Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
There was some head-squeezin’ taking place over my recent claim that many disabled persons believe “life with a disability is no more to be denigrated than life without one”. It’s just obvious to many people that having a “disability” makes your life objectively worse than otherwise, and presumably makes you objectively less happy than you would be without the disability. (A particularly stark example of this took place in an infamous encounter between utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer and disability activist Harriet McBryde Johnson, who uses a wheelchair, in which he insisted - against her objections - that having a “disability” was simply objectively worse than having some mere life difficulty such as being a victim of prejudice. I have always wondered at this in Singer, who, though controversial, is not usually unempathetic - at least, he feels chickens’ pain pretty intensely.) Seeing the disabled as “the disabled” makes it very hard not to respond to them in a way that foregrounds both the disability (rather than the person) and the observer’s interpretation of its significance.
This is an especially strong intuition for progressives for whom “helping the needy” is both a natural inclination and an inherent good (implicitly requiring that “being needy” is less good than not having a need, whereby one is “helping” by removing the need). Yet many people with disabilities would deny both that disability is necessarily an objective harm and that it necessarily makes them unhappy. Simultaneously, they are accutely aware of what is difficult for them that is not for those who do not have their disability, and many seek whatever aid is available - including medical treatment - to lessen that difficulty. Grasping this dichotomy is an important part of bringing disability into the range of human norm, and “the disabled” into the community of caring that progressives seek to build.
Jill Stanek, raving but rarely comprehensible anti-choice knee-jerker, looks at this:
. . . and comes to this conclusion:
The cartoonist who penned this is liberal. However, the cartoon can be taken two ways, [which is] I’m sure not Ohman’s original intent.
Yeah, I’m sure it wasn’t. In fact, I’m sure there’s almost no one but a committed anti-choicer who would look at the choice between safe and legal abortion and widespread abuse, death, and disability from illegal abortions, and think there’s more than one good option.
It’s really hard, sometimes, to resign yourself to living in a world with these people in it.
After barely a month, I’ve decided to retire the “Stegosaurus of the Week” award. I’ve begun feeling uncomfortable about it, and decided it wasn’t the right thing to be doing.
Since I only average about a post per day on weekdays, and often don’t blog at all on weekends, devoting up to 20% of my posts to a recurrent, insulting joke probably sets the wrong tone for the blog. For one thing, I just got done chastizing the most recent StegoWeek winner for her lack of collegiality (among many more serious faults); I don’t think pointing out bad thinking by others falls to the same level as using your supposed credentials to justify picking a personal fight with a critic that spills over two Web sites, but it’s not the height of professionalism either. And singling people out for their personal lack of perspecuity, instead of focusing only on the deficiencies of their actual writings, is harsh. (Not, perhaps, unnecessarily so - there are a remarkable number of idiots who just have no clue about themselves, and I think it’s helpful to tell them the truth - but I’ll leave it to others.) After one early award resulted in an avalanche of abuse that caused the (richly deserving) recipient to shut down his blog, it started to seem as if this was detracting from debate, not fostering it. There may be more high-minded (though less satisfying) ways of conducting this discourse, and I think I should probably pursue them.
So I won’t be making new awards. That’s not to say that I won’t be turning my critical eye where it is needed - and boy, is it needed! And, too, that’s not to say that the winners to date have not entirely deserved their awards. A final hats-off to the few, and from now on the only, Stegosaurus of the Week Awardees:
[No] Thanks to all, for making health-ethics blogging what it is!
Brace yourselves:
If you’re anything like the American public, some of you can’t handle this. AP notes some of the reactions to this cover shot on a magazine devoted to caring for new babies:
“I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third. . . .
Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.
One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.
“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.” . . .
“I’m totally supportive of [breastfeeding] — I just don’t like the flashing,” she says. “I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see.”
Look, you nutcase - unless your husband or son are crazier than you are, there isn’t a breast they don’t want to see. (Gay husbands or sons perhaps excepted - and I admit I harbor a hope that Ash’s family includes at least one of the above, just for the sake of imagining her reaction.)
Voices of reason don’t help:
Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. “There’s a huge Puritanical streak in Americans,” she says, “and there’s a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part.”
“It’s not like women are whipping them out with tassels on them!” she adds. “Mostly, they are trying to be discreet.”
Kane says that since the August issue came out last week, the magazine has received more than 700 letters — more than for any article in years.
“Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob,” wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.
The evidence of public discomfort isn’t just anecdotal. In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half — 43 percent — of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places.
Oh, god. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.
Personally, I favor the tassels.
I have no freaking idea what this means:
Researchers identified 72 female students who said they favored voluntary euthanasia. Researchers then gave orange juice to these subjects, but half of them got juice spiked with caffeine. The students then read a series of arguments against voluntary euthanasia. An after study showed that the subjects receiving the caffeinated juice remembered more of the arguments AND were more likely to shift towards anti-voluntary euthanasia views. Similar results obtained in a study of 76 males.
[”Coffee for Persuasion, “The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2006, A17; thanks Timothy Murphy UIC]
More seriously, I guess it’s not surprising that short-term memory retention would be affected by neuroactive drugs - though it’s a bit worrisome that such an ubiquitous one would have such a notable effect. Taking a total wild-ass guess, I would assume that the change in position is a function of the greater retention of the material - that is, that ingesting caffeine doesn’t inherently make you anti-euthanasia, but rather that a differential retention of arguments specifically against that position, caused by the drug, would then tend to skew respondents’ answers in that direction simply because they then had more such arguments in their heads.
Looking further, the original report is here. The situation is more complicated than explained in the blurb above: The students were selected for having opinions favorable to voluntary euthanasia (so the researchers could test the affect of the reading on changing their opinions). They were not just told to read the articles about euthanasia, but were divided into groups and given one of two tasks: either a mechanical editing chore or a specific instruction to read the articles carefully and consciously try to remember the arguments they used; they were then tested on retention and the affect of the articles on influencing their opinions. They were then given counter-messages (articles in favor of voluntary euthanasia) and re-tested on the degree to which receiving the counter-messages undid the change in opinion they had undergone from reading the original arguments.
The results indicated that reading the first (anti-euthanasia) arguments had no effect on opinion or retention, with or without caffeine, for the students who were given the simple editing task without being told to concentrate carefully. However, reading the first argument with careful concentration did improve both retention of the arguments and a change in the students’ opinions; the effect was present in both the caffeinated and the no-caff groups, but it was greater with caffeine. Then, after reading the counter-arguments, students who did not take caffeine reverted their opinions back to their original opinions, but students who did take caffeine were not affected by the counter-messages and retained the new opinions they had adopted after reading the first arguments. (A summary of the report appears below.)
The researchers attribute this to the differential affect of initial arguments and counter-messages: apparently, there is a theory in psychology that when people are exposed to new information, they tend to favor the first message they hear, which sets up a defense in their minds against a counter-message that they hear afterwards. Interestingly, in the above experiment this effect was not observed for the non-caffeine group, but the caffeinated group did show a defensive effect against the counter-message. This seems to me just as important a result from this experiment as the basic effect of the caffeine itself.
The results seem to suggest that caffeine not only aids retention of information (that one is consciously processing already), but somehow fixes it more firmly in the mind or increases one’s susceptibility to being swayed by it. The first part doesn’t seem so startling, but the latter is, to my inexpert perspective at least. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment with, say, bioethicists or others well-versed in the issue, to say whether their opinions would be more vulnerable under caffeine than those of students presumably reading about the issue seriously for the first time. I would predict the professors would not change their existing opinions even with the caffeine boost; if they did, that would suggest that the caffeine not only increases receptivity to new messages but somehow overrides existing strongly held opinions (a result that, frankly, I hope is not the case).
The Dominican Republic legislature narrowly defeated an amendment to a bill that would have permitted abortions in cases of pregnancy by rape. The amendment was heavily opposed by the Catholic church and other religious right-wingers; the local bishop claims the issue has nothing to do with religion.
The House of Representatives of the Dominican Republic has backed away from legalizing abortion in cases of rape in a new National Penal Code, approved on Tuesday. The new Code now goes to the Senate for approval.
Last week lawmakers presented the reformed penal code, the first draft of which included a clause legalizing abortion in cases of rape. The initial draft drew widespread protests from the Dominican Republic Bishops’ Conference and other organizations.
Although it initially appeared that the modified Code - including the abortion legalization clause - would be approved, lawmakers in the House were persuaded by pro-life lobbyists not to include the clause in the final draft. . . .
Last week, the Secretary General of the Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Ramon Benito Angeles, explained that an abortion in the case of a rape does not benefit the woman who has suffered such a trauma. . . .“Abortion is not a religious issue, it’s a human rights issue. Those in favor of abortion paint the discussion as if this were a question of imposing religion. This is not about an argument between religions. Today in the Dominican Republican we are being plagued by apparently uncontrollable violence. Every day the media surprises us with more reports of horrendous deaths and deplorable events,” the bishop said.
There you have it. Abortion is terrorism, not having to bear a rapist’s child is of no benefit to women, and the Catholic church’s concerted efforts to impose forced pregnancy and forced childbirth on rape survivors have nothing to do with imposing their religious beliefs on others; women’s rejection of the Church’s teachings about forced childbirth do not constitute an argument between religious beliefs.
That clears that up.
An old article by Mary Johnson that I just stumbled across in Ragged Edge Online asks why liberals “don’t get it” on disability rights:
During the debate over Terri Schiavo last fall, disability activists and scholars groused about both right-to-life and right-to-die advocates not understanding disability rights issues. . . .
It’s “downright weird,” says Michael Bérubé, whose 1996 book, Life As We Know it,about raising disabled son Jamie, became a bestseller.Bérubé calls liberals “oddly reluctant to see disability rights as part of a program of egalitarian civil rights.” . . .
Many leftists, says writer Marta Russell, simply think there is no movement; some believe the disability rights movement is too small to qualify as a real “movement.” There are more substantive reasons as well. “Some leftists don’t believe disability is an oppression that belongs on a theoretical par with race, gender or class. They may think disabled peoples lives are difficult and social justice lacking but they don’t see basic underlying institutional relations at work when it comes to disablement.” . . .
“I wish they understood that it was civil rights,” says Cyndi Jones, head of the Center for An Accessible Society. “Talk to progressives or liberals (which I use interchangeably): they just don’t see it as civil rights.” . . .
Jones talks about attending progressive media conferences and being the only one there concerned with disability rights. “They never think about making sure the meeting site is accessible, either,” she says. ” When you complain, though, you’re seen as a ‘whiny cripple.’”
An activist invited to be on a liberal talk show on public television finds the producer resisting the need for a sign-language interpreter, even when the activist offers to pay the cost. A progressive bookstore owner provides a ramp to a locked entrance and offers a doorbell; he is offended when local activists protest the segregated treatment. Liberals involved in election reform organize to stop new accessible computerized voting machines, arguing that they’re open to fraud.
These are good points.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute has an excellent national roundup of pending legislation aimed at reducing reproductive freedom.
Read it and weep:
Abortion
Abortion Bans to Replace Roe
‘Choose Life’ License Plates
Crisis Pregnancy Centers/Alternatives to Abortion
Fetal Pain
Mandatory Counseling and Waiting Periods
Medication Abortion
Minors Reporting
Parental Involvement
‘Partial-Birth’ Abortion
Physician-Only Requirements
Postviability Abortion
Private Insurance Coverage of Abortion
Protecting Access to Abortion
Protecting Access to Clinics
Public Funding of Abortion
Requiring Abortion Providers to Have Hospital Privileges
Reporting Statistical Information to State Agencies
Stem-Cell and Embryo Research
Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers
See Also:
Contraception and Prevention: Abortion-Related Restrictions on State Family Planning Funds
Fetal Assault
Refusal Clauses: Abortion Services (See also General Medical Services)
Contraception & Prevention
Abortion-Related Restrictions on State Family Planning Funds
Contraceptive Coverage
Emergency Contraception
Requiring Pharmacists or Pharmacies to Dispense Contraception
State Medicaid Family Planning Eligibility Expansions
See Also:
Youth: Child Abuse Reporting
Refusal Clauses: Contraceptive Services (See also General Medical Services)
HIV Testing of Infants and Pregnant Women
Nonmedical Use of Ultrasound
Substance Abuse During Pregnancy
Refusal Clauses
Abortion Services
Contraceptive Services
General Medical Services
Minors Access to Reproductive Health
Sex Education
See Also:
Abortion: Minors Reporting
Abortion: Parental Involvement
Contraception & Prevention: Parental Involvement
Hat tip: Reproductive Rights Blog
In her continual display of not getting it, “Jacquefromtexas” offers another bit of inspired reasoning: because you can’t kill your dog, abortions must be illegal.
Every once in a while, I’ll have a random thought that inspires anger in me. Yesterday, when feeding my dog a treat, I had such a thought.
Daisy is the sweetest dog in all Dogdom, the epitome of all cuteness. . . .
Daisy is dependant on me. Daisy requires me to give her food and water, to keep her warm, to keep her clean and healthy. She requires me to give her love and protection from those big, scary thunderstorms.[M]ay I use forceps to twist off her body parts? May I stick scissors at the base of her skull and suck out her brain? May I immerse her in a saline bath to burn her to death both inside and out? How about dismembering her with a suction aspirator?
How about just not giving her food and water? . . .
Bottom line is this: There is such a thing as moral responsibility towards the weak and vulnerable- especially one’s very own children. That is why child abuse and neglect is criminal, as is animal cruelty and neglect.
[emphasis, and spelling errors, original]
Good thinking.
There’s a weird freak-show quality to internecine dustups between extreme right-wingers, especially on the religious anti-sex front. One is going on now as to who is the most authentically sex-negative. Worrisomely, though, one of the combatants is a professional counselor who uses her position, and credentials, to push a highly personal agenda while also pulling rank on people with dissenting opinions.
“Jacquefromtexas” is an MSSW (though not, apparently, with a clinical social work license). She writes a blog mostly devoted to simplistic anti-choice rants, and she also serves as an “expert” on About.com’s answer-board devoted to abortion, where she cites her professional credentials to bolster her standing. One would think that would impose on her an obligation to act within the understood bounds of professional behavior - to support those she counsels in developing and exercising their independence, to remain neutral in assisting them in working through their issues, to acquire and diligently use factually correct and scientific information when providing factual input, and to avoid using her position to promote a personal agenda through her clients. One might also hope it would be exercised by someone with the maturity to stay out of public pissing fights with people with other opinions. In this case, one would be disappointed (all quotes below from About.com except where noted).
“Non-directive counseling:”
I joined AllExperts to counter to pro-abortion opinions and irresponsibility that I saw, like the downright lies that people like “Angel” wrote. . . . I share your concerns and am pleased to report that neither myself nor the other expert who now answers abortion questions would ever promote or refer for an abortion. . . .
[H]aving abortions hurt your body and your ability to have children but oral contraceptives are bad for you, too. They make you infertile (that’s there job) and hurt your ability to conceive later. They are also abortifacient, which means you may not be having surgical abortions, but you’re still aborting by using the pills. If you heart has changed toward abortion and feel like it is morally wrong, then oral contraceptives are not a good choice for you, either. . . .
I think you’re transferring some of that pain and burden onto yourself, saying that because you aborted 3 of your babies, you don’t deserve to have another because of the risks you created. Nicole, God doesn’t work that way. He will forgive you and bless you if you recognize that what you did (abortion and premarital sex) was wrong and you seek Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for forgiveness. If you beleive that He was the son of God, died to your salvation and rose again, then you can be saved and reunited with your children. And any guilt or shame can be taken from you and God can reward you with healthy children if He chooses to. . . . There is so much forgiveness, Nicole. So much. [NB: This was to a questioner who hadn’t mentioned feeling guilty, or having any religious feelings whatsoever.]
My friends [who had abortions] tell me that the feelings of guilt, grief and shame almost never go away. Many feel like they chose themselves over their babies, that they were selfish and let their babies down and feel like a murderer. Many of them report having nightmares of killing babies, of bloody babies crying, or just wake up to a crying baby that’s not there. . . . [etc.]
“Professional neutrality”:
I joined AllExperts to counter to pro-abortion opinions . . . I commonly refer to places that provide free pregnancy help [i.e., anti-choice “crisis pregnancy centers”] . . . [N]either myself nor the other expert who now answers abortion questions would ever promote or refer for an abortion.
Abortion clinics charge for ultrasounds and the counseling that a person receives there is minimal. All services provided by non-profit pregnancy centers are comprehensive and free. . . .
The latter is particularly odd in light of this response:
[Question:] I want to ask you a question but you dont say if you are balanced in your opinion. . . . Can you say if you answer that you are fair and accurate or biased?
While I appreciate your question, I’m afraid I can not answer it. I am a professional and bound by a Code of Ethics that forbids me from answering personal questions about myself.
WTF? I’ve reviewed the entire National Association of Social Workers’ Code of Ethics and the Clinical Social Work Federation Code of Ethics; one or the other is also the basis for most codes of ethics of state or regional social work societies in the US. I cannot find anything even remotely similar to the above in either of them. Certainly no medical association has a code of ethics that prohibits telling your patients whether you are going to be honest with them! The NASW Code requires, among other things:
Social workers treat each person in a caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers promote clients’ socially responsible self-determination. . . .
Social workers respect and promote the right of clients to self-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals. . . .
Social workers should provide services to clients only in the context of a professional relationship based, when appropriate, on valid informed consent. . . . Social workers should provide clients with an opportunity to ask questions.
Social workers should be alert to and avoid conflicts of interest that interfere with the exercise of professional discretion and impartial judgment. Social workers should inform clients when a real or potential conflict of interest arises . . . .
Social workers should not take unfair advantage of any professional relationship or exploit others to further their personal, religious, political, or business interests. . . .
It seems obvious that she evades answering the question above because, in her case, the answer would have to be “No.” It’s certain that no interpretation of professional ethics imposes such an answer; in fact, answering that question - and the only responsible position is to be able truthfully to say “Yes” - is fundamental to setting a supportive and trust-inspiring groundwork for counseling. If, of course, that’s one of your priorities.
”Factual accuracy:”
I am NOT pro-birth control because birth control causes abortions. If you did any research then you’d know that most birth control methods inhibit implantation, causing early abortions. Furthermore, 80% of abortions are performed on women who use birth control and studies show that women on birth control have more sexual intercourse than others and thus are more likely to get pregnant. . . .
Statistics show that 93% of women regret their abortions. Women are 9 times more likely to kill themselves after an abortion. Women who abort often suffer from post-traumatic stress, nightmares and depression. Eating disorders, alcoholism, and drug abuse are more common in post-abortive women. Also, 47% of all abortions are REPEATS meaning that having one abortion often leads to having another because women try to replace the child they lost and realize that circumstances haven’t changed. Promiscuity and the self-esteem issues that accompany it are also prominent in women who have aborted. . . .
Your body that sent out a set of hormones to change your body for childbirth is traumatized by the unatural loss of the child (most miscarriages come from a lack of these hormones, which is less traumatic), so there are hormones that go crazy, mutating cells (like breast cells to turn them into milk-producing cells) that never get the last of the hormones and stay mutated. This makes them cancer prone. . . .
And then there’s the question of maturity - or the amusing display of its lack that results when two anti-choicers get sucked into a holiness contest:
[In response to another anti-choice poster on About.com who criticized her for not being aggressive enough(!):]
Woah there, zealous idiot! How stupid must someone be to direct the attack at an non-offending individual rather than the website itself? . . . Furthermore, she indicates just how uninformed a pro-lifer that she is . . . I love how she chides me for not being pro-birth control . . . Yes, may God have mercy on me for not advocating birth control that slaughters millions of lives by it’s abortifacient action! . . .
It goes on:
I’m going to have this [poster’s comment] removed, but nonetheless I am further annoyed by her idiocy. Abstinence is not birth control and she did nothing to suggest that. She’s trying to save face and failed miserably. . . .
All she’s done is discourage abortion-minded from contacting me and allowing me to give them the resources they need to choose life. Way to cut off your nose to spite your face, at the expense of those unborn babies you claim to love so much.
And on:
Wow, this chick needs a hobby. Perhaps she should direct all that energy toward actually doing something rather than attacking those that do.
So, Jacque, for being the most childish self-described “professional” in easy sight, for asserting your standing in an autonomy-centered, non-directive, healing profession for the explicit and admitted purpose of directing those who come to you into a choice of actions you personally have made for them ahead of time, for spreading long-discredited anti-choice propaganda as fact, for using bizarre, false, and ideologically based definitions of ordinary factual terms like “pregnancy”, “abortion”, and “birth control”, for explicitly refusing to reveal your ideological biases and schemes when asked directly about them while citing as justification professional codes that require the exact opposite, and for demeaning your own profession with these immature antics and your display of childish rancor at a total stranger on two public Web sites, you are officially (albeit belatedly - I had a rough weekend) the Stegosaurus of the Week. Next time try thinking with the cerebral ganglion, not the sacral one.
Our lovely “Stegosaurus of the Week” Award GIF: Official Winners may feel free to add it to their Web sites:
In closing, I have to say I’m actually quite concerned about this. It’s one thing to hear this kind of nonsense from the typical anti-choicer - and most of the above is just old propaganda rehashed. But I think it’s entirely another to see it from someone who claims to be a professional in the healing fields, and who sets herself up in a quasi-clinical role (she apparently is not an LCSW, but she does refer to herself as a “counselor” on About.com, and frequently encourages questioners to e-mail her privately so she can “counsel” or “work with” them). I think statements and behavior such as the above are gross violations of professional ethics, and very worrisome in someone, however immature and inexperienced, who is both well along in training (she’s in a doctoral program - one which apparently hasn’t noticed, or doesn’t care about, behavior like the above!) and already presumes to act in a quasi-professional capacity.
It’s true that the NASW Code of Ethics is filled with weasel words like “socially responsible self-determination”, and various justifications for violating client autonomy and confidentiality, but it’s also clear that they are aimed at questions of obvious and overt threat to others. I would be amazed that anyone in responsibility there would think it was acceptable for a social-worker/counselor who was approached by a client saying she was ambivalent about a potential abortion to then engage in a self-interested and specifically slanted program of influence to encourage that client to make one and only one choice that had been decided upon by the counselor before the client even spoke.
I was tempted to file a complaint about this person. I would never attempt to personally harass an ordinary activist, and this is why I do not support tactics such as posting personal contact information about, or contacting the employers of, people I disagree with. But professionals must be held to professional standards, whatever their personal views may be, and especially whether or not those views match those of their clients. I did look into her licensure status - apparently she does not have a license, so she has no license to revoke. I have a feeling that complaining to her professional training program (it can be discerned on the Web, although she does not advertise it) would be going too far, but I also have the feeling that letting someone this hostile to patient autonomy run loose would be worse. Finally, I don’t want to become one of those bloggers who make it their business to harass others, as we’ve seen too many doing - yet I don’t think that simply behaving unprofessionally on a blog grants you immunity from professional discipline. In the end, I think I’ll let it go, but I can’t tell you how much contempt I have for this abuse of training and professional standards.
From Frank Rich’s column yesterday:
That the administration’s stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party’s far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo’s condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program’s canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he’s read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush’s side.
[emphasis added]
Yep.
Hat tip: Guerrillawomen.
Everybody loves Art Caplan, but it’s hard not to get the impression that he’s just phoning it in much of the time. A WaPo reporter breaks down in panicky confusion over what to buy at the grocery store:
I can’t decide what to eat. I don’t mean which recipe to make, or what restaurant to go to. I mean when I go grocery shopping, I’m paralyzed with indecision. Everything, it seems, is either ethically, nutritionally or environmentally incorrect. Guilt is ruining my appetite. . . .
Should I buy the omega-3 eggs that are supposedly good for my heart? But wait, they’re not organic. Maybe I should spring for the $3.50 organic eggs from Horizon, even though I read that the company has gotten so huge, it’s driving out the smaller organic farmers. Perhaps I should get the cage-free eggs from a small farm in Pennsylvania? Or the brown eggs from vegetarian-fed, free-roaming hens? . . .
[C]hoosing what to eat and drink has become hard work. It’s not simply a case of taste or price. Now we have to ask ourselves: Is this good for my health? Have animals suffered? Is it local? Organic? Bad for the planet? Harvested by child workers?
What’s worse, the answers are often contradictory. Should I buy the locally grown lettuce at the farmers market, even if the farmer uses some pesticides? It’s good to support local farmers, but what about pesticides’ link to cancer?
Either she’s never encountered a complicated moral problem before, or she’s just surprised to find that food choices could be one of them. Either way, she’s arriving pretty late to this game. And Caplan, to his credit, points this out:
I asked [Caplan] if he found moral predicaments at the grocery store.
“Oh, absolutely. And it doesn’t even end with the food,” he says. “One of my great moral quandaries comes when the cashier asks, ‘Paper or plastic?’ ” (For the record, he chooses paper.)
Then he goes off the rails.
There’s apparently a bit of a dust-up brewing among vegetarians over the possibility of “cultured meat” - the lab-grown muscle tissue slabs that generations of sci-fi writers have assured us we’ll all be chomping in the near, sterile and tasteless, future. Such products are now nearing marketability, but the super-veggies and the mere-veggies can’t agree on whether they’re a green and ethical end-run around farmed animal flesh, or an unholy combination of Matrix-style technoslavery and the horror that is ham sandwiches (I’m not making this up).
What’s interesting to me about the debate is that it mirrors so precisely - down to the same buzzwords and some of the same quotes - the liberal/conservative debate over biotechnology and human enhancement. Intriguingly, in this case some of the more radical vegetarians are taking the position of the most conservative bioethicists. But there is also a pro-technology position that takes very much the same attitude toward engineered meat products that most bioethicists do to stem cell research or body enhancement, and brings in people from across the contentious spectrum of animal-rights advocates.
I find that heartening. It also provides a fascinating look at the ways certain divisions between attitudes and values can play out across relatively small, as well as grand-scale, issues of biotechnological impact.
The word is now going out from last week’s Bioethics & Politics conference, organized by Glen McGee at the Alden March Institute in Albany. (I am so sick that I couldn’t attend!) Wesley Smith’s take on it is interesting. He was a prominent representative of the conservative side at the meeting, and participated in a panel discussion. He comments that he views the field of bioethics as a kind of public policy debating ground, in which competing societal visions vie for social influence:
I suggested that (macro) bioethics [bioethics “which tries to impact public policy, culture, and the methods by which {clinical} bioethics is conducted”] is not a discourse and not a matter of bioethicists being “neutral arbiters” of complex moral dilemmas. Nor, is it a profession, as there is no specific training required to become a bioethicist, no state licensing, no professional discipline, etc. Rather, mainstream bioethics is a political and social movement, and like all such movements, seeks to implement policy based on a distinct ideology. . . .
The cause of the divide is fundamental: Mainstream bioethicists reject the intrinsic value of human life and instead have embraced personhood theory. Those of us perceived to be in the other camp, accept the intrinsic value of human life. This divide is too wide for the two sides to reach accommodation. Thus, we will always be in conflict.
But, this is good. These conflicts are how democracies decide important issues. Moreover, we will not decide how it all turns out. The people will through our democratic institutions. Thus those of us in the fray owe it to society to vigorously and energetically debate these matters. But how we do that is important. The people have a right to make informed decisions based on accurate information.
Without accusing Smith of being disingenuous, it seems to me there is a great deal of that is both wrong and highly politically convenient (to the conservative side) in these remarks.
“Faithmouse” is a painfully sincere cartoonist who specializes in incomprehensible images of fetuses doing cutesy things, in the apparent belief that the morality of abortion is determined by the wisdom of Little Jeffy from The Family Circle. But occasionally he makes himself clear enough that you can understand what he’s saying. Here’s an example:
If you can’t see it clearly in the reduced-size image, a cute pink fetus is lounging in a wingback chair, reading “Modern Fetus” magazine, inside a soft, red, squishy-walled apartment with the sign “Womb Sweet Womb” hanging on the wall. The fetus is plugged into the wall through an umbilical cord that terminates in an electrical outlet. Its baseball cap is hanging from a peg on the wall, a ventilator duct appears on the other wall, and - displaying a worrisome grasp of anatomy - a heart-shaped heart and other organs are visible through a huge gap in the side wall, next to a set of large, coin-operated binoculars like you find at outdoor public attractions. (?) A gloved hand is bursting through the screen door and slamming down the front door of the apartment, holding an “Eviction Notice”.
Yep. Your uterus is the home of a fetus. Your cervix is merely the front door of its “apartment”, and your bodily organs are merely the walls, floor, wiring, and ventilation ducts of its abode. Acting on your own body, or having a doctor do so on your behalf, is equivalent to bursting down the door of someone else’s home. (I admit, I have no freaking idea what the binoculars are for.) And, of course, it’s a violent invasion - tearing through the screen, ripping off the door, and dragging the little wobbly-head-doll fetus out into the cold, like a thug or a home invader, or at best a slumlord. You don’t, of course, have the right to treat your own body as your own body if someone else is living in it - that would be cruel.
Amazingly enough, also, the cartoon manages to show the inside of a woman’s body without ever implying that there’s actually a woman present. The fetus is fully characterized - it not only looks like a typical cartoon image of a fully-developed child, but it has intellectual interests, possessions, and a home with little domestic touches hanging on the walls. The woman is represented only by the grossly distorted image of the walls of her uterus, which actually belongs to the fetus as its dwelling place. (When you see someone’s apartment, you don’t think “Oh, here’s the landlord’s real estate investment” - you think “Oh, here is this person’s apartment“. Here, the woman’s entire body, including the internal organs visible through the “window” in her uterus - it’s a “womb with a view” - get it? - are the dwelling place of this fetus; they are its home, not her body.)
So, if you want to know what you are to the right wing, there you have it. You are the property of your own fetus - its home, its “castle”. Your uterus is as sacrosanct against “home invasion” - by you - as a citizen’s home is against thugs or intruders. You have no right of “trespass” on your own body. And your fetus is a fully-developed person with its own tastes in home decoration; you are nothing but some walls and tubing. Do be sure to keep the yard picked up, though; it’s your obligation as landlord.
Serge, of LTI Blog, posted a comment to my recent post on the abortion debate. I’ve taken the liberty of moving it up here as a separate post.
Serge asks the following:
One quick question - Should a pregnant woman who is suffering from severe nausea or severe acne be able to take thalidomide or accutane to treat their condition based on their right to bodily autonomy? After all, the fetus has no moral status let alone a right to an environment safe from pathogens. Would that be a morally appropriate choice? (More on this point here.
A simple answer: Yes.
The self-consciously quaint, and apparently unironically asinine, “Ladies Against Feminism” consists of the usual religious-right commentary on social issues couched in the prose style of Miss Manners. Every other post is about babies and homemaking (”Many women do not see the importance of their role as Mother and Wife . . . “). Mostly it’s just weird and dreary, but sometimes they surpass themselves. From their July 10 posting:
Birth rates in the European Union are falling fast. . . . What is supremely sad about those who insist that “it’s up to the individual to decide what constitutes a family,” is that they do not realize it will one day be up to the state to determine what constitutes a “worthy” life. Euthanasia can only flourish in a culture that embraces sterility and sees children as burdensome leeches. Who will be around to care for the elderly when the vast majority of the population is old or infirm? The state will not love you back. It will not ask to share your memories or miss you when you are gone. . . . Deliberate sterility is choosing death.
Wha . . .?
This is mind-boggling in a way that goes beyond the right’s usual confusion. Not having children leads to euthanasia? I can’t even imagine what kind of slippery slope would link those two. Presumably this is some kind of “culture of death” raving, but usually that’s accompanied by at least an attempt to make the delusions sound plausible.In this case, they just let it all hang out.
Birthrate . . . euthanasia . . . leeches . . . eldercare . . . . “The state will not love you back” - huh? Who imagines the state loves them? “Deliberate sterility is choosing death”? Does that mean the involuntarily sterile are murder victims? Strangely, sterile individuals generally look pretty lively to me - at least as much so as fully-stocked breeders do. Whence this “choosing death”? No matter - it’s all part of the “culture of death”. It doesn’t have to make sense.
I have nothing to add. Some forms of nonsense speak for themselves. But there’s a familiar sense of idiocy permeating these writings - an unapolagetically unhinged repudiation of any obligation to make sense, or even to use conceptually related terms in the same paragraph. This is the gibbering of people for whom gibbering is, well, good enough. And that calls for recognition.
Therfore, Ladies Against Feminism, for proudly selling the entire rest of womanhood down the river, for mistaking preciousness for insight, for nearly-insane doomsaying in response to perfectly ordinary human behavior, for making no fucking sense, and for including on your own blog the disclaimer that “Ladies Against Feminism was founded by Mrs. Lydia Sherman and Mrs. Jennie Chancey . . . . LAF is under the oversight of Stanley Sherman”, you are officially and collectively the Stegosaurus of the Week. Next time try thinking with the cerebral ganglion, not the sacral one.
Our lovely “Stegosaurus of the Week” Award GIF: Official Winners may feel free to add it to their Web sites (if Stanley approves, of course).
UPDATE: Added link and post ID reference.
Jessica of Feministing has an outstanding interview with Katha Pollitt in the current Salon. Among her usual refreshingly clearsighted remarks, Pollitt touches on the clicheic put-downs of feminists as “strident” and overly political. What she had to say touched an important nerve for me:
Well, do black people, do Latinos, do workers go around saying, “Oh no! Our leaders are so strident! Someone just wrote a strident book defending my rights!” . . .
[W]hen we talk about abortion, how often do we talk about it in terms of women’s lives? As opposed to it being about a fetus being a person. The anti-choicers have so thoroughly switched the conversation over to the question of the personhood of the fertilized egg or fetus that now it’s even a person before it’s implanted in your uterus!
This came right on the heels of my stumbling across another old cliche of the abortion-rights fight: “There are no easy answers in the abortion debate.” The two together put me onto a line of thought that I want to spin out a bit:
There certainly are easy answers about abortion, and it’s time we damn well insisted they be recognized.
The New York Times Magazine has a wrenching photo-essay on the incidence and universality of “child brides”. Girls are forced unwillingly into marriage with, and frequently sold to, husbands rapists often generations older than themselves - either to avoid the cost of raising a “useless female”, to raise money, or to cancel family debts. The practice is almost inescapable:
Globally, the number of child brides is hard to tabulate; they live mostly in places where births, deaths and the human milestones in between go unrecorded. But there are estimates. About 1 in 7 girls in the developing world (excluding China) gets married before her 15th birthday, according to analyses done by the Population Council, an international research group. In the huge Indian states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the proportion is 36 percent; in Bangladesh, 37 percent; in northwest Nigeria, 48 percent; in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, 50 percent.
But that’s not the worst of it.
. . . we’ve been Feministing-dotted!
[UPDATE: And now Pandagon-dotted! Welcome, Pandas!]
[UPUPDATE: And Feministe-dotted! And Alternet-dotted! Thanks, all!]
This blog has been up for a year, and now averages about 30 hits a day. You can imagine how thrilled I am. But just now I noticed I had received close to well over 200 hits in less than 3 hours, and the rocket shows no signs of decelerating. WTF? Quick inspection (love that Sitemeter!) demonstrated that it’s all coming by way of a link from Jessica at Feministing, to my post about the dumbass who posted screens and screens of rant about a wholly fictional article on abortion from The Onion, of all places.
For this, I can only say: Thank you, Jessica! - and Feministing! - and the Feminist Blogs aggregator! (all linked to the right)
And now let me say this about that . . .
First, welcome, all Feministingers! Delighted to have you here, and very flattered to be linked by a great blog I read each and every day. [UPDATE: Special shoutout to my homies in Hayward, and Castro Valley, California! I grew up in Castro Valley, graduated from CV High, and never looked back. I was shocked to see you in the visitor stats - but welcome!] You’re exactly the audience I want to be in touch with.
And that’s what prompts these comments. Not to sound like a completely shameless blogwhore, but, now that you’re here, stick around! Read a few posts! Post a few comments (believe me, there’s room)! More than anything, tell me what you think, how this blog tickles your bioethics fancy, and what you’d like to see here.
I know this sounds pathetic, but I’ve been trying to build readership for a year, and can’t seem to find the formula. As both my regular readers know, my penchant is for longer-form essays on more theoretical issues in healthcare policy and ethics. This is not to say I don’t frequently take time out to rip some right-wing dipshit a much-deserved new one, but many of my posts are more discursive than brief commentary. And I don’t do “Friday Random Ten”. That’s just me. (See the FAQ for some light on why.) Maybe it’s not what blog-readers want. But I can’t help thinking there’s some sort of an audience for me out there. And if there is, that audience will be one with progressive values, strong feminist leanings, science-literate, with an eye for detail and a respect for argumentation. And I suspect much of that audience is already at the blogs I read and respect, such as the ones in my (very selectively chosen) blogroll. I think I’m posting things they (you) would find worthwhile, and I wish I could get the out to that wider audience.
I don’t know if I just have too low a profile, or if I’ve been tried and found wanting. But for those of you here the first time, consider coming back. Those of you who blog, please consider linking when you think there’s something here worth reading. You are the people I want to be in community with. Send me some feedback, drop me a line, let me know if what I’m offering fits a need you have.
And thanks again, for linking and for coming by. Hope to see you again.
The Associated Press reports that a New Hampshire court has ordered the state Board of Medical Examiners to halt disciplinary review of a doctor who made offensive, racist, and insulting remarks to patients. It doesn’t seem to have been a First Amendment issue; instead, the judge declared that:
“It is nonetheless important … to ensure that physicians and patients are free to discuss matters relating to health without fear of government reprisal, even if such discussions may sometimes be harsh, rude or offensive to the listener,”
I’m not impressed.