greenpass

Chipping away at women's rights

My mother, who has lived abroad for most of her life, called me in shock today about this article, describing how a growing number of doctors and OBGYNs are refusing to prescribe or fill prescriptions for any form of hormonal birth control, including the Pill, no matter why they were prescribed.

Anti-abortion believers have apparently decided on the basis of two articles printed in the Christian conservative Paternoster Press in the UK and a similar publisher in the US that abortion routinely happens when women use birth control, because although the Pill really works by supressing ovulation and fertilization entirely. Mainstream medicine finds that ovulation occurs maybe 2-3% of the time, and in that case fertilization is extremely rare, but anti-abortion activists claim that that number is far higher - apparently with only these two pieces of literature to back them up:

Crockett SA, Harrison D, DeCook J, Hersh C. Hormone contraceptives: controversies and clarifications. In Kilner JF, Cunningham PC, Hager WD eds. The reproductive revolution: a Christian appraisal of reproductive technologies, sexuality and the family. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI and Paternoster, United Kingdom, 2000.

Larimore WL, Alcorn R. Using the birth control pill is ethically unacceptable. In Kilner JF, Cunningham PC, Hager WD eds. The reproductive revolution: a Christian appraisal of reproductive technologies, sexuality and the family. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI and Paternoster, United Kingdom, 2000.

These people believe that if an egg is ovulated, and then fertilized, against all the odds, it will then not be able to implant into the uterine lining (the actual beginning of a pregnancy). This for them counts as an "abortion". However, you can't even detect pregnancy until an egg implants into the wall of the uterus, so these people are saying that abortion is happening before a woman is even detectably pregnant. The problem is, there's no evidence anywhere that the Pill prevents an egg from implanting into the lining of the uterus. Modern medicine says that the reason you don't get pregnant when you're on the Pill is because the egg never gets to the stage of implantation in the first place.

What I find so disgusting about all this is that the Pill is such a central part of women's health. With women my age it's routinely supplied for debilitating menstrual cramps and excessive bleeding, irregular periods, and acne which it clears up a treat. With older women it's prescribed for shrinking fibroids and controlling endometriosis. In addition, since the Pill reduces your likelihood of getting ovarian cancer by 80%, it's used as a lifesaving medication by women who have a strong family history and genetic disposition to the disease.

I have two problems with the stance of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that bills itself as the educated, medically erudite arm of the pro-life movement. First of all, they don't address the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to back their claims up besides a theoretical fear of loss of a single fertilized cell that hasn't even caused its progenitor to become pregnant yet. Although they bill themselves as doctors, they seem to forget that even doctors need to provide proof of these claims - you can't just sit back and say "I'm a doctor, I know." The lack of scientific data and hard evidence that what they claim is happening is actually happening is worrying. What if they suddenly decide that a life-saving heart medication is "against their beliefs" because it has a 0.005% chance of causing a heart attack? But of course, they'll never do that, in the same way that every single one of them will happily provide Viagra even if it's for an "immoral" affair. Because it's ok to hold women to your own moral, clearly stated Christian standard, but not worry about what men are using their drugs for.

The other problem I have with their stance (apart from the whole pro-life thing in the first place) is that if they so strongly believe that life begins at conception, and are willing to deny contraception to millions of women in this country, then why is there not one word about the thousands of fertilized eggs discarded every year in IVF treatments? According to their stance every single cell they discard is a murder or an abortion, and yet on their position page they list:
--post-abortion health effects
--post-abortion breast cancer risk
--perinatal hospice
--human cloning
--RU 486
--the oral contraceptive "controversy"
--partial birth abortion
--mandatory abortion training for doctors
Doesn't look like they care much about human life, except when it might allow women to have sex without getting pregnant.

Pro-choice activists focus on the big issues, like partial birth abortion and making sure Roe v. Wade isn't going to get overturned. But this is a far more insidious way to prevent women from making their own choices about their bodies, including about other medical decisions that might be the difference between their own life and death from something like ovarian cancer or excessive menstrual bleeding. Since when were women only as important as the cells that they might, all medical evidence to the contrary, possibly produce?

One thing that I know John Kerry will do is protect a woman's right to choose. One of the many things I hope he does first thing is put a mandatory requirement to cover oral contraception into government funded HMO's and health-care packages. George W. Bush got rid of this requirement for federal health plans in his first budget to Congress. This is a central plank of woman's health care - and not just reproductive, but all health care - and needs to be as available as widely as Viagra. There's not an HMO or doctor or pharmacist who would refuse a man Viagra - we need to demand that the far more essential right to oral contraceptives is constantly maintained.

Blair impeachment efforts

I must say, if there was a Tory who could say two words without drooling, Blair would be out on his ass. There's even an unholy alliance of MP's impeaching him. Where is Chris Patten? I know I'm biased, but I think if the Tories put him up for something - ANYTHING - right now, they'd have a winner.

Again...

Only light posting. The screens at work must date from 1988 and for some reason the past two days of staring at them under flourescent light has really hurt my eyes. I don't know how long the tubes inside a monitor are supposed to last, but the windows on this screen are definitely fuzzy and pulse subtly. Or maybe that's just my eyes...

Real posting when I get home to my own, lovely laptop.

Sunflowers for good, not evil

A fascinating discovery by a team of chemical engineers based at Leeds University has determined that with the use of two catalysts, made of nickel and carbon, they can produce incredibly pure hydrogen from vegetable oils without using any fossil fuels. The byproducts are only oxygen (which can be fed back around to power the device), carbon dioxide, and methane. They used sunflower oil, but said that any vegetable oil could be used.

I read this, and being incredibly excited about the very real possibility of having a hydrogen station on my corner someday rather than a gas station, I started to daydream. This could be a godsend for developing countries, which are often energy-poor but agriculturally productive. It could also entirely upset the current balance of energy power: the most sunflowers I've ever seen growing commercially was in Northern France - could France become the new Saudi Arabia? The US could easily become self sustaining for fuel and energy, and it could revitalize farms in the mid-west and other economically depressed agricultural areas.

Rabobank has an interesting study of oil-producing crops (sunflowers, soybeans, rapeseed and palm): oil crops are moving from North America and Western Europe to South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, based on the need to supply soy meal for cattle ranching and other meat production. Palm and soybeans are the fastest growing crops in terms of production, because of their need for animal feed. Sunflowers are hardy and grow almost anywhere - a ticket to economic independence? How cheap would the hydrogen production system have to be for developing countries to afford? How efficient are hydrogen fuel-cell cars? Nickel producing countries would see their economies boom - Russia, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Columbia. The balance of power shifts southwards in Asia Pacific towards Australiasia. China gets mad (again).

Conversely, if enough oilseeds had to be grown to supply the world with hydrogen, it could get out of hand - too many fields used to grow soy and rape, and not enough for other forms of food. Food prices shoot up even as cars transfer to hydrogen fuel cells. The Middle East becomes a net energy importer, but because of new restrictions on fossil fuels in Western countries, they have no financial resources to buy themselves into the modern hydrogen era.

And finally, to invoke Murphy's Law, we would end up with George Prescott Bush winning the 2032 presidential election, and by 2034 we would be invading Canada for their rich sunflower-strewn plains and nickel mines, and claiming to be rescuing them from the hands of a government in thrall to France.

At the tone, the war will be...

So it seems pretty clear from the sabre-rattling that if we start yet another war, it will be in Iran. But now it seems we're building a "coalition of the willing" for "regime change" in Zimbabwe.

I mean, at least think of some other terms so it seems like a different war, and not that we're fighting a total war, all the time, against everyone. How many more times can life under the Bush administration imitate "1984"?

(Link via the Agonist)

Busy busy busy

Light posting today, mainly because my last day at my job is Friday and I have a couple of big projects that need finishing up before I leave.

I do, however, have a list of questions (sparked by an email from Raf) that hopefully I will be able to answer in some fashion by the end of next week:

General questions:
--How long have you been involved in politics? been interested in the presidential campaign?
--Did you vote in 2000?
--Do you donate money/time/the sweat of your brow to political campaigns?
--Do you feel included in the current political system? Do you feel that one vote can make a difference?
--Do you read political blogs?
--Where do you get your news from about international affairs? the campaign? the war in Iraq?
--Why do you think the RNC is being held in New York?

To the protestors:
--How do you feel about John Kerry?
--Why are you here? Do you think your protests will change anybody's mind? Are they intended to change anybody's mind?
--If things get violent, do you think that will help or hurt Bush? Kerry?
--How do you feel about Nader?

To GOP delegates, if I can find any to ask:
--Do you like Bush and Cheney? Would you have rather had someone else?
--Who do you want to see run in 2008?
--Who do you think best represents the Republican Party that you feel a part of - Tom DeLay or John McCain? Rick Santorum or Ahnold? Bill Frist or Rudy Giuliani?
--What do you think of Zell Miller?

Are these good questions? Anything I should add? Are people going to throw trash at me if I ask them these things? And how am I ever going to be able to sneak into Tavern on the Green for a pro-life lunch with Ann Coulter?

Deja vu!

Ezra thinks that the Bush campaign has a "Teen-ese" machine, where they put in their words and it comes out all "teen-ized". If anyone doubts that what Jenna and Barbara say is either generated by robots, or perfectly memorized, look at this. Today they said (with comic interjections provided by World O'Crap)

We know it can be hard to find time to think about politics. We just graduated from college and are perfectly aware that schoolwork, parties, and extra-curricular activities keep students busy, away from campaigns and voting booths.

One short month ago, they said:

with all of the daily activities in college (school work, tests, parties, etc.) students are preoccupied and just think they don't have time for politics.

Again with the parties! Don't these girls think about anything else?

Anyway, as I noted in my very first post at the Gadflyer, they're completely wrong. Young people aren't voting because no one is bothering to talk to them. If you aim for seniors who vote, you'll miss the opportunity to convince young people who may not vote or even be old enough to vote now, but might be in November. Discounting young people because they "don't vote" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard - young people should be as big a constituency as seniors, veterans, NASCAR dads, or white-collar criminals. But, you know, we're all distracted by, like, parties! Anyway guys, I'm outie - I heard there's a great party and some really cute guys at the Fox ;-p

Fisking the bitch-slap blogs

Following up a trackback ping, I discovered what appears to be the newly minted, rather angry blog des femmes, taking exception to my comments about women and the blogosphere. My response to her is over on her site, but it was the purpose of the her blog that caught my interest.

The author of this site has taken it upon herself to be a feminist watchdog of the way many people speak about politics and life in general - no wonder she's angry. I'm thankful that I didn't catch her eye for an egregious use of "bitch-slap" (Josh Marshall), "not man enough to..." (again, Josh Marshall), "smirking pussy" (The Poor Man), or "sniffle like little girls" (Digby), but rather for undermining my sex in various ways.

The fact that des femmes exists at all - and I heartily apologize if there are more archives somewhere that address more than sexist remarks in the blogosphere - is rather depressing. I absolutely agree with the author that the use of words like "pussy" or "bitch-slap" is not necessary and degrading to women, but these words have entered into our linguistic lexicon as not necessarily connected to their original meanings (which is why people have no problem using them, and are often so incredulous when a woman says it makes her uncomfortable). In the same way that I often use the word "bugger" (eg. this morning I said about someone else "They know bugger-all about Deng Xiaoping's reforms"), or "bitch" (eg. "He was bitching about his latte being too hot") I don't connect it to their original meanings. I don't feel like I'm a particularly offensive or insensitive person, and of course if someone told me that I had offended them I would be mortified, but these words are in our collective lexicon of words that mean certain things not necessarily connected to their literal or original meaning.

des femmes could certainly carve out an interesting little niche in the blogosphere by offering alternative terms for ones that many bloggers use with impunity. However, I think that this campaign is doomed to failure if the male dominance of the political blogosphere continues. The only way to change the flavour of the dialogue is to get rid of the old boy's club of political blogs - one pitches one's writing to one's intended audience, and if more women are blogging, reading and commenting I think we'll find that objectionable phrases will be less common. Pointing terms like "bitch-slap" out, and criticizing other women for not being assertive enough (I think...) is not the most constructive way to purge our dialogue of these terms.

This is not to say that women should shrink from pointing out when they are offended or feel that someone is not being respectful. I myself once blew up at JamesB3 over at Kos for calling Maureen Dowd "Midol", implying that her arguments could be disregarded because of something to do with her gender. I've often been at the receiving end of this, where people dismissed my comments or criticism as it "being that time of the month" instead of engaging my arguments on their own merits. But if I spent all my time getting mad at people like him, at rap music, at fellow students, at other bloggers, and at the world in general for the use of these words, I wouldn't have any time to actually engage with what they're saying.

Everyone has issues that they feel strongly about, and I respect des femmes for taking on this enormous, thankless task. I'm going to wish her luck, thank her for looking out for the rest of us women, and I'll be going back soon for a bit of a laugh at male bloggers' expense, but I think I'll stick to the criticism of the ideas and not the language that they were expressed with.

In which there is much ineffectual handwringing

Steve Lovelady over at Campaign Desk has a brilliant post dissecting the formulaic methods we see in so many stories about the election. The fact that these formulas are so widespread, and so immediately obvious to every moderately interested media consumer, means that these stories are failing on a very fundamental level.

My godmother came into town last night, and we had a wonderful afternoon and evening and ended up talking until 2 in the morning. One of the things she noticed, having lived outside the States for more than 20 years, is how uninformative the news is here. As I said to her, I really believe that there is a crisis of confidence in our sources of information - which is unfortunately entirely warranted by the behaviour of our news-gathering organizations. And I link that to the corporate nature of the news.

For example, as I saw in China, news organizations were firing their foreign correspondents all over the place, or cutting them down to freelance status. As a result, when something important happened and the world press descended on Beijing, the "pros" were far more gullible, had no sources of their own so they all ended up interviewing the same guy who just happened to speak English, and had no way of actually contextualizing what was going on. This often leads to Xinhua worthy howlers, along with a complete lack of informative coverage for the viewer back home (or even worse: misleading and downright wrong coverage). The old China hands didn't make it any easier - they greatly resented the interlopers who descended for a week, walked all over everyone, and failed to give credit to people who had helped them, and there are stories of pranks pulled on clueless laowai journos that are told with great hilarity late at night, usually after many drinks.

But the upshot of all this is that newpapers, television and magazines are actively limiting their ability to do what they should be required to do - to tell consumers what's happening. The philosophical point can be (and I hope will be) hotly debated: do news organizations have a responsibility to tell you what's going on? And if they don't, what is their functional responsibility? Proctor & Gamble has a function (to provide consumer goods that customers buy), and McDonald's has a function (to sell you food). If P&G sells something that is faulty and defective, they're penalized for that, and if McDonald's sells you a burger that gives you E. coli poisoning, they're fined or suspended and suffer financially. It should be obvious that with the centralization and cost-cutting at news outlets, what we are getting delivered to us is a faulty product. The formula described over at Campaign Desk is a faulty way of conveying what's going on, and if we can identify these formulae we should be able to see that something is wrong with the way these columns are written. What's insidious is that unlike food poisoning, if we're not informed, we can't tell that we're being misinformed - it's the ultimate catch-22. Thus consumers have no way of penalizing the media for their misinformation except by consciously choosing to either cut themselves off, or seek out alternate sources that may be more difficult or more expensive to obtain.

I can think of a number of things that I would like to see done, and I welcome a discussion of practical means to improve the situation.

--I would like to see real legislation preventing huge media empires, and preventing the centralization of the news to one or two huge hubs, thus starving the local news.
--I would like to have a government-imposed expectation of fairness, giving equal time to both sides of an argument (especially on television). This works in the UK and there's no reason it can't work here too (with a real independent watchdog body to administrate it).
--I would like to see news gathering organizations employ regional or country-specific correspondents who know the local language and are invested in the political, social and cultural realities of the situation.
--I would like to see a justification for unnamed sources in the print media, and an end to "Some people say..." journalism
--I would like to see the separation between "news", "news analysis" and "opinion" become more sharply defined.
--I would like journalists to take the time to do the research and actually say what is true in a crosstalk situation. (This probably requires many more journalists and thus more money. But wouldn't it be great if telling the truth was disassociated from "taking sides"? Saying that the Swift Boat people are telling stories that are demonstrably false doesn't mean that you're necessarily losing your objectivity - in fact, the opposite is true. If you credulously report their accusations without informing readers or viewers what the actual situation was, then you have become a hapless conduit of false information and are thus unobjective.)

All of these things require vast amounts more money and oversight by the government, plus a sea-change in the culture of journalism as we know it. And most of them will probably never happen and are just fevered pipe-dreams, a product of too much caffeine and an inflated sense of entitlement to be informed. But who knows - maybe the proliferation of blogs are a sign that something is changing for the better in the world of information.

I don't give a flying @#$%

Thank you, Mr. McSweeney (and not the funny Canadian variety, either). Via the Star Tribune and the Washington Post comes this article:

He did not have to go -- because he had been. His tour on a destroyer was overseas time enough. But he went to the boats because other young men were there. The men and the boats had a mission -- and he commanded, because he could.

That is enough for me. I couldn't care less whether he received a medal. The rest of it is frosting. There is no honor in this debate for our country. We need to know whether a man can save the economy and slow terrorism, not listen to harangues about who was a shooter and who was a dodger.

This sort of reminds me of during Monica Lewinsky, when the op-ed pages and polls seemed to be saying how sick everyone was of hearing all the gory details...and yet the news pages devoted countless column inches to those same stories. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm SICK of this pointless, valueless coverage of Kerry and Vietnam. I don't care whether he talked about it at the convention. I don't care that he stood up and told the truth about what he saw in Vietnam when he came back to this country. I care, selfishly I admit, about how he's going to solve the horrible mess that we're in and how he's going to save this country for MY future.

That's it. It's all about me. Anything that happened 14 years before I was born is not as important as what's going to happen in the next 14. I think I'll go on over to the John Kerry website where I can read for myself without the pointless middleman of the media what Kerry says he'll do. Too bad Bush's website says precisely zero about what he plans to do with his next four years (besides clear brush, ride mountain bikes, choke on pretzels and fall off Segways).

UPDATE: With regards to the media, Campaign Desk has aggregated the bloggers that are on the media warpath today.