Culture Of Life – Page 35

Culture of Life: Death Be Not Proud

Gerri Santoro was the mother of two daughters, and recently estranged from her abusive husband. For whatever reason, Gerri met another man, Clyde Dixon, and (gasp!) had sex with him. She became pregnant. Fearful of what her husband would do to her if he returned to town and learned she was pregnant by another man, Gerry and Clyde decided that they had to terminate the pregnancy. By any means necessary. Of course, they couldn’t afford to pay off some doctor in a nice hospital to do a purported D&C, as rich women could back then. Or hop on a plane and go to Mexico. Apparently, they couldn’t afford even a back-alley abortionist (what–abortion being illegal didn’t stop people from performing abortions???). No, these people were so poor, and so desperate, that they decided to do what far too many people in like circumstances saw as the only way. They decided to perform the abortion themselves. And they agonized over this decision so long, that Gerri was 6 1/2 months pregnant when they decided to take matters into their own hands.

Dixon acquired a medical book and equipment. They got a motel room, and he attempted to operate on her there. As expected, everything went completely wrong. Very quickly. Realizing he had made a mistake, realizing what could happen to him if he were there when Gerri died, Dixon fled the scene. She tried to stop the hemorraghing, but nothing worked.

Here is how Gerri Santoro’s life ended.

This is a culture of life.

HT: The Heretik

Culture Of Life: Shoot First, Pay Later

Two bursts of automatic gunfire rang out across a busy street in west Baghdad, echoing off the walls of the Australian embassy and one of the city’s major hotels. A few seconds later, a three-vehicle convoy belonging to a private security company, transporting a foreigner working to facilitate Iraq’s parliamentary elections, began to drive away from the scene.

Askew in the centre of the street sat a civilian car, a neat line of bullet holes piercing its hood and windscreen. The driver lay some five metres away, wounded in the side and stomach, and going into shock. Later that day, he died in hospital. Another motorist, who was driving with his two children in the car, stood dazed in the street, his head lightly grazed by a bullet.

Scenes such as this, witnessed by FT correspondent Awadh al-Taee on January 23, repeats itself time and again across Iraq. This Baghdad neighbourhood of Kerrada alone, according to local police, sees one fatal shooting a week by either private security companies or the military.

Under constant threat from suicide attackers driving explosive-rigged cars, coalition soldiers and contractors follow combat zone rules of engagement to protect themselves: warn drivers who stray too close, but if that fails, shoot. With procedures designed to protect the identities of anyone who might be singled out for retaliation, the victim’s families may never know what happened, let alone obtain justice.

In this case, the situation was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the victim’s family after negotiation with the security company. However, it is not clear if the parties would have found each other had foreign journalists not been involved.

While scores of Iraqi lives are claimed every month in this way, it took the killing of a westerner for the world to take notice the brutal reality on Baghdad’s streets. On March 4, the shooting of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, escorting a recently released hostage to freedom, provoked a storm of international revulsion and a rethink by US commanders of their rules of engagement in Iraq. Calipari was killed by US troops who mistakenly opened fire on his vehicle, under still-disputed circumstances.

The unarmed victim of the January 23 shooting was Abd al-Naser Abbas al-Dulaimi, age 29. Unmarried, he worked in the power station across the river to support his mother, two sisters, and the two children of an older brother who went missing in the 1991 Kuwait war. When he was shot, say police, he was out looking for petrol, which most Iraqis are forced to buy on the black market because of a recent shortage at the pumps. They found no weapons on his body, nor in his car.

This is a culture of life.

Culture Of Life: Monsanto

On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it “Alabama clay” and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn’t know their dirt and yards and bass and kids — along with the acrid air they breathed — were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn’t know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.

Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as “CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy” — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.” In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from “slightly tumorigenic” to “does not appear to be carcinogenic.”

Monsanto enjoyed a lucrative four-decade monopoly on PCB production in the United States, and battled to protect that monopoly long after PCBs were confirmed as a global pollutant. “We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business,” one internal memo concluded…

…Monsanto’s uncertain legacy is as embedded in west Anniston’s psyche as it is in the town’s dirt. The EPA and the World Health Organization classify PCBs as “probable carcinogens,” and while no one has determined whether the people in Anniston are sicker than average, Solutia has opposed proposals for comprehensive health studies as unnecessary. And it has not apologized for any of its contamination or deception.

This is a culture of life.

Culture Of Life: Touring Cancer Valley

Snaking along an 80-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the tour traveled “Cancer Alley,” so-called for its dense cluster of petrochemical plants, oil refineries and other toxic industries. At the southwestern end of the state, the cities and towns of Calcasieu Parish, some of them founded by freed slaves in the 19th century, sit next to more than 53 industrial factories; more than 40 of the plants are clustered in a ten-mile radius. Recent tests have shown that residents of Mossville, a small town near Lake Charles, have dioxin levels in their blood three times the national average.

The communities these plants loom over, most of them made up of poorer African American families, have complained for years of the contamination of their land, water and air, and the attendant cancers and other life-threatening illnesses that have been so prevalent since the chemical factories moved in. Their environment, with its intense concentration of vinyl chloride plants — the chief producers of dioxins — has earned the title “Global Toxic Hotspot,” while the state of Louisiana as a whole has been labeled a “polluter’s paradise” by Greenpeace….

…At their first stop, less than two miles from the Georgia Gulf chemical plant, the town of Ella’s water supply is contaminated by vinyl chloride and arsenic. Ella, also known as Ella Plantation, derives its name from the slaveholding plantation that once occupied the site. As the celebrity delegation listened, Brooks described Ella’s deterioration, how death and illness had cut their community by two-thirds, how toxic contamination made it almost impossible to keep animals or harvest a vegetable garden. “We’re in an awful place here,” she said, “and we’re just like dogs waiting to be gassed. We have nowhere to go, and we need your help. We can’t move, but if we all help each other, we can move [Georgia Gulf, one of the petrochemical companies] out of here.”

If the companies don’t move, sometimes the townspeople have to, as a matter of survival. As the bus drove past the former sites of Reveilletown and Morrisonville, tour participants heard former residents talk about the deaths of their communities. “The people literally started dying out when the plant came around us,” said Linda Turner. In 1987, the residents of Reveilletown sued Georgia Gulf, claiming serious health problems and property damage from the company’s vinyl manufacturing. In a settlement sealed by the court, Georgia Gulf relocated the families and bulldozed every building in the town. Soon after, residents of nearby Morrisonville threatened action against Dow Chemical for creating similarly toxic conditions in their town. To avoid a potentially massive liability, Dow relocated residents to a new subdivision. Now nothing remains of Morrisonville but the cemetery where the town’s people had been buried for more than 100 years. When residents moved into Morrisonville Acres, the new community built for them, many died of illnesses before they could enjoy their new homes.

This is a culture of life.