk, who have been using the results of poorly designed retrospective studies to increase fears about abortion and breast cancer. . . .

It should now be clear that abortion does not increase breast cancer risk. The issues about abortion are serious and controversial but they are not helped by distorting science. Anyone who continues to make that claim is dangerous, irresponsible, and ignoring the evidence.

That hasn’t stopped the propagandists, however.
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Court TV online is reporting this story:

A blind and deaf Australian woman who claims she never should have been born is suing a doctor for a lifetime of suffering in the country’s first “wrongful life” suit.

Alexia Harriton, 24, is seeking compensation from the doctor who misdiagnosed rubella in the first trimester of her mother’s pregnancy, claiming Olga Harriton would have aborted her had she been aware of the potential birth defects arising from the illness.

Lawyers for the Sydney woman argued in Australia’s highest court Thursday that Dr. Paul Stephens is liable for the costs arising from a lifetime of medical treatment that Harriton needs to survive. . . .

Alongside Harriton’s suit is a similar claim from a 5-year-old Australian boy who was born with permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy after doctors failed to detect a blood disorder present in his father’s system.

Keeden Waller’s parents have filed suit on his behalf, claiming they would have sought out other methods of conception had they been aware of the potential for birth defects.

Apparently, Harriton’s parents cannot sue in their own name due to the statute of limitations. Such a suit would - as I understand the law (don’t quote me) - be allowed in many countries, including the US, on grounds of “wrongful birth” or simple malpractice. The theory there is that the parents are harmed by the birth of a child with severe health difficulties, and by being denied the opportunity to choose whether to take on that burden. That argument is reasonable, and such suits are usually successful. (A defense that was commonly tried is that there cannot be any harm in a live birth, because, essentially, babies are always a good thing. But the argument is not that the child should not have been born on objective grounds, rather that the parents should have been given the choice whether it should be or not. Besides which, if every successful live birth is good no matter what, then there is no such thing as malpractice in obstetrics - but obviously there are some births with less-desirable outcomes, and where that is a preventable fault of the physician, the physician should be liable.)

In this case, because that kind of suit is legally blocked, the child is suing in her own name for harms that she herself suffered - namely, the harm of being born. (The same is true in the Waller case, where the parents have filed suit but the son is the official plaintiff.) But, in this case, the only alternative would have been for her (Harriton) not to be born at all (her condition was not caused by a mistake the doctor made during delivery - it was a developmental defect caused by her mother’s illness during the pregnancy, such that the fetus was already affected and nothing could be done about that). It is obvious that the doctor’s actions - not diagnosing rubella and thus failing to warn the mother, as he should have done - caused her to be born as she is. But it is a standard (though not entirely uncontroversial) ethical precept that one is only morally responsible for certain harms if there is something that one could have done differently and that one had an obligation to do. Here it is true that there is something the doctor could have and should have done differently (i.e., correctly diagnose the illness and warn the mother), but that would have resulted in a different outcome only if the mother aborted the pregnancy; there is nothing else she could have done with that warning that would have made a difference.

For a malpractice suit to succeed, the plaintiff must show she was harmed by the doctor’s actions. Given that outcome in question here is her life itself and the only practical thing that could have been done differently would have been to prevent that life, in claiming that this outcome - her life - is a “harm”, she must implicitly be claiming that her life leaves her worse off than the available alternative. In other words, she would have been better off dead at birth. (Similar arguments apply to Waller.)

This is clearly a startling claim, but it is also a challenging one logically and morally. If this claim is equivalent to the claim that she is better off dead now, too, then it seems there is prima facie evidence that this is not so: after all, she has not chosen to kill herself, though it probably wouldn’t be hard to accomplish, so she must obviously prefer being alive now to being dead, and thus the claim that she would be better off dead is obviously one she does not now believe. Indeed, if this is in fact her claim, it seems almost indubitable that her suit ought to fail outright. However, if she is merely making the claim that she would have been better off dead as an infant, although things have changed since, that may be reasonable (it is structurally the same as Dax Cowart’s famous claim that he should have been killed after his disfiguring accident, to terminate his sense of loss and the excruciating treatments he went through, notwithstanding that he was willing to live afterwards). This does not mean that it is true: it is hard to imagine what was so bad about being an infant with rubella-caused birth defects that is worse than being an adult with the same condition - and, again, if she does not regard that as worse than death now, it is not clear it would have been so earlier. And so, if her condition is not, and was not, literally worse than death, it is not clear how she suffered a harm from being born with that condition, if the only alternative was death.

Anti-assisted suicide activists will also object to these suits, on the grounds that they open the door to legal recognition of claims that there are conditions worse than death - a recognition that could justify legal permission to end those conditions when there is no means of ameliorating them. But this is a question of political strategy - not of morality.

At any rate, “wrongful life” suits have not typically been allowed, because they embroil the state in determinations it is uncomfortable making.

“Whether it is better never to have been born at all than to have been born with even gross deficiencies is a mystery more properly to be left to the philosophers and the theologians,” the New York Court of Appeals wrote in a 1986 decision rejecting a similar “wrongful life” claim. “The implications of any such proposition are staggering.”

I don’t know that they are especially “staggering”. They are just difficult to put forward in a logically reasonable way. (If you want to live, your life is not worse to you than death, so you can’t claim you are harmed by being alive if death is the alternative. If your life really is worse to you than death, why are you still living it?) Most (not necessarily all) such suits should fail on straightforward factual grounds. The public policy implications are reached only if we actually take the “wrongful life” claims seriously in the first place, and those implications (that some people really should be dead) are also not “staggering” no matter how much angst the anti-autonomy crowd whips up over them.

I am not glad to see the concept of wrongful life reappearing in the courts, but the issue can be dealth with in a straightforward way. I hope the ruling from the Australian court reaches the issue on its merits.

The Republican Governor of New York has taken to ordering state psychiatric agencies to incarcerate, for the purpose of involuntary psychiatric treatment and indefinite detention, convicted sex offenders who are eligible for release from prison and otherwise show no signs of mental illness and have not undergone a proper, or any, clinical psychiatric evaluation. A State Supreme Court judge has held this is an abuse of the involuntary detention system and a violation of the prisoner/patients’ legal rights.

You would think that would be obvious, but these are perilous times for liberty in whatever form.
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Target discount stores has been embroiled in controversy over its policy of allowing its pharmacists to refuse to dispense valid emergency-contraception prescriptions by reason of “strongly-held religious beliefs”. They have stumbled further into trouble by citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act protections against religious discrimination as grounds for this position.

Joseph Hughes at Americablog has an excellent post taking them to task on this issue. He points out that this policy stance would presumably authorize any Target employee to engage in any offensive behavior toward any customer (er, “guest”), as long as they cited “religious beliefs” as justification.

Yes, apparently Target employees are allowed to not sell you things based on THEIR religion. That’s an absurd, and rather dangerous, legal statement from Target.

So let’s ask Target if they also support the following Target employees:
- Check out clerks who verify how fat you are before selling you that package of potato chips?
- Pharmacists who don’t want to fill prescriptions for Jewish customers who killed Christ.
- Pharmacists who don’t want to help customers who worship a “Satanic counterfeit” (read: “The Pope,” in fundie-speak).
- Pharmacists who only dispense HIV medicine to “innocent victims” of AIDS.
- Pharmacists who want proof that women seeking emergency contraception were really raped, and that they didn’t “deserve it.”
- Pharmacists (or cashiers) who are Christian Scientists - can they refuse to sell any medicine, even aspirin, to anyone?
- Pharmacists who won’t sell birth control pills to unmarried women, condoms to unmarried men, or any birth control at all because God doesn’t want people spilling their seed.
- Can fundamentalist Christian employees refuse to interact with gay people in any way, shape or form since gays are sinners, abominations, biological errors, and very likely pedophiles?

Amazingly, he got a response from a someone in the “Target Executive Offices” (apparently they don’t have job titles there), claiming that EC denial is the only form of religion-based personal offense they permit.

This pretty much blows their “Civil Rights Act” defense entirely out of the water. (There is no reason other forms of offense could not have the same religious basis as EC denial. If Target can prohibit its other employees from acting like jerks, the Civil Rights Act notwithstanding, it can also require its pharmacists to actually fill prescriptions.)

As Target notes, the Civil Rights Act requires that employers make “reasonable accomodations” for employees’ religious beliefs. It is hard to imagine that being allowed to refuse to do your job qualifies as a reasonable accomodation, or as the only accomodation that Target can adopt. They do say they will take steps to see that the prescription gets filled, but also specify that this may mean going to another pharmacy or waiting - which essentially means that EC denial means, in some cases, complete lack of access to the medication, if other pharmacies are not convenient or the waiting period exceeds the short window for taking the drug. Target could, instead, instruct its pharmacists to fill the prescriptions unless there is another person immediately available to perform that duty for them. The “reasonable accomodation” would then be to allow the employee to refuse to act as a professional as long as the patient was not harmed, but not to block access to medication in any circumstance. Target has chosen to put the burden on the patient to find a way to get around the Target employee’s restrictions, when a truly reasonable accomodation would guarantee the patient the care she needs and give the employee the option, but not the guarantee, of induling their personal religious inclinations at their own cost, not the patient’s. That Target has chosen the solution they have - while offering a legal justification that makes not the slightest sense and is undercut by their own policy regarding every other form of religious refusal - speaks volumes about their corporate values.

Clarence Thomas has called for less-in-depth examinations of federal judicial nominees’ views, to minimize the impact of the abortion issue on the judiciary.

Federal court appointments are being held hostage by the abortion issue, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday in advocating a briefer, less intrusive confirmation process.

Speaking to law students at the University of Alabama, Thomas said former clerks and other lawyers often tell him they’re not interested in federal judgeships because of the potential for bruising confirmation battles.

“I think that’s a problem when the stars are beginning to say, `Thank you, but no thanks,’” said Thomas.

Thomas, who opposes the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, said the fight he faced during his own confirmation hearings in 1991 went back to abortion politics. Thomas was accused of sexual harassment, charges he referred to at the time as a “high-tech lynching” for an “uppity” black man.

“I think we all should be honest with one another that the only issue, the central issue in all of this, is abortion. It’s not the other things that people throw out,” he said. “The whole judiciary now is being held, in a sense, hostage to that one issue.”

Without giving specifics, Thomas said the confirmation process should be scaled back and not allow for seemingly every aspect of a nominee’s life to be laid bare.

“We cannot say that all the examination of nominees has improved the court,” said Thomas.

It’s hard to say whether the courts have been helped or harmed - we don’t have the alternative course of history available for comparison. What is certainly true is that they have been shaped by the national debate over abortion - and that seems appropriate. Thomas is right that abortion is the tail that wags the dog, but that is true in electoral politics, cultural conflicts, and many other aspects of society. And it is, in the American legal system, a quintessential judicial issue - the status of abortion rights turns almost entirely on what the judiciary does, because restrictions on abortion rights fall at the interface between state powers and Constitutional guarantees of personal liberty. It would be strange if we did not put that issue in central place in decisions over staffing the judiciary.

We should note, too, that abortion has entered the judicial nomination fights largely by way of attempting to preserve women’s rights against right-wing assault. The judges who have faced questions over abortion have almost universally been the most extreme right-wingers. Thomas may pretend merely to be offering a suggestion for procedural efficiency, but he is really asking for a free pass for anti-choice extremists. And, as pro-choicers have always noted, the right wing can avoid fights over abortion by stopping nominating judges who are trying to take it away. Thomas does not want his right-wing patrons to stop their assault on women’s rights - he simply wants defenders of those rights to stop asking inconvenient questions about it.

What really got me, though, is this:

Thomas said he has never met a judge who attempted to impose a personal agenda through decisions . . . .

How about Scalia, and . . . Thomas? The two super-reactionary Catholics who are staunchly anti-abortion, and who in Scalia’s case can’t stop making public speeches about the role of religion in public discourse, and who have both announced their opposition to the Roe precedent (even if Thomas, idiotically, claimed he had never discussed it or thought about it before his Supreme Court confirmation hearing), just happen to be the two justices who have written dicta time after time begging the Court to overturn Roe and who have supported every conceivable restriction on women’s rights. But the fact that their personal agendas just happen to appear over and over in their judicial opinions is entirely coincidental . . . every single time.

Why do we allow someone so manifestly disingenuous on the Supreme Court? Thomas has been lying brazenly about his own beliefs and his role as a judge since before he was confirmed - lying in ways that don’t even sound like they might be true. His cynical suggestion to place abortion rights off the table is actually Thomas at his most upright. That he can make that suggestion in the same breath with a claim that he doesn’t know any judges with a personal agenda merely marks him as the buffoon he has always been.

Jim Rudd, whose anti-abortion rants we have encountered before, offers another insight into the exteme wing of the anti-choice movement. His most recent post excoriates legislators who do not address abortion the way he chooses, decrying “child killing by abortion [at]the hands of the Department of Human Resources”, “unborn grandchildren . . . murdered — with the help of the State”, and that “lawmakers are saying they intend to keep the murder of children by abortion legal for a very long time”.

The source of his angst? A proposed bill imposing significant restrictions on abortion.

If this seems hard to figure out, apparently the issue is that, in regulating abortion even repressively, the legislators are impliciting endorsing the underlying legality of the procedure - which Rudd cannot abide.

Are Georgia lawmakers aware of the fact that if HB 197 becomes law it would make them, and the citizens of Georgia, directly accountable for the murder of every unborn child killed under these regulations?

Such legislation is NOT pro-life

It can be clearly stated that the expansion of state abortion regulations in killing unborn children by defining how, when, where, on whom, by whom, or with whose permission abortions may be carried out, is NOT “pro-life!”

Regulating abortion is NOT outlawing abortion! Regulating how children are to be killed is NOT outlawing child killing! Quite the contrary.

And it goes without saying that only completely outlawing abortion would satisfy him.

This illustrates something interesting about the most perfervid anti-choicers - that their goals and ideology do not seem constrained by any necessary acknowledgment of reality. Abortion remains, for now, a right guaranteed by fundamental precepts of the Constitution; the most restrictive decisions of the Supreme Court have held that there is at least some core of rights to reproductive self-determination that may not be legislated away, no matter how severely and creatively the Court winkingly encourages states to restrict them. There are unquestionably state legislatures that would do away with all abortion rights if Roe did not stand as good law - some of them have already passed statutes explicitly to that effect, predicated upon the overturning of Roe. But they have not been able to put these wishes into complete effect because of the central holding of Roe that remains in effect. Nobody, pro-choice or anti-choice, would hold the anti-choice legislators responsible for this. Almost everyone would recognize - whether they approve or not - that in passing restrictive legislation but not infringing the central holding of Roe, anti-choicers are getting half a loaf if not more, which is all that it is possible for them to get under the law as it now stands.

But Rudd holds them responsible for making abortion legal, because they have not made it illegal, because they cannot. “Dirty hands” theory notwithstanding, this is bizarre simply from a basic understanding of cause and effect.

And I am certain Rudd is not the craziest person on the right wing. (His sentences end with only a single exclamation point, for instance.) There are no doubt others who join him in banging their heads against the rock of reality - and in assault up0n the people who are supporting their side of the controversy! I certainly don’t mind seeing anti-choicers cannibalizing one another, but it is rather strange.

Just to be clear, when I said he wasn’t the craziest anti-choicer around, I didn’t mean he wasn’t crazy at all. There’s this, among other things:

Christians across the State of Georgia are being lied to by fund-raising special interest groups telling them that HB197 is “pro-life.” Soliciting funds under a false pretense is fraud!

FRAUD occurs when all of the following elements exist:

• An individual or an organization intentionally makes an untrue representation about an important fact or event;
• the untrue representation is believed by the victim (the person or organization to whom the representation has been made);
• the victim relies upon and acts upon the untrue representation;
• the victim suffers loss of money and/or property as a result of relying upon and acting upon the untrue representation. (1)

How To Report A Pro-Life Fraud

If you are a pro-life Christian living in the State of Georgia, and you receive or have received in the U.S. Mail a solicitation or solicitations of funds asking you for “pro-life” support of HB197, you can file a fraud complaint with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service by using its Mail Fraud Complaint Form page.

I’m tempted almost to feel sorry for him, but . . . I don’t. What I do take from this is the utterly uncompromising nature of much anti-choice ideology. The people who hold this position are not only implacably opposed to women’s autonomy, they are enemies even of their co-religionists who are simply not as implacably opposed to the same thing. If this is the rhetoric he uses against other anti-choice activists, you can imagine how tolerant he is willing to be of those who actually disagree with him - or their rights.

It is useful to be reminded of this from time to time. Examples like these reveal the animosity that drives the anti-autonomy camp.

The Women’s Bioethics Project (see “Bioethics Links”, at right) has a new report on the organized efforts of conservative groups to influence bioethics policy and public perceptions - far exceeding those of progressive groups - and to establish restrictive regulations on ethical issues. The report offers an interesting and well-researched overview of the political/ethical landscape and the efforts of these groups. It also profiles their overall agenda and the resources they have put into forwarding it.

By all means read the report. Some highlights:

Key Findings

• Conservatives have well-established bioethics centers with strong advocacy outreach programs that are interlocking and supportive of each other.
• Conservatives are using an existing infrastructure of think tank and religious organizations to drive awareness, energize their constituencies, and support a unified bioethics agenda.
• Conservative foundations are strategically funding high-profile cases with a broad bioethics agenda in mind.
• Conservatives see driving bioethical debate as critical to building a society based on their values and worldview.
• What progressive activities there are in the area of bioethics are under funded, narrowly focused, and lacking in a unified philosophical framework.
• The progressive organizations that have added bioethics to their agenda are the reproductive rights groups that are ill-equipped to carry a broader “progressive bioethics agenda” because of their ties to the abortion debate.
• Although progressives dominate academic bioethics, the scholars are not trained and in many cases are disinclined to work from an explicit ideological framework.
• Progressives will need to do more than throw money at the problem; it will require a major rethinking of the issues.

Conservatives weighing in on presidential bioethics issues is not new. Both the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have been closely following and submitting reports on cloning and human stem cell research as far back as Clinton’s National Advisory Commission in the late 1990’s. No progressive political organizations responded to either report.

While it is interesting that there are a few bioethics centers trying to push a conservative agenda, and that conservative foundations have decided to fund a few high profile cases, what is even more compelling is that well-established conservative think tanks that have traditionally focused on broad economic, social, and foreign policy issues have added “bioethics” to their political agendas. The following is a list of the key players:

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., (2002 revenue: $17 million); The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., (2003 revenue: $1.8 million); The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., (2003 revenue: $4 million); The Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. and Holland, Michigan (2003 revenue: $9 million); James Dobson’s Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, Colorado, (2003 revenue: $127 million); The Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington (2003 revenue: $4 million)

Why are these conservative think tanks now fervently working to shape bioethics policy? They see bioethics as a way to extend their conservative agenda and they have an eager audience. When people are confused and afraid, they will seek the more conservative option. Their constituents are looking to them to provide education and counsel on these issues, and they believe that bioethical debate will be the battlefield for defining the kind of society we want to create.

The five progressive organizations analyzed are trying to get some purchase against the onslaught of conservative resources. Unfortunately, their work is severely under funded; three of the top five groups have annual incomes of less than $150,000 and are run mostly by volunteer staff. . . . Two of the more broadly focused groups, the Women’s Bioethics Project and Appignani Center for Bioethics, were founded in the last year . . . .

There’s lots more, including excerpts from important reports and news stories on this phenomenon, a timeline of major bioethics “events”, lists of conservative and progressive organizations, and profiles of major players in bioethics from each side of the spectrum. This will be a vital reference document in building a bioethics agenda for activists with a liberty-promoting worldview.

Hat tip: AJOB/bioethics.net

One Zachary Karabell (shockingly, a middle-aged white guy with a receding hairline who works as an investment fund manager and has very likely never been pregnant) has this modest proposal for the Democratic party:

[W]hat if they did something utterly unpredictable? What if the Democrats simply decided to walk away from this particular battle, a tactical retreat that no Republican in their right mind (pun intended) expects? What if, yes, the Democrats decided that to let those proverbial chips fall where they may, and allow for the possibility that the Supreme Court just might overturn Roe and declare that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

The Democrats would be far better off.

To begin with, let’s once again lay to rest a popular canard: overturning Roe would not, repeat would not, make abortion illegal. That simple truth ain’t so simple. In fact, if you stopped ten people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, where it’s fair to say support for Roe runs high, high, high, seven, eight, or even nine would say that if Supremes overturn Roe, we’re back to the days of dark alleys and wire hangers.

Not true.

If Roe disappears, very little changes - at first. Roe enshrines a federal, constitutional right to privacy, which in turn bars state legislatures from passing laws making abortion illegal. Before Roe, nothing stood in the way of states making abortion legal. Post Roe, nothing would change in the Blue States.

But in many Red states, abortion is already de facto restricted. Try finding an abortion clinic in rural Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia. Abortion is already socially illegal in many parts of the country; mores often matter more than laws.

But if Roe is overturned, suddenly, every state would be forced to discuss and debate, and that would propel the Democrats from defense to offense. . . . [T]here would suddenly be an opportunity to debate choice, privacy, state power versus individual freedoms, morality, life, death, and science.

It’s easy to note the complacency of a man who’s perfectly willing to sell half of America down the river for a tactical advantage to one political party, and the chance to “debate choice”. This hardly deserves comment (though it deserves a full measure of contempt).

But it’s also worth nothing that the seeming logic of this piece does not withstand scrutiny any more than does its morality: It’s true that overturning Roe would not immediately change any state laws on abortion. But the loss of the Roe precedent would immediately trigger complete bans on abortion in at least two states that have already passed laws to that effect, explicitly contingent on the vacating of the Roe precedent. And, of course, it would then be open season on abortion restrictions in many remaining states, where such barriers as arbitrary clinic architecture standards, spousal vetos, and other restrictions have been found unconstitutional only by reliance on Roe. Karabell’s sunny analysis is at least half empty, however much he tries to pretend it’s half full. The apparent stalemate that prevails under Roe does so only because Roe prevents further encroachments on women’s autonomy - not because there is an equilibrium between the pro- and anti-woman forces in the country.

Abandoning Roe would mean abandoning the only thing that keeps abortion from becoming entirely illegal in large parts of the country. It would also free up the Red state anti-choice forces for a concerted assault on choice in the Blue states. There is no chance that the moral right to abortion will be respected in the conservative states if it is not also recognized as a Constitutional right - pro-choicers can “debate choice, privacy, and state power” as much as they like but misogyny is deeply entrenched in Republican country. Women have rights there only because they cannot legally be denied them, not because they are popular, and forfeiting that legal protection means forfeiting women’s freedom there, and engaging in a “debate” over it elsewhere. This is not a “very little” thing, and pretending that it will not have momentous consequences is an exercise in willful denial that no Democrat would engage in on an issue they cared about. This one, of course, is only about women, their bodies, and their freedom, so it’s OK.

There is a widely-remarked study published in the November PLoS Biology (the open-source online journal that is rapidly building a reputation for itself). The study was a prospective longitudinal study of the role of male circumcision in reducing HIV infectivity. That is, adult black South African men who were intending to become circumcised were recruited into the study and randomized into “trial” and “control” groups; the trial groups were offered free circumcision at the beginning of the study, and the control group was asked to wait until the end, when they would be given circumcision if they still wanted it. They were tested for a variety of sexually-transmitted infections, and offered condoms, sexual health counseling, and referrals to free clinics attached to the project for treatment for STIs they encountered during the study period. The study was intended to run for almost 2 years, but was stopped early by the data committee (a monitoring group separate from the researchers that reviews the data periodically, without informing the researchers of their findings - to avoid compromising the “double blind” nature of the study - unless the data show a clear, statistically significant difference between the experimental and control arms of the study, at which time the “blind” is broken and the researchers are informed); it was found that a significant difference in HIV infection was developing between the two groups, and the conclusion was reached that circumcision reduces the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission by 60%.

This is the first study of its kind, and the results are clearly valuable. However, the conduct of the trial has raised serious ethical questions. The trial illustrates many of the concerns surrounding medical research, particularly involving preventive measures (where by definition the trial essentially consists of waiting for subjects to contract the disease), and in cases where researchers from developed nations conduct experiments on residents of less-developed countries that would not be possible, or permitted, in their own countries. In this case, the researchers themselves made what seem clearly to be good-faith efforts to recognize those tensions and deal with them, but still did not succeed in avoiding controversy. A closer look at the controversy illustrates some of the pitfalls of these situations.
(more…)

Welch’s Grape Juice is plumbing new depths of hypocritical “denials” of magical health properties in substances they just can’t seem to stop talking about in the context of the curing of terrible diseases. Sinking to the level of marketing strategies for quack “diet supplements”, they announce in bold letters on their Web site that “Welch’s grape juice does not provide protection against the avian flu.” This by itself makes sense, except that nobody in their right mind would expect that Welch’s grape juice would provide protection against avian flu - so mentioning it in that context obviously serves no purpose other than raising in consumers’ minds the possibility that it does provide such protection. Welch’s is thus marketing grape juice along much the same lines, and with the same scientific evidence, as Laetrile.

And, after they’ve gotten your attention (for the disease their product, remember, absolutely does not cure), what happens when you click the convenient link they provide? They tell you all about the ways their product can cure that disease:

Welch’s Grape Juice does not provide protection against the avian flu.

While we are aware of recent research on resveratrol and the inhibition of influenza viruses, no research has studied the effects of drinking Welch’s 100% Grape Juice made from Concord grapes on the avian flu. Because of this limited information, we cannot recommend the use of our product in this area. We do know, however, that Welch’s 100% Grape Juice is abundant in a number of natural antioxidant compounds, of which resveratrol is just one, that may contribute to good health in many ways. Decisions on how to manage conditions like the avian flu should be made in consultation with a physician.

This is just shameless manipulation, but, of course, everything they say is technically true. So, in the spirit of scientific accuracy characterized by the Welch’s corporation, and out of a sincere concern for your health, let me assure you that:

Welch’s Grape Juice does NOT give you syphilis, no matter what you’ve heard to the contrary.

Any statements that Welch’s Grape Juice is contaminated with aborted fetal remains are entirely groundless.

While it is true that consuming dangerously large amounts of Welch’s Grape Juice can lead to asphyxiation, vomiting, or blood-sugar imbalances, the Welch’s Grape Juice company does not regard these dangers as requiring a product package warning at this time.

So far, there are NO confirmed, peer-reviewed studies published in respectable scientific journals that prove conclusively that Welch’s Grape Juice causes cancer.

Hat tip: AJOB/bioethics.net

Kudos to Corrente for this magnificent post on getting his needs met, Canadian-style.

Jim Rudd, Director of the “Christian Street Preachers Alliance” (abortion clinic harassers), makes the dangers of the anti-choice movement perfectly clear. He is convinced - in a roundabout and somewhat deranged way - that freedom of choice has “destroyed marriage” in America by - in his own words - undermining patriarchy, and the purpose of opposing choice is to restore hardline patriarchy to American families under the law.

OK - so it’s insane, but at least it’s clear. There’s no room now for misunderstanding what the anti-choice position is about.

Along with this, he’s (predictably enough) het up about gays, insisting that they’re part of the conspiracy because he can’t think of any reason for them to support choice other than that they share with feminists a desire to destroy families. Really.

When I started preaching in front of abortion clinics several years ago, I was perplexed by the large number of homosexuals who were “abortion activists.”

I asked myself then, “why are homosexuals so militant in their support of abortion?” “Why do they spend so much money and effort defending “a woman’s right to choose?” “What is the political connection?” As I searched for answers to these questions, I began to understand why feminists and homosexuals both defend abortion so vehemently. . . .

Before 1973 our civil laws recognized that when a husband and wife conceived a child that: the husband was the father; the wife was the mother; and together with their child they constituted a “nuclear family.”

However, with Roe v. Wade the Court ruled that there is no child at conception. Today, the State calls the child in the womb a “potential life,” and as long as the child is in the womb the husband is called the “prospective father.”

In effect, Roe v. Wade stripped the husband of his right to be legally recognized as the father of the child until the child is actually born. By doing this, Roe destroyed marriage and the family at their core by defiling the marriage bed at the moment of conception. . . .

The State strips the man of his God ordained authority both as a father and as a husband at the moment of conception. In effect, the State maintaining “…a woman’s right to choose” changed American society from being a patriarchal society to a matriarchal society. The father of the child is only the father of the child by permission granted him by his wife.

Aside from betraying his complete ignorance of the law (there is no legal status called “prospective father” or anything like it, and the law explicitly recognizes the interest of the father in the fetus - that was the whole point of Alito’s dissent in Casey that has gotten so much attention lately), and aside from the laughability of calling America a “matriarchal” society, he couldn’t be clearer about the connection he sees between male authority over women and the denial of women’s rights to control their pregnancies. This is exactly what feminists have been saying about abortion from the beginning, while the right wing has consistently tried to cast the issue in other terms. Here, though, an ultra-right Christian makes it perfectly plain: the anti-choice position is a matter of patriarchy - of male control over women’s fertility. And he not only favors that, he’s got a plan to restore it.

Both feminist and homosexual activists are very much aware of the political and legal ramifications of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973 they have made an extraordinary effort and spent huge quantities of time and money reinforcing the feminist/matriarchal agenda. . . .

While they funnel millions of dollars into political efforts and support candidates that they know will protect Roe from congressional override, their attorneys are systematically winning one court battle after another and are succeeding in redefining marriage and the family to accommodate their criminal sexual desires of fornication and homosexuality (i.e. domestic partnership benefits and same sex marriage).

Here is the key point: For the Church to pour resources into defending the Christian definition of marriage and family in our society without Congress first overturning Roe v. Wade is folly. It is meaningless to defend something that has already been destroyed. One cannot defend something in civil law if it does not exist. It must first be established in the law. The Christian definition of “marriage” and “family” in our society depends entirely upon the legal recognition of life at conception. . . .

[T]he Church can reclaim its “covenant-keeping” stewardship of the “moral order” in America if the United States Congress overturns Roe v. Wade by specifically instructing the Judiciary to recognize the “personhood of the child in the womb from the moment of conception.”

Once our society guarantees the child at conception “due process of the law,” abortion becomes illegal, the marriage covenant is “re-established,” and patriarchy is reinstated in the nuclear family and the extended social structure. Thus, Christian men reassume their covenant-keeping responsibilities in the home, the Church, and the civil society.

Again, he’s confused on the law and immersed in a bizarre and primitive theology - but he’s far from alone in either of those things. And that theology is aimed squarely at stripping women of their independence, most especially in any matter related to sex, but in all others as well.

Oddly, he could have resolved his own confusion about gays simply by listening to himself: it’s perfectly obvious why gays (especially lesbians) are strongly supportive of abortion rights - they have as much interest as straight women, possibly more, in not being forced to submit to patriarchy. It has nothing to do with “accommodat[ing] their criminal sexual desires” - they are motivated not to be straight men’s slaves whether or not they accomodate their criminal sexual desires. And lesbians have as much interest as other women in having abortion rights available when they need them, even if they need them less often. If he knew any gays, he might have asked them about this - it’s hardly a secret.

But the real message of this garbled and perfervid gibberish is that the extreme right wing has engaged a war against women. That fact is hardly new and hardly unknown, but occasionally they say it right out loud, and Jim Rudd has done so today. I can’t see why anyone would not be terrified of this movement, whether or not they think abortion is a good idea - or could fail to see the link between abortion rights and women’s freedom when the misogynists themselves state outright that destroying the former is necessary to, and the first step en route toward, destroying the latter.

If you hadn’t believed it before, believe it now.

There is a notable tendency for the far right to turn on itself in schisms over who is the most authentically reactionary.

I have commented on the “Marie Bain” incident before: a drama teacher at a Catholic high school was fired after someone located photos of her volunteering at an abortion clinic before she was hired at the school and forwarded them to the Bishop with a complaint. Later, a student at the high school posted a widely-disseminated blog entry disparaging the teacher, quoting the absurdly draconian school rules about abortion (students are immediately expelled not merely for advocating abortion rights, but even for saying they know someone who had an abortion), and exulting at the teacher’s firing. It quickly turned out that this student was the daughter of the woman who had crusaded to get the teacher fired.

But the plot continued to thicken: shortly thereafter, this student was herself expelled from the school! Today, the Sacramento Bee quoted the explanation from school officials:

“The family continued to meddle in the administrative affairs of Loretto High School by making demands and threats that created an atmosphere contrary to the mission of Loretto. The malicious language, taunts, threats, abuse towards members of our school community, gossip, rumors, unkind language and behavior continue.”

(The family denies this, of course.)

Apparently the family was on some sort of aggressive anti-abortion kick that included a systematic campaign of complaints about things or people they found insufficiently dogmatic on the issue, until finally even the other anti-choice Catholics couldn’t stand them.

It may be somewhat unfair to comment without detailed knowledge of the incident, but I will say that the school - which addresses even mentioning abortion punitively, and fired a popular teacher for having previously had a dissenting opinion - can hardly be surprised that there are people in their midst with a vindictive attitude about the issue. What is grimly amusing is to see all this maliciousness turn so quickly into a moral purity contest - something that, I think, the Inquisition or the Salem witch-hunters could have told them about. (To be fair, it is not only religious persecution that has this tendency: it was seen among the leaders of the French Revolution, the Soviet Communist Party, and the US Republican anti-Communists of the 50s. It is the behavior of vicious and intemperate ideologues freed from the obligation of liberal tolerance. It is the reason why those who know the complete and exclusive truth should never be allowed to act on it. But they’re teaching it to the students awfully early at Loretto High School, aren’t they?)

Hat tip: De Civitate Dei