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Tag: Culture Of Life

Bush Nominates First-Trimester Fetus to the Supreme Court

“With its precocious intelligence and adorable pocket size, the fetus could very well prove to be the moderate ‘consensus candidate’ many on Capitol Hill have hoped for,” said attorney, author, and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. “And with its confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the bench, Bush ensures that his presidential legacy will last until about 2089.”

This is one nominee that I could really support.

Bush Screws Clinton

Over emergency contraception, of course.

Here’s the background: Senators Clinton and Murray (yeah Washington State) brokered a deal with the White House to quit blocking Bush’s nominee for head of the FDA in exchange for a ruling on over-the-counter sales of Plan B. The senators stepped aside, and Lester Crawford was confirmed. Shortly afterward, he announced that his agency was finally taking action on Plan B — by indefinitely postponing a decision.

The latest development in the Plan B battle reveals more than just the administration’s dishonesty, though. It shows how much the Bush White House remains in the clutches of the right’s most extreme elements.

Many pro-lifers are in favor of putting Plan B over the counter — after all, it could prevent hundreds of thousands of abortions every year. That’s something we can all agree is good, right?

That benefit has been lost as the Plan B battle has played out. Opponents describe the pill as tantamount to an abortion—it is not, according to medical definitions—and they complain it will encourage promiscuity among young girls. The most outspoken critic, the right-wing Concerned Women for America, has fired off a dizzying array of objections. The group insists it is worried about the long-term safety of the pill, no matter what scientists say. In the 33 countries where Plan B is available without a prescription, CWA argues, a handful of studies have shown a rise in sexually transmitted infections. It has even equated the drug to “a pedophile’s best friend,” imagining that a child rapist could slip the pill to a girl to “hide” his crime.

That such extreme views have gained traction with the FDA has frustrated Plan B proponents. Asked how abortion politics has colored the debate, for instance, [Princeton University Professor James] Trussell has a hard time hiding his disdain. “There are no two sides to this issue,” he says. “What those people are spouting is their political ideology, not science. It’s just nonsense.”

The Voice article also includes a great quote from Steve Gilliard:

Every time you try to find common ground with these folks [the anti-choice right], they raise the stakes. “First they’re against abortion. Then they’re against contraception. Then they’re against pharmacists filling birth-control prescriptions.”

If the Plan B battle reveals anything, it’s that the opponents’ real agenda is not to prevent unintended pregnancy and abortion. If that were so, they would be for all forms of contraception. They’d be for better sex education. They’d be for more family-planning counseling. “The problem is the right doesn’t want greater access to birth control,” Gilliard says, “and their opposition to Plan B proves it.”

Amen.

More from the Times

Today, it’s Tom Friedman who sticks it to the President:

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending “intelligent design” as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

So true. And my goodness do I love Maureen Dowd:

The administration’s foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love – the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don’t see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.’s “culture of life.”

Culture of Life: Katrina

Why am I so angry? Obsessed? Read this post:

They would move heaven and earth to save the life of one White Woman in Florida to combat the very idea of euthanasia (which technically it was not). A woman that a decade earlier had lost her ability to so much as ask for help, much less have coherent thoughts about the quality of her own life.

And they would sit on their ass and watch as tens of thousands of poor men, women, children, babies, and elderly bake in the New Orleans heat surrounded by water, sewage, gasoline and an abandoned city, now devoid of anyone with the means to have escaped ahead of the storm.

This is the culture of life. The culture of life wants to save brain dead white women and unborn children. The culture of life wants you to watch endless non-news about the disappearance of one white teenager in Aruba. The culture of life wants you to support your nation as it kills tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in its Quixotic quest against a non-threat. The culture of life wants a zero-tolerance for looters policy to sound authoritative as babies die of dehydration. The culture of life expects you to take care of yourself, and if you can’t, then it is your own fault for getting into that situation in the first place. Fuck off. You had your shot. Station in life, where you hang your hat, and whether you have the $40 at the end of the month to pay for the overpriced gasoline to get out of that home in time is all up to you.

…But none seem to support American Culture. New Orleans, as much as any city, represents distinctly American Culture. A melting-pot of language, music and revelry unlike any other. But it is desperately poor. Over 50% of the children in the state live below the poverty level. But no matter. Mostly black folk down there. They shouldn’t have lived there in the first place. They should have gotten out while they had the chance. It’s their own fault.

Michael Chertoff was interviewed on NPR this afternoon. He was asked if he had heard of thousands of people at the Convention Center in New Orleans, without water or food or sanitation. Elderly dying. Little girls being raped. Mr. Chertoff was eloquent in his cluelessness. Completely unaware of what had been on the television all day long on both MSNBC and CNN. Unaware that he, at the top of the agency charged with bringing relief to the affected areas, had not been informed of something every American with a remote already knew. That the situation there was desperate. That people needed help. And that noone seemed to be providing it. The man in charge was not in charge at all, folks. It took the Bush Administration 4 years since 9/11… 4 years of chasing ghosts and old demons in Iraq to not do a fucking thing about stateside preparedness. To gut the national guard’s responsiveness by sending so many of them overseas. To cut funding for the levee system that allowed Lake Ponchartrain to roll into the city. To put someone in charge of Homeland Security and FEMA that is eloquent, but so impossibly incompetent that he is incapable of establishing a staff capable of letting him know the worst of a situation so large.

Mr. Chertoff said, that he had not heard of such things. That you couldn’t believe every rumor from the streets of the area. That he wasn’t in a position to argue about what the NPR Reporters had witnessed.

Get the people to our staging areas, he stated, and they can get water there.

Donate and bully your family and friends to give some money too.

via Jim

What Really Caused Katrina?

Water vapor, warm air, condensation and wind, you say? Oh you sad, sad blue-stater, you just don’t get it, do you? Courtesty of that science-loving radical right, we now know that hurricanes are caused by evil feminists aborting their babies for fun. Except, well, sometimes they’re caused by the sodomites. And occassionally, it’s boobies and Girls Gone Wild. Many of these same sinners also caused 9/11.

via Ryan.

And in other ridiculous right-wing news, does anyone here read The New York Post? I don’t (I think my 50 cents is better spent elsewhere, like on 1/10th of my coffee), but I do read it over the shoulders of other passengers on the subway (thank goodness for huge headlines, small words, simple ideas and big print!). One thing I noticed yesterday was that all the stories covering Katrina were under the page label “Our Tsunami.” Now, Katrina is a horrific tragedy. But is it really “Our Tsunami”? For one thing, it’s not a tsunami by any stretch. And must the right always co-opt someone else’s tragedy for their own gain? I realize in this case they’re just trying to sell papers, but comparing this hurricane to the South Asian tsunami is entirely innaccurate, totally disprespectful and pretty darn stupid.

Texas Law Could Mean Death Penalty For Doctors

Texas doctors who perform abortions without parental approval or after the third trimester could face capital murder charges because of a new law that takes effect this week, a prosecutors group says.

The Texas District and County Attorneys Association has outlined that scenario in its new book updating the Texas penal code and in public presentations around the state. The group says such charges could occur under the new law because of the 2003 fetal protection law.

Key legislators said Monday that wasn’t their intent.

Not your intent? Sorry, you’re just another cog in the spin wheel.

The fetal protection bill was designed to allow for prosecution of a person who harms or kills an embryo or fetus, supporters say. Exceptions were made for legal drug use, action taken by the mother or a “lawful medical procedure.”

But legislators this year defined two scenarios that would be “prohibited practice” in medicine: performing an abortion on an unmarried girl under age 18 without proper consent, and performing an abortion in the third trimester that isn’t covered by certain exceptions. The law takes effect Thursday.

If this were about the sanctity of human life we would a) not penalize doctors with the death penalty, and b) penalize the women who have abortions as well. If this were not about control of women’s sexuality the woman’s marital status would not be of concern.

In other news, see the Dawn Eden Guide On How To Handle Your Rape. Nope. It’s not about control.

via Bush v. Choice