It's a Good Thing There Wasn't Obamacare to Tell Him He Wasn't Alive

Man trapped in 23-year 'coma' reveals horror of being unable to tell doctors he was conscious

Or, as Orrin Judd notes, it's a good thing Michael Schiavo couldn't benefit from his death.

This Pretty Much Sums Up the Problem with Amanda Marcotte's Arguments

From The Other McCain is a post with the wonderful title Silence of the Vagina Warriors, discussed the dearth of feminist blogging on the octuplet single mom:

There is exactly one narrative Amanda Marcotte is interested in, and because the octomom story doesn't confirm that narrative (indeed, it may be dispositive) then it is ignored as long as possible. When it cannot be ignored, throw some pretzel logic and fulminations about "choice" at it, then move on.

This is exactly what happened just before I was banned at Pandagon. If you recall, I asked Amanda, at the outbreak of Blagogate, why she hadn't made a single, solitary comment about the affair, given her amazing capacity for mockery when Republicans were caught in wrongdoing. Her answer boiled down to "You can't make me!", which is precisely what Robert S. McCain is saying.

And frankly, this is the problem with most leftwing blogs I visit. If the story fits their talking points, it gets splattered all over the blog. If it doesn't, the story doesn't exist. What? A woman with six kids and no husband goes and has eight more? No story there. If said woman had been married and the couple said they believed God was in charge of birth control, then Amanda would write post after post about the stupidity and misogyny of the people involved. Here, we just have a woman who either has a mental problem or is just selfish or shallow (thinking her story is worth millions).

That's not to say there haven't been any bloggers discussing the octuplets and their wayward mother. The argument tends to be that this couldn't have been her choice because no sane person would have chosen this. In other words, the woman is still a victim, but, in this case, she is perhaps a victim of either Teh Patriarchy, which has a Cult of Motherhood going, or of some mental illness. I don't know if she suffers from any mental problem or not, but this was still her choice to do this. No one made her.

But you won't see a discussion of this at Pandagon, or, probably, most other feminist sites. Because it doesn't fit the meme about female oppression.

Pandagon Watch: Abortion Arguments

I really love it when Amanda Marcotte decides she's going to rebut pro-life arguments. Her answers are filled will twisted logic or just utter fallacies, but I'll run through them here:

1. A baby isn't unique because of its DNA because there are identical twins. Oh, and babies don't have consciousness before 29 weeks, so they aren't people, either. This misstates the use of separate DNA from the parents as proof that the baby inside his/her mother is, in fact, a separate human being. While there is truth to the idea that both sperm and eggs have different DNA from the whole person, I've yet to hear that cells in and of themselves are humans deserving of protection. The argument is that, unlike one's appendix--which Pandagonistas have compared abortion to--a baby is actually a separate being from the mother. And while the child is dependent for about 40 weeks inside the mother, he or she isn't a bodily organ over which Mom should simply decide to get rid of. We don't typically allow Mom to take out, say, her kidney, her intestine, her lungs without a lot of counselling and paperwork. To treat the killing of an infant with less concern is barbaric.

Now for the consciousness argument. People in comas aren't conscious either. And Alzheimer's patients have an enormously limited sense of consciousness. To take people who are not conscious off life support requires more paperwork and what can amount to a court order. We don't allow "consciousness" to be the rationale for killing Grandma, so it's hard to see how this is acceptable for the abortion argument.

2. People who think women use abortion as birth control just hate women and think they are sluts. Amanda's reasoning here is so golden that I have to quote it directly:

It’s assumed that a woman who chooses abortion for the simple reason she doesn’t want to have a baby is somehow getting away with something, and that something is having sex. However, the underlying assumption is that there’s a rational reason to oppose sexual liberation for women, and so far, I haven’t seen it. What few and tenuous social benefits we get from controlling women’s sexuality and shaming it are minor compared to the damage that this control visits upon women. Shaming and controlling female sexuality may make a few men’s lives easier because they can keep women in unhappy, servile relationships by invoking slut shame if they leave, but it makes women’s lives much harder. Sexual shaming of women contributes to bad outcomes on a number of levels: worse health care, lower incomes, lower self-esteem, and even violence against women. Sexual shaming also hurts the majority of men at the expense of the few. Most men are better off in a system where people can try partners on without shame until they find one that suits them best. If half the human race can’t engage in sexual contact freely, the other half has pretty limited options, except for the few that are gay, and even that presumes that misogyny doesn’t lead to homophobia, and we know in the real world that it does.

This is the argumentation I point to when I say how utterly out of touch Amanda and many feminists are with the pro-life position. Pro-lifers don't disagree with abortion as birth control because they want to punish women for having sex. Pro-lifers disagree with abortion as birth control because it is killing a human being for the convenience of someone else and life should be considered more precious than that. It's just not complicated. This has nothing to do with not wanting women to enjoy sex. Plenty of women with children still enjoy having sex. Not only this, but many women actually think that their ability to help create and nurture life makes them more powerful, not less. The pathetic attempt to white wash abortion as woman hatred is delusional.

3. Abortion has nothing to do with self-loathing. I actually agree with this statement, but it isn't what Amanda actually means. Here's what she says:

Abortion is the behavior of neurotic women who don’t enjoy being women. This one very rarely trickles up to the official discourse (emphasis mine), but there’s still this lingering belief that motherhood is every woman’s destiny and that abortion must therefore be a neurotic rejection of your biology. Pointing out that most women who have abortions have children already---and that the rest probably will eventually---shuts this avenue down pretty quickly. But it’s worth noting, because it used to be, from what I can tell, a very popular secular anti-choice argument.

I have never, ever heard this argument from a pro-life supporter. Not in any form or fashion. No one on the pro-life side argues that women who have abortions hate being women. This is the type of argument pro-abortion supporters like Amanda use to dismiss the logical arguments against abortion.

Here's a little warning. Whenever Amanda says "there's this lingering belief" without giving a link to some reasonable, normal source of information (as opposed to a church with three members that she found in a Google search), it means "no one thinks this but I gotta lie about it anyway."

This is the first time in a while that Amanda has actually tried to rebut pro-life arguments, and it's obvious why. She would never be able to actually debate pro-life supporters in any forum that wasn't heavily stacked in her favor (say, her blog where she can lie to people and shut down debate when she loses). Instead, she builds the kinds of strawmen not seen outside of corn fields in Iowa. Pro-lifers don't hate women and they don't spend too much time thinking about whether a pregnant woman is a slut or not. Instead, they spend their time and energy on helping to preserve life, particularly the innocent life of children. If this is the best argument Amanda has, it's no wonder she shuts down debate as often as she does.

That Wonderful Socialized Medicine: The Duty to Die

It's always interesting when we turn over the rock that is socialized medicine and watch all the bugs squirm out of the light. Today's installment is from Great Britain where Baroness Warnock declared that those suffering dementia have a duty to die because they suck up too many resources.

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.

Perhaps Nicholas Provenzo will write another stirring column on the morality of killing inconvenient people. After all, according to Provenzo, killing Downs Syndrome babies is the moral thing to do because they are only "marginally productive" and wind up being a burden to family and society.

I am not the first to note that the downside of socialized medicine--aside from the outrageously long waits for procedures and the lack of motivation for innovation--is that somebody must get less care so that somebody else can get more care.

When the State has the burden of providing “free” medical care, that care will get rationed in ways that are, unfortunately, all too predictable. Human life stops being sacred and instead becomes a commodity with a balance sheet. If bureaucrats decide that a particular life, or a class of life, has become a net negative, then eventually they will find ways to eliminate the liability.

Totalitarian governments have always worked this way; the shock comes from the same impulse occuring in supposedly enlightened democracies. We’re seeing a new kind of government these nanny states, though — a democratic totalitarianism that makes all of the choices for its subjects after they willingly give the bureaucracy the power of life and death over them. It’s a voluntary totalitarianism, and it starts by assigning government the role of caretaker from cradle to grave, the latter point coming at their choosing.

We've heard about this obligation of the sick and the elderly to off themselves so that the healthy can live better before. It's similar to Provenzo's argument justifying aborting Downs Syndrome babies. And it's still barbaric.

There Is Real Evil in the World

I was listening to a radio show on the way home from work last night and the host and guest were talking about the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. The host pointed out that some movies are generally conservative (Braveheart, Gladiator) while others are unabashedly liberal (In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and Syriana).

One of the things that came out was that in conservative movies, we don't care why someone is a bad guy (the guest was arguing that he wanted to know what made the Joker into the Joker). We simply understand that evil is evil and there aren't excuses for that. Whereas, in liberal movies, we have to come to understand the bad guy and even sympathize with him, understanding his motivations (unless the bad guy is a conservative, then the motivations are obvious: he's just evil).

This discussion made me think about the shooting at the Knoxville Unitarian Church Sunday. There are plenty of people wanting to plaster the blame onto others besides the gunman.

You killed them, Pat Robertson. You killed them, Pastor Hagee. You killed them, Ann Coulter. You killed them, Dick Morris and Sean Hannity and the rest of you at Fox News.

Yet, in the end, it wasn't Ann Coulter who killed those people in a church. It wasn't Pat Robertson. It wasn't Sean Hannity or Michael Savage, regardless of how you feel about their rhetoric or politics. Millions and millions of people listen to, watch, and read these people on a daily basis and yet do not succumb to violent tendencies. So, why blame those pundits when violence erupts?

The fact is, there is real evil in the world. It walks into churches and shoots unarmed and innocent people. It attacks people who disagree with it. It tries to shame people into silence by attaching evil to good.

I'm willing to say that what the man in Knoxville did was evil. But trying to attach blame to the authors of books he read is just stupid. Did he own a dictionary, as well?

Too Much Info

Back when I was a kid, there were a number of subjects one didn't discuss in polite company. Those subjects included but were not limited to:

--Alcoholism

--Abuse (spousal or child, physical or verbal)

--Drugs

--Religion

--Politics

--Affairs (either one's own or others)

--Sex (either gender or intercourse)

You could wrap most of those topics under the heading "gossip," and the taboo on gossip served a purpose; that is, it spared the listener from having to stop a person from blabbering about things one knew one shouldn't discuss. That people did, in fact, discuss these topics and others didn't make the rule less civil. That simply shows that people don't like to use self-restraint and would rather say whatever they think and feelings of the listener be damned.

That's the way I felt when I read about the sportswriter who is switching from being a man to being a woman.

I'm not going to discuss the rightness or wrongness of this situation (although I find it interesting that we don't know if Penner's "spouse" is a man or a woman, and if there are children involved). Such discussions aren't germaine to what I'm really thinking, which is why burden the rest of us with your secret?

I understand Penner telling his spouse, his employer, his minister, his friends. But why publish this information? Couldn't the L.A. Times just put a shirttail on the end of his column that says:

Times sports writer Christine Daniels used to be Mike Penner. Her column appears Mondays and Thursdays.

Would there be readers curious about this? Sure. But it wouldn't inflict his decision on the rest of the known universe because, frankly, it's nobody else's business.

One of the problems with the Jerry Springer-ization of the U.S. is that there is no longer anything private anymore. All information about a person is up for grabs, regardless of the effects such publication will have on that person and others. It's one thing to tell your employer you are getting divorced and that you might be a little stressed out for a while; it's another to write a column discussing the intimate details of your life. Especially when you aren't writing a personal column but rather, a sports column.

So, good luck, Mike/Christine in your new life. But please, keep it to yourself.

The Killing of Eve

I wrote here about a series in the Washington Times about India and abortion. (H/T GetReligion)

GetReligion has a new article about the series after the third installment was released. Terry Mattingly of GetReligion was afraid the series would be politicized--turned into something about left and right--as opposed to being about "a connection in India, and in China, between modern technology and the ultimate form of sexism — an attempt to favor males by preventing females from even being born."

The problem posed isn't so difficult for people like me who are very pro-life. I was more curious about the differing use of technology--the ultrasound--by women in India, who want to abort female babies, and pro-lifers in this country, who use the ultrasound pictures as a way to discourage women from having abortions.

I asked how pro-choice women square their support of abortion with what women in India use that "choice" for. While I've had a couple of people try to answer that question, I'm still not satisfied with the answers (not because I don't think the commenters aren't being honest or trying to present a reasonable answer, but because I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around the concept yet. But I'm trying).

A documentary was made about doctors who either performed abortions after 20 weeks or who gave referrals to women more than 20 weeks pregnant. Both actions are illegal under Indian law, but that doesn't stop anyone. The documentary caused an enormous furor for daring to speak the truth.

The descriptions of women killing their babies (both before and after birth) is shocking.

In Rajasthan's violent desert culture, baby girls were drowned in boiling milk or abandoned in a sand dune. Whole villages went decades without female children.

The question I kept asking myself was What happens in these cultures when there are no women to have children? The answer: sex trafficking.

Currently, women-starved parts of western India are importing women. The best trafficking season, reports Supriya Awasthi, South Asia director for Free the Slaves, a New Delhi-based advocacy group, is in the summer during the monsoons, when people are most hungry and desperate.

Girls from Nepal and Bangladesh constitute 70 percent of all trafficked girls. Top Nepalese hubs are the capital Katmandu; Sindhupalchowk, a district north of Katmandu; and Makwanpur, which is east of the capital.

They end up at a slave market known as Phoolbagh in the Purnia district of Bihar, India's poorest state. Girls are then traded to circuses or loaded on trucks or trains bound for states like Punjab and Haryana, which have the country's worst male-female sex ratios.

Miss Awasthi particularly remembers one 12-year-old she ran into in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. She had been raped by five men and was three months pregnant. She had a baby boy, who died.

People go to huge lengths to unload their girl children, she said. "The government bans child marriage but nothing substantial has been done so far.

"The police can be moved to take action only if there is pressure from the local people who complain to local bureaucrats. Or a court can direct police to act. Or they will act out of pressure from the media."

The shortage of women here has opened the market for "paros," or trafficked women, purchased for 12,000 to 15,000 rupees, or $260 to $330. Those under 14 go for less: 5,000 to 10,000 rupees, or $110 to $220.

Aphrael noted that as the number of women went down, their value would increase and, perhaps, the status of women in these countries would improve. I didn't argue the point, but, as this article points out, almost the opposite is true. As the number of women in these places is reduced, their monetary value goes up but their value as people is reduced even further.

I find this series shocking, horrifying, and depressing. There are organizations fighting the trafficking of people, but I want this to be a major concern both for our government in its foreign policy and for non-government organizations.

About that One Ounce Baby...

It's always amusing when someone's snarky comment becomes reality.

The other day, blubonnet said this on this thread at CSPT:

1 and 1/4 oz fetus’s “life” is not the same as a woman’s life.

I responded by asking:

At what size do you consider the baby to be a baby? One pound? 1 1/2 lbs? 20 weeks?

The point being, of course, that a 1 1/2 lb. baby is physiologically the same whether it is in the womb or outside. In our country, however, the one outside the womb is the only one recognized as a baby.

It seems my comment wasn't far from the mark. According to this story,

Amillia is the new world record holder for a baby to survive through gestational age, according to the University of Iowa's national registry for the tiniest babies.

"We have a special baby here today because she was extremely premature at birth 21 weeks and 6 days," said neonatologist Dr. William Smalling. "There is no known survivor born this early to ever go home and not only is the baby going home she is thriving and doing well. It's a special day for us all here."

Surrounded by the team at Baptist Children's Hospital that has cared for her since her unexpected arrival, Amillia is now ready to go home. Doctors said they marvel at what the little girl has taught them.

"Well... I learned that we can work with babies this small," Smalling said. "Previously it was thought to be technically impossible."

"She showed us early on that she was a fighter and wanted to be here," said Dr. Paul Fassbach, a neonatologist.

Amillia was born Oct. 24, 2006. She was the world's fourth-smallest baby, weighing 284 grams (just under 10 ounces) when she was born. She was just 9.5 inches long -- barely longer than a ballpoint pen.

"We've never even really resuscitated babies this small right," Fassbach said. "Now, the recommendations for the American Academy of Pediatrics is that we can resuscitate babies that are 23 weeks or by birth weight over 400 grams. So, babies were considered non viable or too immature to survive outside the uterus if they were born earlier than that."

I wonder...is 10 ounces enough?