Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
tgirsch of Lean Left (and my own blogfather!) writes:
I’m interested in the issues surrounding animal testing. I’m certainly not a member of the PETA crowd or anything, but at the same time, I’d certainly think we should keep such testing to a minimum, using it only where it’s necessary, useful, and relevant. But I honestly don’t know what all the issues are.
I really loathe PETA, for lots of good reasons.
But that can take many forms, one of which is mocking, in appropriately childish fashion, PETA’s own tactic for pressuring corporate chicken-torturers [sic]. They have a Web sign-generator site in which they encourage people to post comments about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s practice of, as they put it “tortur[ing] chickens for profit”. Whatever the hell that’s about, it interests me far less than the fact that PETA, as a group, is offensive and abusive to real people, whom I care about far more than the animal fetish-objects that are their sole obsession. So if we’re going to make little signs about cruelty and inappropriate moral priorities, well, let’s get our inappropriate priorities straight, first:
There has been a kind of mini-carnival developing across the blogs lately, on the subject of sexual violence in prisons. It began with a recent LA Times Op-Ed on the subject by high-profile blogger Ezra Klein. It’s good to see attention being paid to this issue; the number of bloggers getting involved is encouraging.
But, as important as the issue is, and as vital as it is to re-assess and reform our justice and prison systems overall, I think viewing this as merely an aspect of the mis-management of prisons is a mistake. Systemic sexual abuse occurs not merely in prisons but in the military, among the “contractors” of KBR in Iraq, between priests and congregants, in the workplace, and throughout society. As feminist critics of violence against women have long been saying, the problem is not one of sex in itself, but of the use and abuse of power in general. It is just one manifestation of an issue that pervades the authoritative control of human beings by other human beings.
Michael Gerson, Bush administration tool and terminal sufferer from Conservative Comprehension Disorder, continues his pattern of getting everything exactly backwards in his Washington Post-sponsored campaign of attacks on Barack Obama. The day after April Fool’s Day (he must have missed a deadline), Gerson published another misinformed screed, this one claiming that Obama is an “extremist” on abortion for opposing laws that would have sentenced women to death. As usual with Gerson and the forced-pregnancy crowd generally, almost everything he says is factually false, and a repetition of standard right-wing myths. The column consists of nothing more than Gerson and the Post carrying water for the organized anti-woman crowd by repeating their well-worn talking points verbatim, with no pretense of originality or reportorial integrity. (more…)
“Reproductive Health Reality Check” is running an April Fool’s Day blog carnival against “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” that mislead patients seeking abortion with deliberately deceptive tactics and false information. “CPCs” are medical fraud - there is no other description for it. And they are an increasing problem as abortion services are continually targetted and women have fewer real options; currently they outnumber real, full-service reproductive health clinics 2:1.
College women are specifically targeted by these charlatans - sometimes with official support from the colleges themselves. Shockingly, not only does Georgetown University - a Catholic school - refuse to provide any form of contraception or abortion referral through its campus healthcare center or hospital, they apparently have also been blanketing the campus with anti-abortion stickers whose only pregnancy-care referral number is to a CPC, not a real health clinic. (Full disclosure: I have an MA from GU, from the early 90s, and their behavior in this regard was even more reprehensible then.) UNC Chapel Hill students have had to create their own sex-ed programs for fellow students, who mostly come from local high schools with “abstinence only” programs and literally don’t know anything about reproductive health, and then are targeted for lurid propaganda by a CPC located just off campus. Students at other schools have had to do the same.
CPCs are a threat to the larger patient population as well. Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation documents many of the problems they represent, including their deceptive tactics, medical fraud, and the support they receive from the anti-choice right (including over $30 million in taxpayers’ money from the Bush administration, and more from state legislatures). Allyson Kirk reports her experience with a CPC that had deliberately located itself along the entranceway to a real health clinic; after receiving an appointment at the real clinic, she mistakenly entered the wrong door, deliberately made up to look like a pro-choice facility, and was treated as if she was the expected patient, then subjected to invasive questioning and fraudulent misinformation.
This kind of behavior would be criminal in a real health clinic. CPCs present themselves in a deliberately fraudulent manner, impersonating real clinics with trained personnel (almost invariably, nobody at a CPC is a licensed healthcare practitioner) offering appropriate healthcare services, for the deliberate purpose of manipulating patients’ decisions and foreclosing their options; they then defend themselves legally by denying that they are subject to the professional obligations of real healthcare providers. The more this is known, and the more their tactics are exposed, the safer women will be.
I don’t usually write link-only posts, but this is worthwhile and the stories some contributors have to share are appalling. Go take a look.
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.
There’s an interesting article by Ron Rosenbaum, in Slate, regarding the fate of Vladmir Nabokov’s final, unfinished manuscript.
Nabokov left a manuscript on index cards, apparently totaling about 30 pages’ worth of text, for an unfinished book titled The Original of Laura. No one outside his family knows what is in the text, or what the title means. Nabokov left unambiguous instructions, at the time of his death, that the manuscript was to be destroyed without publication. This jibes with ideas he expressed elsewhere about refusing to publish imperfect works. His wife, the legendary (infamous?) Vera Nabokov, was his literary executor; she indicated she would follow his wishes but never got around to destroying the cards. When she died in 1991, the cards, and Nabokov’s imprecation, fell to his son Dimitri, who has otherwise actively defended his father’s literary legacy. Dimitri has indicated that he is ambivalent about destroying the work, but is apparently leaning in the direction of carrying out his father’s wishes. Rosenbaum has corresponded with Dimitri over the years, encouraging him to publish the material; in his Slate article, he broadcasts a call for input from readers, promising to forward the best responses to Dimitri, who is apparently finally nearing a decision.
Well. By itself all very interesting, no doubt, and arguably very thinly connected to bioethics by way of Nabokov’s background in biology. (Rosenbaum even tries to link Nabokov’s Laura to Petrarch’s Laura by way of a bird image in the latter and one of Nabokov’s ubiquitous butterfly images in Pale Fire; Dimitri scoffs at this.) But it really doesn’t seem to be an immediate issue in bioethics itself. Or is it?
Chris Muir is the bizarrely unfunny cartoonist behind “Day by Day” - a conservatively-themed Webtoon that is so consistently incomprehensible that it has spawned an entire cottage industry consisting of the reworking of his strips by liberal bloggers on a desperate quest to force them to make some sense. Adding to the through-the-looking-glass fun are Muir’s many signature artistic tics: utterly non-sequitur dialog, references to Muir’s personal political hotbuttons that are so obscure many of the cartoons appear to have no recognizable content, a cast of characters that consists of weirdly-drawn urban hipsters spouting conservative cliches while striking pointless poses, a female cast that consists exclusively of huge-breasted slim-waisted sexpots with low necklines and bare tummies, artistic skills so marginal that his human poses often simply leave out major body parts or appear deformed, and a strange penchant for showing dialog balloons emerging from implausible parts of the speaker’s body. Plenty of nutty goodness there for those who have the time and energy to wade through it, which I rarely do.
This week, however, Muir joined the creepy talking-fetus brigade of conservative ‘toonists. It’s been discussed before, but it’s apparently a growing meme on the right wing - fetal “personhood” taken to such a bizarrely literal extreme that they imagine fetuses as having fully-functional adult personalities, and sometimes adult bodies (and why not? - with all the retrograde scientific claptrap the right wing has latched onto, the homunculus theory is hardly out of place). This can’t be a coincidence. Literalizing the claim of fetal personhood distinctly changes the relationship between, and relative moral standing of, a woman and her fetus, to the detriment (need it be said?) of the woman. That this delusional characterization of pregnancy has become so common and so widespread of late signals another move in the ongoing assault on the effective moral personhood of women. Here is Muir’s contribution to the war:
Classic Muir. The first panel makes no sense. (Emphasizing the word “must” makes the second woman’s response seem like a logical deduction from the first woman’s statement - but it’s non-sequitur. As commentary on the immigration bill issue, it’s equally nonsensical: who is legal? why “must”? what the hell is he talking about?) He hits bottom in the second panel, when the woman’s fetus addresses her directly and declares itself to be an “illegal immigrant” in a voice loud enough to be heard by the woman next to her. This panel’s a three-fer: creepy fetus fetishization, self-contradiction (the fetus appears to be claiming solidarity with illegal aliens, which is against Muir’s own point of view [does he not actually read his own strip?]), plus nutjob rhapsodizing about marriage that is both false and idiotic (there’s nothing illegal about being conceived before your parents were married, as this fetus is said to have been; he’s somehow elevated a right-wing obsession with adult women’s sex lives to the level of a criminal act on the part of the fetus, which is impressive doing even for Muir). The third panel is just dumb. (What has late-night TV got to do with a talking fetus? Is she hallucinating the voice? That would undercut the fetus-fetish message, plus the other woman seems to hear it, too. Is the fetus watching TV? That’s even creepier.) It’s like he feels no responsibility to relate the content of one panel to another, let alone make his weird asides and personal in-jokes make any sense to anyone else.
The bottom line, though, is the talking fetus. No matter how dumb the rest is, talking fetuses are weird, scary, and implicitly misogynistic.
Which means, of course, that it’s time for another Chris Muir cartoon upgrade project. I’ve posted my weak efforts below the cut. Feel free to pile on. (Add your edited cartoon in comments, or just quote the dialog for the balloons.)
Today is International Women’s Day, and for that reason also Blog Against Sexism Day. I want to use the opportunity to take notice of the degree to which sexism is the root of many healthcare ethics issues affecting women, or, to put that another way, how much of women’s health issues arise from or are shaped by sexism and gender oppression.
[NB: I began this review just after the movie came out, almost 15 months ago, and never finished it. Finally, sitting around this weekend, sick and procrastinating, I decided to get it off the books. Here it is, for whoever’s still interested.]
The 2005 techno-thriller The Island hides a ham-handed anti-biotech message amidst its helicopters, gun battles, and explosions of various kinds. It trots out some of the standard “clone army” cliches, but goes beyond this, in places literally taking its dialog directly from the religious-right’s anti-science talking points. It fills a certain niche in the long line of biotech-nightmare morality plays, but with a particularly preachy, and notably slanted, take.
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.
There has been much talk about New York City’s bold move to ban artificial “trans-fats” in restaurant cooking.
The New York City Board of Health voted yesterday to adopt the nation’s first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants . . . .
Naturally, there has been a backlash from those whose pocketbooks are implicated (just once I’d like to see a business owner say “This is bad for people? Well, I guess I shouldn’t do it then!”). There has also been the predictable grousing about the “nanny state”. However, I think the issue is intriguingly complicated in ways that some other public-health or safety issues are not.
Saw a couple of offbeat movies recently, one pretty good, one very bad. Both had doctors in them, and they got me thinking about doctoring and what we want it to be.
What happens, f’rinstance, if your doctor’s a mobbed-up, drug-using, drug-pushing, fairly psychotic lowlife with sybaritic sexual tastes who doesn’t really mind seeing you die?
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.
DB, of the eponymous “Medical Rants”, makes a good point about rare diseases:
The problem with Lemierre’s Disease is that it represents a “long tail” disease. Most sore throats are viral or due to streptococcal disease. At least we thought that until recently. Evidence from 2005 in two articles suggests that the organism thought responsible for most Lemierre’s Disease - Fusobacterium necrophorum - may cause as much as 10% of pharyngitis. . . .
For the past 30 years, the infectious disease community has worked to decrease the use of unnecessary antibiotics. They have assumed that group A beta hemolytic streptococcal infection is the only pharyngitis cause which needs “necessary antibiotics”. They have assumed that group C and group G streptococci do not need antibiotics. They have excluded the possibility of unknown bacterial infections. Now it appears that Fusobacterium necrophorum may indeed be an “unknown bacterial cause” of pharyngitis.
What can we do about the Long Tail?
There seems to be some sort of multi-way dispute taking place between the extreme animal-rights activists, the really extreme animal-rights activists, and those who are actually taking care of animals. In much the same way as the vegan/vegetarian dispute over arificial meat, the animal lovers are carrying on the fine tradition of progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by turning on one another for docrinal incorrectness before they can accomplish anything.
Plus there’s the two dead chimps and a body chained to a laboratory door, but that’s the least of things.
“Blue”, of The Gimp Parade, has an interesting post on the differing reactions non-disabled people have to the disabled in different contexts, and on the expectations they seem to have for how the disabled are “supposed to”, or are allowed to, look to non-disabled eyes.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what people with disabilities look like and how it influences our interaction with the nondisabled in public. What disabled people are supposed to look like is part of the interaction too. . . .
Anyone who has experienced both limping and using a wheelchair will tell you that public reactions to the two appearances differ. Same with manual chair versus power chair, white cane versus guide dog, invisible impairment versus visible one(s), and, Ballastexistenz claims, with dog versus sans dog for her as a person with autism. Visual differences cue stereotypes, and breathing on one’s own versus towing a ventilator on my scooter also makes a discernible difference. Most notably, even fewer people are willing to make eye contact. . . .
Okay, so I know it’s fear of difference and the old “there-but-for-the-grace-of” thing. And that’s fed by a history of segregation and institutionalization. I’m 37, by the way, and Americans in wheelchairs who are my age are pretty much the first generation allowed to attend public school with everyone else.
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.
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).
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.
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.
