Tag Archives: abortion

Rape, Incest and Ben Carson

Shades of Richard Mourdock and “what God intended”!

Among the many other retrograde positions he has taken, Ben Carson wants the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize all abortions. As Ed Brayton reported at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, 

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said on Sunday that believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and that women should not be allowed to have abortions even in the case of rape or incest.

“The mother should not believe that the baby is her enemy and should not be looking to terminate the baby,” Carson opined to NBC host Chuck Todd. “We’ve allowed purveyors of division to think that baby is their enemy and they have a right to kill it. Can you see how perverted that line of thinking is?”

There are a number of possible responses to this latest evidence of Carson’s worldview: the most rational is to simply shrug. Ben Carson isn’t going to be President of the U.S.–despite his current lead in GOP polls, he isn’t even going to be the Republican nominee, so the fact that he wants to make women carry their rapist’s baby to term–however creepy or nauseating one might find that–is ultimately irrelevant.

On the other hand, Carson is hardly the only Republican who sees “God’s will” in the consequences of a rape. Mourdock and Akin were the most high-profile, but there are plenty of others–almost all of them men– who want to deny women not just the right to abort, but access to birth control as well. (After all, if you give us the right to control our own reproduction, we’re likely to get all uppity and start thinking we’re equal to men.)

I don’t really expect this latest pronouncement to damage Carson’s popularity with the GOP fringe. After all, if stating that racism wasn’t a problem before Obama’s election, that Muslims should not be allowed to be President, that evolution is a “Satanic plot,” that we need to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, and that university professors should be monitored and censored only operated to endear him to the party base, this latest evidence of bizarre reasoning is unlikely to offend them.

What’s a little misogyny among Republicans?

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The Economics of “Social Policy”

There are economic consequences to most policy choices. That’s just as true of so-called “social” policies as it is of decisions to build roads or wage wars.

When religion is driving policy, economic repercussions tend to get ignored. So it was interesting to read Two Sides, Same Coin–a report by the University of California at San Francisco on the economics of abortion policy. Researchers followed women who were turned away–who wanted to terminate a pregnancy but were unable to do so. As the report noted,

Access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion, is essential to women’s economic security. Yet many progressive politicians and advocates often ignore this important connection. This report delineates the many links between these topics—including that family planning increases women’s economic opportunity, lack of supports for pregnant and parenting women interferes with their economic stability, and there is an unfulfilled potential for reproductive health care to help create economic security—and the need to integrate both issues into any proactive policy agenda to achieve equality for women.

The Guardian recently noted the “costly choice” faced by pregnant American women:

For a country where politicians are rather eager to promote family values, America has few policies that make it easy to have children. On top of high health-care costs and limited employer benefits, the country has little in the way of affordable child-care. It is unsurprising, then, that three-quarters of women who choose to have an abortion say it is because they cannot afford to have a child. Some will argue that they can always put their child up for adoption. Others will add that marriage can be a fine antidote to poverty (45% of all women who seek abortion are unmarried). These are fair points. But perhaps instead of closing down abortion clinics, lawmakers might consider more ways to give these women better choices.

Perhaps the most widely-read economic analysis of abortion policy was the argument by the authors of Freakonomics,  

who concluded that legalization of abortion in the 1970s explained a substantial part of the crime decline in the 1990s. (Evidently, children born into households where they are wanted, and where the adults are financially and emotionally capable of raising them, commit fewer crimes.)

None of this is an argument for making moral choices on the basis of economic consequences. But opinions on the morality of abortion are hotly contested.

It’s interesting to note that people who believe that the moral position requires respect for personal autonomy and reproductive choice tend to give generously to organizations like Planned Parenthood. On the other hand, the lawmakers most willing to use government’s power to impose their personal moral/religious beliefs on women who may not share them have shown little interest in ensuring the well-being of children once they are born.

The economic consequences of that disinterest fall on the rest of us.

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Speaking of Abortion..

Yesterday’s blog ended with a question about the motives of the anti-abortion culture warriors. Although there are obviously many sincere people who have moral or religious objections to reproductive choice, the punitive measures advanced by many others (together with their utter lack of concern about what happens to the babies so “saved” once they are born) raises legitimate questions about their real agenda.

I’m not much for conspiracy theories; I tend to agree with a colleague from my days in city government who often remarked that incompetence explains so much more than conspiracies. But in this case, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a fair number of the men who have staked out anti-abortion positions (and yes, they’re disproportionately male) aren’t as opposed to abortion as they are to women’s full equality. (Keep ’em barefoot and pregnant, like God intended…).

After all, if you are truly anti-abortion, you’d support programs that reduce the need for and incidence of abortion.

The New York Times recently reported on the GOP’s war on contraception and Planned Parenthood:

One would imagine that congressional Republicans, almost all of whom are on record as adamantly opposing abortion, would be eager to fund programs that help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

That would be the common sense approach, anyway.

And yet since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have been trying to obliterate the highly effective federal family-planning program known as Title X, which gives millions of lower-income and rural women access to contraception, counseling, lifesaving cancer screenings, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

A House subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services has proposed to eliminate all Title X funding — about $300 million — from a 2016 spending bill.

The bill would also slash funding by up to 90 percent for sex education, specifically President Obama’s teen-pregnancy prevention initiative. The only winner was abstinence-only education, whose funding the subcommittee voted to double, despite the fact that it has basically no effect on abstinence and has been associated with higher rates of teen pregnancy.

Federal law prohibits the use of any federal dollars for abortion or abortion-related services, and has for many years. That inconvenient fact hasn’t prevented the “pro-life” posers from insisting that their efforts to eviscerate reproductive health programs serving poor women–programs that save the lives of many of those women–are “pro life.” Of course, they aren’t “pro” anything. They are anti-woman–and fiscally irresponsible.

What Title X grants actually do is help prevent unwanted pregnancies — more than one million in 2012, which translates to about 363,000 abortions avoided. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization, every public dollar spent on family planning services saved about $7 in costs related to pregnancy, birth and infant care, as well as sexually transmitted diseases and cervical cancer. So the proposal to slash the program’s funding is not just inhumane, it’s also fiscally dumb.

A genuine opposition to abortion would require support for family planning programs that reduce abortions. A genuine concern for “life” would include concern for the lives of poor women. A genuine commitment to fiscal conservatism would mandate support for programs that demonstrably save tax dollars.

The operative word is “genuine.”

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PLEASE Make Them Stop!

It’s no longer possible for us mere mortals to keep up with the craziness in the Indiana General Assembly.

Yesterday, Doug Masson posted about House Bill 1123.

It prohibits a health insurance policy from covering abortion services provided by a medical provider except that it can provide such coverage if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or if an abortion is necessary “to avert the pregnant woman’s death or a substantial an irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.” However such coverage may be provided through an endorsement or rider.

The paternalism and anti-abortion zealotry that led to this particular effort to tell insurance companies what they can and cannot cover, and how, joins a raft of other equally high-handed measures.

Does your local government want to ask its citizens what modes of transportation they want –and what they’re willing to pay? Tough. We know better than you what’s good for you.

Does your local sheriff want to sponsor a gun buy-back to get weapons off the street? Don’t try it. Our gun freaks will not only forbid it, they’ll add a measure letting  you bring a gun to school.

Who do you businesses and local governments think you are, anyway–trying to make your own decisions?

Whatever happened to the self-described legislative champions of free enterprise–the pro-business folks who advocate limiting regulations to those absolutely necessary to protect the public? Where are all the staunch defenders of local control–the legislators so protective of their prerogatives that they deep-sixed Common Core? (How dare anyone suggest that Indiana schoolchildren learn the same math and history as kids in other states?)

I guess when the General Assembly talks about “liberty” and “local control,” it means liberty from federal rules and the right to control everything else.

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They Just Can’t Help Themselves

Senate Bill 371, currently passing easily through the various stages of the legislative process, requires facilities that dispense abortion-inducing drugs to meet all the structural and operational specifications of facilities that provide surgical abortions. In other words, in order for a clinic to prescribe or supply a pill to induce a very early abortion, its facilities must rival those of a hospital or surgical center.
SB 371 also requires the physician providing such a prescription to provide the patient with materials–colors specified!–oversee ultrasound imaging, and document efforts to have the woman return in two weeks for a follow-up examination and ultrasound.
This bill has nothing to with women’s safety. It has everything to do with limiting the availability of safe and legal abortion.  As a side effect, it also limits the availability of all reproductive health care for low-income women.  Note the language: it applies only to “clinics.” None of the standards in SB 371 apply to private physicians who dispense abortion-inducing drugs.
The restrictions apply only to “clinics”–read, Planned Parenthood– that provide health care at low cost.
Medication abortion is a safe, early-stage procedure.  SB 371 is an unwarranted interference with the doctor-patient relationship, not to mention an unconstitutional effort to deny some women but not others access to reproductive health services by forcing the closure of the clinics that serve them. This measure is yet another salvo in the GOP’s ongoing war on Planned Parenthood. and a woman’s right to make her own moral decisions.
On the other hand, the perennially cash-strapped ACLU can use the legal fees that will be generated when it wins the inevitable legal challenge. So I suppose there is a bright side to everything.
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