The Sarah Palin nomination is so ludicrous it’s hard to grasp. People are still trying to get a handle on what it means, and what the relevant aspects of her tissue-thin background are. There’s been a lot of good commentary so far, including her relatively minor political experience, all of it in (literally) bush-league environs, and the obvious pandering - to pro-Hillary defectors and religious-right goons - that constitutes the only justification for her nomination. There is also her utter lack of background or preparation for assuming the Presidency without warning - as is her most important, and almost sole, Constitutional responsibility. And there is her apparent penchant for using her office and state agencies for personal vendettas. No doubt all of this will get more thoroughly aired, as it should. (My only fear is that McCain will come to his senses before the official nomination and force her to “reluctantly withdraw” to “spend more time with her family” - I want her on the GOP ticket!)

But there has been some other stuff entering into the discussion that I think is very ugly and ill-advised. Of course there have been some idiotic sexist remarks (and some equally idiotic attempted defenses of her “women’s work” as a qualification for President that are just as sexist in their condescension); that’s bad enough. And it’s hard to know just how to evaluate her “life story”, since much of her qualification for office - according to those who support her - is that she hunts moose and has a passle of kids. If they really think those are qualifications*, then it’s fair game to point out that they are not.

But there are other personal issues that are not fair game.

I hardly like to even bring the subject up, but it should be confronted. There are all kinds of weird rumors going around about Palin and her kids. Many people have suggested that her last child, born when Palin was 44 years old and not known to have been pregnant at the time, was actually the child of Palin’s oldest teenage daughter, who had dropped out of school claiming illness for over 6 months leading up to the birth. In addition, that child was born with Down Syndrome, and some other clown is now posting suggesting that that condition was the result of Sarah Palin’s behavior during the pregnancy. Alan Colmes has suggested Palin could have endangered the fetus by traveling more than 9 hours to a rural Alaskan hospital, rather than go to any of the many larger and closer hospitals, while supposedly in labor. (Note that the two rumors conflict with one another.)

Aside from this being a highly personal issue (and, if the rumor about the teenage mother is true, then apparently something the family does not want to acknowledge), it’s hard to see what legitimate relevance it has. Once, this would have been a career-killing scandal; thankfully, as the result of progressive social activism and the victories for women’s reproductive freedom that Palin herself opposes, there are now many options for forming families, and one’s personal choices in that regard are granted much more respect. Ironically, it is only Palin’s own base that would find anything scandalous in this. But it can certainly be used to create discomfort for the candidate and her family, and, again, among all the irrelevant lightweight issues Palin brings to the campaign, this seems to bear no relation to the question of her fitness for office.

To deliberately pick on an uncomfortable and private issue for the purpose of embarrassing or harassing a candidate is despicable. And to use women’s reproductive choices as weapons against them only involves us in the worst abuses of the right wing. This is absolutely the sort of thing we - decent progressives who support women’s freedom to choose their reproductive pathway - must not be doing. Yet highly-visible blogs like DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan (not a defender of choice, it’s true) are pushing the issue, and others are spreading it with their concern-trolling.**

There is perhaps one argument that makes the issue sound relevant, and that is the question of hypocrisy. The religious right and the GOP are on hair-trigger to judge other people’s lifestyles, family structures, and reproductive choices, so when one of them finds themselves enmeshed in a “non-traditional family” saga, perhaps we are entitled to some schadenfreude? And perhaps we are, but the only decent response is to welcome that family to the community of freedom of choice and freedom from condemnation. Palin, as far as I know, has not been one of the overt persecutors of others in that respect, and does not deserve to be persecuted in return.

Lee Stranahan, of the Huffington Post, offers this odd defense:

The whole story is based on an insulting view of fundamentalist Christians; that they’d be so freaked out by a teenage pregnancy that they’d have the Governor — the most highly visible and public women in the small fishbowl of Alaska — fake a pregnancy to cover up the sins her of daughter Bristol.

Actually, I find that perfectly possible to believe. But it’s just as much none of our business as it is none of theirs. We’ve got to stop making political fodder out of people’s health and reproduction, out of their attempts to just live their lives as best they can by their own lights, without interfering with anyone else. I have little hope that this story - whatever is behind it - will have any such effect on the GOP; in fact I have little hope that it will even encourage Sarah Palin to think that women who make different reproductive choices from hers might deserve the kind of privacy and respect that she wants for herself. But if we’re going to see a future in which people have the freedom and security to live their own lives and make their own choices, we have to let everyone do so, even those who oppose that freedom for others. We can’t let ourselves be the thing we oppose and expect anything good to come of it.

Update: Palin herself has just announced that the rumors her 17-year-old daughter had the baby (Trig) in May are false, because . . .  the daughter is pregnant now.

ST. PAUL (Reuters) –  The 17-year-old daughter of Republican  vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said  on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by  liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up  for her child.

That would seem to lay the other rumor to rest. It also explains why the daughter was seen wearing an engagement ring - she’s marrying the father of her expected baby (yes, 17 years old, with a baby and a husband, neither of which she planned for). Palin has requested privacy for her family over that issue, and again it seems to me they ought to have it. This does raise the tantalizing question of how her insane fundie supporters are going to react, but I think we know the answer to that already: they would be screaming and howling at any Democrat who made the same announcement, but nothing matters if you’re a Republican, so it’ll be just fine.

* I’m highly suspicious that any of her supporters actually believe she is qualified for this office, or that they really mean the things they say in claiming so.
** I hope that’s not what I’m doing here, also. That’s not my intent, at least.

[Crossposted from my group political blog, Lean Left.]

Update: Revised description of one of the rumors; my original explanation was wrong.

Michelle Malkin now takes on the cause, and the rhetoric, of the misogynist anti-autonomy movement and its efforts to eliminate accessible reproductive healthcare.

Planned Parenthood is the largest single provider of prenatal, contraceptive, and abortion care in the US. In a country in which over 85% of all counties have no abortion services provider at all, in which health insurance plans are not required to provide contraception, and in which government-provided health programs for the poor are prohibited from providing abortion or, at times, even information about abortion, Planned Parenthood is often the only reproductive health provider available in many communities, and usually the only one available at reduced cost.

This drives the anti-woman brigade screaming crazy. There has been an organized campaign against Planned Parenthood by the sex-negative right wing for years, using a combination of smear tactics, lies, distortions, and political lobbying. Attacks range across everything from Margaret Sanger’s racism (don’t believe what you hear from hypocritical liars), Planned Parenthood’s practices of murder, malpractice, and coverup (don’t believe what you hear from anti-woman liars), and the - in Malkin’s terms - “obscene profits” Planned Parenthood makes from the lucrative business of providing subsidized healthcare to uninsured patients in poor communities (don’t believe what you hear from financially illiterate liars). The reason, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is doing what they are dead set on wiping out: making reproductive autonomy real for the most vulnerable women in America.

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I have posted elsewhere on my reaction to Obama’s speech on race, and conservative reactions to it. But yesterday’s column by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post moves me to comment here specifically on the provocative remarks about AIDS that have been quoted in this controversy, and their implications for the larger questions that must be faced by this country.

As most people will be aware, the right wing has been Swift-boating Barack Obama for the past few weeks over controversial statements made at various times over several decades by the pastor of the black-identified Baptist church Obama attends in Chicago. Yeserday Obama responded with a speech on the history and role of race and racial discrimination in America - a speech that will stand within the highest ranks of American political oratory, and, I am convinced, be seen in the future as the watershed moment in race relations in this country (certainly so if Obama wins the presidency; likely so even if he does not). There is almost nothing in the speech about healthcare, and only a little about the particular statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that the right wing has picked out to whip up into controversy. Rightly, Obama placed the entire controversy in the larger context of racial history; many conservative commentators, angry at seeing their manufactured controversy dismissed in favor of more important and more substantive issues, responded with criticisms that Obama did not explicitly repudiate Wright and specific statements he had made, as they had demanded. Michael Gerson, in particular, focuses on Wright’s endorsement of the far-fetched conspiracy theory about AIDS that has been circulating in the black community.

Obama’s excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor.

Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama’s speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama’s grandmother, which Obama said made him “cringe” — both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference.

Gerson regards holding such an opinion as beyond the pale - and anyone who would believe such things as deranged. (”This accusation . . . makes Wright a dangerous man. . . . Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America . . . .”) Gerson is obviously grossly ignorant of the history and substance of these rumors, and the historical context in which they arise. And - like other conservatives dismissive of blacks’ reactions to America’s racial history - he seems to have no sense of what that context means to the people it most closely affects.

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I met Robert Rummel-Hudson last night at his New York book party, celebrating the release of Schuyler’s Monster, his memoir of his daughter’s struggle to meet the challenges of having been born with polymicrogyria - a neurodevelopmental disease that prevents her from developing spoken language - and his own struggle to meet the challenges of parenthood and the demands imposed by his daughter’s condition. The book grew out of Rob’s gripping, heart-rending blog, Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords.

Robert has been documenting, step-by-step, the pathway he, his equally-admirable wife Julie, and Schuyler (pr. “SKY-ler”) herself have followed, first coming to terms with Schuyler’s developmental difficulties, then battling the public schools’ broken and indifferent system for educating special-needs children until finally moving to a city (Plano, TX, of all places) that offered what Schuyler needed. At the urging of his growing base of enthralled fans and well-wishers, he turned the blog into a book that hit the market just this week. It has already received considerable word of mouth and small-market press attention even before release; I am convinced it is just about to explode into a real sensation, and deservedly so.

Robert has an ability to communicate the pathos and humor of his family’s situation, and even more strongly Schuyler’s unbelievably spunky and winning personality, and her brilliantly unique triumph over the multiple dirty tricks life has played her. Schuyler is without question the star of his blog (which, he says, she still has not read, nor has she the book, either, though she is fully aware that she is a media queen). It is impossible to read their story without falling in love with Schuyler (and indeed she is regularly showered with largesse by fans, often anonymous, who have visited the family’s Amazon wish-lists). “Schuyler has a posse!”, I told Rob, and he agreed that one of the most satisfying side-effects of blogging about her condition is that she has garnered such a wide-spread support base. That is due to Rob’s ability to make her come alive through his words - though it’s obvious Schuyler is giving him a lot of great material to work with.

In person, Rob comes across just as you’d imagine from his blog: funny, personable, thoughtful, fiercely dedicated to Schuyler and her needs, worried about her future, and laceratingly honest about his own uncertainties and shortcomings (which I think he overestimates). It was great fun meeting him, and I was glad to see the St. Martin’s Press staff just as enthused about the book as were the many fans who turned out to meet the author.

I mention all this simply to add this plug for a book that deserves to be read, and will break your heart and change your viewpoint when you have done so. I can’t communicate the impact of Rob’s blog or the book it gave rise to, but I urge everyone to experience them for themselves.

(1) Go buy this book:

(2) Go read this blog.

You can thank me later.

UPDATE: Fixed an editing mistake.

Making with the sorely overdue link-love: two months ago, Amanda Marcotte (of Pandagon, and the best thing that ever happened to John Edwards) linked my prior post on right-wing propaganda about Margaret Sanger (as a way of attacking Planned Parenthood). She points out the fact that, in Sanger’s day, PP was actually anti-abortion (largely for reasons of the relative safety of the procedure, much lower then than now), and that the wingers seem to have no conception of the irony of their slanders.

The article generated a fascinating discussion thread, however (with minimal, but nonzero, trollage) - one that I only stumbled across today by following a visitor link (thanks!). I’m sorry to be so late on this but I encourage everyone to run over there; the discussion is interesting and, collectively, it includes a fascinating list of resources on the history of abortion, abortion and race, and sexual autonomy as seen from a variety of times and places, and presented in a variety of media (the rock-opera version of a 19th-century German play about the link between lack of sex ed and unplanned pregnancy sounds . . . wild - and I had no idea there was a whole list of early silent movies on the same topic!). Now I’ve got a lot more reading to do! So do you.

“Wendi Aarons” contributes an open letter to the McSweeney’s collection:

AN OPEN LETTER TO
MR. JAMES THATCHER,
BRAND MANAGER,
PROCTER & GAMBLE.

February 6, 2007

Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your Always maxi pads for over 20 years, and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core™ or Dri-Weave™ absorbency, I’d probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I’d certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can’t tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there’s a little F-16 in my pants. . .

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? Ever suffered from “the curse”? I’m guessing you haven’t. . . .

Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: “Have a Happy Period.”

Are you fucking kidding me? . . .

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I need to play weaker defense.

That’s a conclusion I just now came to after struggling to understand my own reactions to things I’d been reading, and in particular to why everyone I’d been reading seemed so angry all the time. Since it seemed to me they didn’t have reasons to be so angry, there was apparently something wrong, and I was sorely tempted to put it right. I knew, too, that they wouldn’t appreciate my assistance in encouraging them not to be angry about the things they were angry about, and then they would be angry at me, which really wouldn’t be fair.

So, before even attempting to help all those angry people realize they were wrong to be so angry, I’m already [more of] the asshole [than usual] - supposedly. And that makes me angry, so I began devising all these imaginary ripostes to the as-yet-only-potential criticisms I knew I would get for helping the angry people see things my way. And the more I thought about the issues at hand, the more I had to defend myself against attacks from people I was only trying to straighten out for their own benefit, to the point that this defensiveness defined my understanding of the issues - making myself right was the test of the correctness of the positions I took. The more tenacious my defensiveness became, the harder it was to understand what all the angry people were saying except in ways that automatically made them wrong, so I could be right.

Clearly, Tenacious D is a considerable mind-fucking auto-petard that one might best be rid of if one hopes to understand others in non-assholish ways.*

* Yes, it’s also the name of the worst rock-’n-roll band in the entire world, including all the French ones.

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Every day is freedom day, autonomy day, self-determination day, choice day, as far as I’m concerned. Reproductive choice is one part of the freedom and autonomy we all enjoy throughout our lives - the birthright of every moral person, the foundation of morality in both its constraining and its liberating guises. That pervasive freedom, and the moral responsibility it brings, must remain inviolate if we are to be moral persons at all, and to act from that stance of moral agency in any and every part of our lives. In that sense, every threat to the moral dignity of the individual is equally a threat to freedom in all its aspects and manifestations.

If you are pro-freedom, you must be pro-choice - and pro-free-speech, and pro-marry-whom-you-want, and pro-fuck-whom-you-want-and-how-and-when-and-why, and pro-feminist, and pro-speak-truth-to-power, and pro-read-what-you-like, and pro-write-what-you-like, and pro-vegetarian, and pro-wear-leather, and pro-wear-makeup, and pro-hate-makeup, and pro-piercing, and pro-no-piercings, and pro-disability-righs, and pro-lift-up-every-voice-and-sing, and pro-hip, and pro-square, and pro-people-in-all-their-crazy-ways - for freedom enables all of these, and freedom is lost when any of these is banned. That’s good enough reason - a reason that makes a necessity - for being pro-choice and all the rest, every single day you value freedom.

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 Yep.

(And a hat tip to Jessica of Feministing, for the unbelievable site this comes from.)

Not sure what to say about this:

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The New York Times hits the right note, almost in passing, in today’s article on the difficulties working-class women face in breastfeeding due to opposition from employers. Women are more and more pressured to breastfeed (witness the Times’s own notorious article - titled “Breast-Feed or Else” - virtually accusing them of child abuse if they do not), but those with fewest choices economically have the hardest time doing so, especially because employers, while sometimes paying lip service to woman-friendly policies, prohibit women from doing what is necessary to keep their kids in best health.

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Right-wingers have been beside themselves over a small cluster of deaths from toxic-shock-like syndrome, caused by infection by certain specific microorganisms, in patients who had obtained medical abortions using RU-486 or a similar preparation. Specifically, there have been 4 such deaths from 2003 - 2005, plus one previously; the most recent 4 all involved women in California who had been given an “off-label” vaginal suppository for Mifepristone Misoprostol (one of the two drugs used in the most-common medical abortion procedure), as opposed to taking it orally. These similarities prompted concern among health officials; the American College of Gynecology, which had endorsed the off-label usage, convened a study panel on the issue, and Planned Parenthood stopped using the vaginal-delivery method (which is otherwise more comfortable, easier, and more effective than oral delivery). The anti-choice contingent, however, of course began trumpeting the incidents as “proof” that all medical abortion was “unsafe”.

This “proof” suffers somewhat from certain facts: (a) no clear cause of the toxic syndrome in these cases has ever been determined; (b) the medication has been used safely, orally and vaginally, by over half a million women, as compared with only 5 deaths; (c) the death rate for medical abortion - as for every other form of early- to mid-term therapeutic abortion - is lower than that for childbirth, making abortion in general, and RU-486 in particular, the best choice for women from a safety perspective. Now, the results of ACOG’s review of the situation show that this safety differential favors RU-486 even more than was previously known.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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

HPV

Parental Involvement

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)

Pregnancy & Birth

Fetal Assault

HIV Testing of Infants and Pregnant Women

Infant Abandonment

Infertility Coverage

Nonmedical Use of Ultrasound
Substance Abuse During Pregnancy
Refusal Clauses
Abortion Services
Contraceptive Services
General Medical Services

Youth
Child Abuse Reporting

Minors Access to Reproductive Health
Sex Education
See Also:

Abortion: Minors Reporting
Abortion: Parental Involvement
Contraception & Prevention: Parental Involvement

Hat tip: Reproductive Rights Blog

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.

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.

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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.

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[Note to visitors from Pandagon: Welcome! Glad to have you here.]

Sharon Hughes, of an eponymous blog subtitled “Changing Worldviews”, has a radio talk show and podcast in which she comments on a predictable range of rignt-wing issues. She recently used her extensive media presence to retail a tired old misquote of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

This quote - one half of one sentence from a letter about setting up birth control education programs in the black community, has been circulating around the anti-choice community for years. The purported interpretation is that Sanger was deliberately planning a genocide against blacks - and announced this in a letter to a black doctor, seeking another black doctor and black minister to carry out her nefarious program. Aside from the sheer idiocy of the claim, they never even quote the entire sentence, because that alone would make it clear how absurdly false the accusation is. Still, with the complete lack of critical faculty that marks the right wing, the half-quote and its gasping mis-reading are taken at face value wherever they are presented. Hughes is merely the latest vector.

Here is Huges revealing “Planned Parenthood’s Secret Agenda” on her blog:

The abortion industry’s secret - Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood shockingly said, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

This is outrageous and makes me angry every time I think about this sinister agenda . . .

[boldface original to Hughes]

Assuming that she was merely in error, and not, of course, in any way telling deliberate falsehoods (however obvious), I took the opportunity to write her a polite and supportive letter explaining the misunderstanding and encouraging her to issue a correction on the radio, podcast, and blog venues in which she had originally slandered Sanger. Since she is naturally concerned only with telling the truth on these important issues, I’m sure she’ll get right on it. For the record, however, my letter - with links to supporting material and source references - is below the jump.

In the meantime, let’s count the days until the corrections are made!
(more…)

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[Same also to visitors from Feministe, Haloscan, Alternet, and the several others who have picked up on this post. Over 3,000 of you have visited in the last 5 days. Welcome, all!]

[At this point, let me just say: “Hello, and thanks!” to all the new visitors from the many sites that have linked this story. I’ve been overwhelmed - 7,000 hits in 6 days, from a pre-story average of about 35 per day! - and gratified by the attention. I can no longer keep up with the flood.]

Sometimes God hands you one on a plate.

The Onion ran a blunt but funny parody of the right wing’s delusional vision of women who have abortions (”Well, I don’t care what the pro-lifers say… I am totally psyched for this abortion! . . . Those pro-life activists made it pretty clear that, unlike me, they actually think abortion is bad and to be avoided. Are they nuts? Abortion is the best! . . . I seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions. This abortion is going to be so amazing. . . . See you at my post-abortion party, everybody!”).

Exceeding even my low expectations, some imbecile “pro-lifer” took it seriously, and posted a lengthy finger-wagging screed about this woman’s irresponsibly light-hearted attitude toward “the killing of innocent human beings! [exclamation point original]”

She says:

“If my HMO wouldn’t have bowed to [pro-life] pressure not to cover oral contraceptives, I never would’ve gotten pregnant in the first place.”

Sorry ma’am, if you hadn’t had sex you wouldn’t have gotten pregnant, it’s not the HMO’s fault for not supporting your promiscuity while not married. . . .

Miss Weber, you have killed your child . . . . That does make you an admitted murderer. . . . I’m going to pray for your forgiveness and for the suffering which you will endure when you realize what you have done. Every baby you see from that moment on is going to wake you up to the realization that you killed your child.

Why do I get the feeling that when “Pete” at “March Together for Life” says he’s going to pray for “Miss Weber’s” suffering, that’s exactly what he means?

And yes, true to form, he posted both the name and the photograph of the person whose suffering he was praying for (not realizing that both are fake).

So, Pete, even though it’s not yet the end of the week, you take the prize. For being an unbelievable moron, for sanctimoniousness above and beyond the call of decency, and for confirming in hilarious detail the sheer boneheaded idiocy of the pro-life movement, you are officially 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.

UPDATE:

Man, it’s just too easy. After getting hammered with a 4-day surge of traffic from this site, and then the several who picked up the story and linked him directly, and after suffering several hundred unanimously derisory comments (still my favorite: “I’m pro-life, but sweet Jesus you’re an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?”), “Pete” has finally responded. Not, as many had predicted, by taking his insanely stupid post down, but by following up with another attack on the same satirical Onion piece and claiming he was right all along!

I was tempted to just ignore it, but it’s priceless. He repeatedly refers to “Miss Weber” as a real person, insisting that “she” really said all the things in the article. He then asserts that he is entitled to believe that the article was real because that’s how pro-choice people really talk, as witnessed by a totally deranged conversation he claims to have had with a pro-choice woman while he was setting up his “Genocidal Awareness Project” signs in a public park. He concludes: “I think I did a good job of turning the ’satire’ right back at them, don’t you?”

It’s hard to tell what he means by this, since, just before that comment, he quoted his own research into the meaning of “satire”:

Hmm, let’s look up the term satire:

“witty language used to convey insults or scorn; “he used sarcasm to upset his opponent””

Yep. He looked up the wrong word, then quoted it. [UPDATE: To be fair, it should be noted that there is an online dictionary that gives the above as a definition of “satire”. It’s obviously a bad definition, but I suppose he’s entitled to use it. See comments below.]

I dunno. The Stegosaurus of the Week award was just recently instituted, and was intended more as a joke than anything (I hesitate to use the word “satire”). There aren’t really any rules for it, so I don’t know if I can give it out at the beginning of the week, or to the same person twice for what is essentially the same act of stupidity. I do strongly suspect we’re not going to see anything this gaspingly dumb again, certainly not in the next three days. Unless Pete keeps posting.

Pete: don’t.

ABSOLUTELY FINAL UPDATE: He posted another self-defensive statement when his first defense only drew more flames. When all three absolutely idiotic posts collectively garnered over 1,500 comments, virtually every one of them harshly critical, he moved the entire content of his blog to a new URL. I could almost sympathize with that, except that he moved the clueless anti-Onion rants along with it and left them up on the new blog, with no retraction and no indication that their subject was fictional. (He does appear finally to have figured this out - after having it pointed out in unmistakeable terms 1,500 times - but he hasn’t deleted, retracted, or edited the two posts in which he claimed the Onion story was real.) The new blog requires registration for comments (I wonder why), so he’s insulated from criticism but still puts forward his clueless and false rants about abortion.

I give up. I will post nothing more on this. This dipshit is simply far beyond help, and there’s nothing to be gained by flogging the incident. As some have begun to note on his old comments threads, there may not be any more point in commenting on his posts either. Whatever they are capable of learning from this, he and his supporters no doubt already have. Insulting him or them just to do it is gratuitous and makes no political point that hasn’t already been made. Best just to ignore him. As for me, I’m very gra