Right-wing morality

PZ Myers tells about a particularly nasty instance of the clash between reality and Fundamentalist so-called "morality", involving a class of very common birth defects.

About one in a thousand births in the USA involve a failure of the neural tube to close up during development. Mild cases lead to spina bifida; serious cases lead to anencephaly, where the fetus does not grow a brain [Warning: link contains graphic medical images that some people may find disturbing].

PZ writes:

Failure of the anterior neuropore to close is even more serious. The brain fails to form. This condition is called anencephaly, and it is untreatable and lethal. If they aren't dead at birth, they might last a few days before succumbing. They have no brain. At best, they have a mass of dying, relatively undifferentiated neural tissue smeared across the floor of their incompletely formed skulls. They can't think, they can't feel, they can't respond. The real tragedy is that development can proceed surprisingly far without a brain, and these fetuses are recognizably human (here is a photo for the strong of stomach), and they can be carried fully to term.

That's the reality: anencephaleptic babies can't think or feel pain and won't survive more than a few days. But the right-wing fundamentalists in the US government have decided that the life of a literally brain-less creature, one that cannot possibly survive after birth, is more important than the health and emotional state of the mother. PZ quotes the Reality Based Community:

But the Congress had decided -- that no federal funds should be used to pay for abortions except where the life of the mother was at stake. As a result, Tricare (formerly CHAMPUS) the agency that covers military families, refused to pay the $3000 the abortion would cost.

The family sued, and a federal court ordered Tricare to pay, and the abortion went forward.

Then the Justice Department (with John Ashcroft as Attorney General) sued the family to recover the $3000, out of the sailor's pay of less than $20,000 a year.

The Justice Department just won.

and argues that:

Our guardians of purity have magnified the pain of this family and willfully and vindictively punished them for the 'crime' of a biological imperfection. I call that evil, pure and simple. There should have been no question in this case that an abortion was necessary.

I can't blame Tricare for refusing to fund the abortion in the first case -- it isn't their place to choose which laws they obey and which they don't. Nor can I fault the appeal judge's decision: it seems that the initial order for Tricare to pay for the abortion was morally right but legally wrong. But it is a horrible, bean-counting, cruel and heartless act for John Ashcroft's Justice Department to have appealed that decision, and for them to pursue the sailor to collect would be even more mean-spirited and nasty.

Emergency contraception and the war on women

As part of the American Taliban's war on women, it is getting harder and harder to get contraceptives of all sorts. But access to emergency contraceptives is especially hard to get, as Ohio resident Biting Beaver found:

"But see, the problem is that we have 4 doctors here right now but only one of them ever writes EC prescriptions. But see, the thing is that he'll interview you and see if you meet his criteria. Now, I called the pharmacy but I also talked to him and well....*clears throat*....you can come down and try to get it. You know, if you meet his criteria he'll give you a prescription, I mean, there's really no harm in trying." [...]

[...] "You know, you'll just have to have an interview with him and he'll see if you meet his criteria. He'll only be on duty until 2pm today though and you should ask for him if you decide to come down because he's really your only chance."

I sigh and thank him before hanging up. I know exactly what he was telling me. If I wasn't raped and wasn't married then too damn bad for me.

[...] I called every hospital in every surrounding county and none of them would prescribe me EC. Not even ONE. [...]

I found that the more hospitals and clinics and doctors I called the more ashamed I became. Yep, you heard right. I was feeling ashamed at being such an unworthy dirty whore. Well, at least in the eyes of all these hospitals and doctors and clinics. I cried, then I sweated, then I cried some more, then I called some more.

[...]

I have been asked about my sexual practices. Whether I'm 'monogamous' or 'in a relationship' if I'm married, if I have kids, how many kids I have, if I was raped or 'traumatized' but there wasn't ONE question about my health. Not one.

Thanks to BoingBoing.

That isn't to say that it is only male doctors and phamacists who are trying to roll the clock back to before safe, effective contraceptives were available. There is no shortage of self-hating women who think that sex is a sin that needs to be punished too. It was Biting Beaver's regular doctor, a woman, who refused to write her a prescription.

I've written about a similar story before.

This clearly demonstrates a particular mode of failure that free markets are subject to. It isn't common, and tends to happen only with so-called "morality" issues, but it can happen -- especially if people who hold a certain immoral viewpoint deliberately take jobs in the medical industry so they can force their immoral vision of pregnancy as punishment onto the rest of us. It needs no grand conspiracy, just a lot of like-minded people who are "trying to make a difference".

And unlike (say) vegans becoming butchers so they can preach to the meat-eaters, it isn't economically self-correcting. A butcher who doesn't sell meat for moral reasons will go broke and be replaced by a butcher who will sell meat; a chemist who refuses to sell contraceptives has a thousand other products to live off, the loss of a few products is only a small cost.

Incredibly, twenty-four percent of Ohio hospitals won't provide emergency contraceptives even to rape victims.

There was one small ray of sunshine in this lousy story: one of the blog readers wrote:

Everytime I hear a story like yours, it reaffirms my committment to see school through. I would be proud to be a pharmacist that women knew they could come to for help.

The more we shine light on the monsters, the more we encourage people to reject their toxic memes.

Baby snuffers

Olvlzl, writing for Echidne of the Snakes, discusses the secret history of "baby snuffers" in pre-Roe America.

The first week of April, 1983, in the small city of Somersworth, New Hampshire, a couple started to do some house cleaning. One thing they needed to get rid of was an old steamer trunk a woman had asked them to store for her. She had long since moved and they couldn't return it. Opening the trunk they were shocked to find five mummified skeletons of babies wrapped in newspapers. They called the police.
[...]
The woman who owned the trunk was in her 60s in 1983. The papers say she was called a "pillar of the community" when she lived in the area. People who remembered her said that at the time the babies had been killed she often appeared to be pregnant but she never had children. The authorities found her but she wouldn't say anything about the trunk. I don' t know of any legal pressure put on her to talk. The fact that there were five corpses of infants wrapped in newspapers from different years certainly suggests serial infanticide, not a misdemeanor in anyone's book.

Olvlzl points out that in 1983 New Hampshire was solidly in control of the Republican Party, with an officially anti-abortion policy. It is curious that a political party which celebrates the so-called "culture of life", which considers aborting single-cell embryos to be murder, is so unconcerned about the actual murder of actual babies which have been born and taken an unassisted breath. But then, I'm hardly the first person who has noticed that while the American Taliban will fight heaven and earth to save a single-celled embryo, once the baby is born, it is all on its own.

In virtually every culture on Earth, infanticide is a common practice for getting rid of unwanted babies. The only exceptions that I know of are modern Western cultures with easy access to reliable contraceptives, allowing people, particularly mothers, avoid pregnancy in the first place. Christian Fundamentalists in the USA, like their spiritual brethren in the Taliban, are working hard to deny contraceptives even to married adult women: even if they can't (yet) outlaw it, they can make it virtually impossible for women to get access to either. We've been there before: "baby snuffer" was common enough to develop it's own term in pre-Roe America. As abortion and contraceptive becomes more restricted in America, I have no doubt that baby snuffers will come back into business, and (except for rare frenzies of false moral indignation) will be ignored by the hypocrites and control-freaks in the Culture Of Life.

The Anti-Life movement

Guest blogger Jill writes for the Rude Pundit about the so-called "pro-life" movement which is actually anti-life.

She shows the extents to which the "pro-life" movement aims to steal control of women's reproductive systems. It isn't just about abortion: they are attacking the availability of contraception equally as hard -- even for married women, which proves the lie that their opposition to contraception is that it encourages promiscuity. In the "Heart"land, that den of hypocrites and monsters, pharmacists have been known to refuse to fill potentially life-saving prescriptions for antibiotics or vitamins if they came from a reproductive health clinic. Some of these "pro-life" monsters even oppose vaccines against cervical cancer.

She explains how the "pro-life" policies lead to more deaths of mothers, more abortions, more sickness, and that European countries with progressive sex education policies and easy access to contraceptives end up having far fewer abortions than countries like the US and Brazil that ban them. It isn't about saving the poor innocent babies -- the monsters are more than happy to see them die in the womb from infection. It's about making sure that any woman who has sex suffers the consequences: disease, pregnancy, even cancer.

These are very strong claims, and may seem very provocative to those who have heard nothing but specially selected sound-bites from the anti-freedom brigade about "saving the little babies". But Jill's post has many links to direct quotes from, for example, the immoral monster who would rather her daughters die of cervical cancer than face the possibility that she might just grow up to control her own body. See here for the lie that is the "pro-life" movement.

[Update: the link to Feministe (via snipurl) above has changed to here.]

Pete the dolt just gets funnier and funnier

I recently posted about Pete the wingnut who used a satirical article from The Onion as evidence of the depravity of women who have abortions.

Pete's at it again. After it was pointed out to him that The Onion is satire and that "Caroline Weber" is not a real person. Does Pete say mea culpa and hide his head for being so humorless that he didn't realise that after reading the first paragraph?

No. He defends his post:

because I meet women like her in the field all the time

Yeah, sure you do. Because women just love those uterine contractions.

Since Pete asks us to call him a dolt, it would be rude of me to do otherwise.

It's official: satire is now dead

And it was murdered by Pete.

Pete's written a rant about the evils of abortion, and guess what his primary source is?

The Onion.

Oh lordy lordy lordy. If Pete wasn't so deadly serious, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing.

Now, some folks might think that poor old Pete is guilty of nothing more than failing to read the whole "essay" in The Onion. But no... Pete actually quotes the supposed author as saying:

I realize there are those who will condemn me to hell for what I'm about to do. Well, I don't care what they say: It's worth it for all the fun and laughs I'm going to have at the clinic.

Is it possible that Pete's eyes glazed over the bit where "Caroline Weber" described the "fun" she was so looking forward to?

I seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions.

Or maybe, since it involves real hard words with four syllables, perhaps he just didn't understand it. (What is a uterine anyway? Something to do with pickup trucks?)

Certainly he doesn't get satire or irony. And now he's murdered it for the rest of us.

What Happens When There Is No Plan B?

Dana L. writes for the Washington Post about how the conservative so-called "culture of life" policies of the Bush administration forced her to have an abortion she didn't want.

Dana L. is a 42 year old happily married mother of two who found herself pregnant to her husband accidently:

My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we're starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.

The next morning, after getting my kids off to school, I called my ob/gyn to get a prescription for Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent a pregnancy -- but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. As we're both in our forties, my husband and I had considered our family complete, and we weren't planning to have another child, which is why, as a rule, we use contraception. I wanted to make sure that our momentary lapse didn't result in a pregnancy.

And that's where it all started to go wrong.

Dana's doctor refused to prescribe Plan B. After trying a few other potential sources, real life interupted and Dana found the 72 hour window of opportunity had gone by... and she was pregnant. And that's where she found herself entering the murky Twilight Zone of legal -- just -- abortions in the USA:

All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn't been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn't even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.
...
It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.

The Great and Arbitrary Abortionist in the Sky

PZ Myers of Pharyngula discusses the Great and Arbitrary Abortionist in the Sky:

...the rhythm method kills more embryos than contraceptives. It's straightforward: by avoiding sex during the prime time for ovulation and fertilization, there's a greater likelihood of fertilization occurring when the egg is past its sell-by date--it's increasing the chance of spontaneous abortion and birth defects. The paper is all speculative and philosophical about it all, but there are actually some suggestive epidemiological data that suggest it is true. A study by Jongbloet describes a doubling of the frequency of Down Syndrome in young Catholic mothers.

Myers also quotes some figures for the yearly numbers of live births, spontaneous abortions ("miscarriages") and clinical abortions, and reaches the conclusion that God causes nearly twice as many abortions as all the abortionists in the world combined.