It’s The Women, Stupid…redux

I have from time to time made the point that the entire debate over abortion and birth control and almost the whole edifice of what we call Fundamentalism in the world, in whatever religion, is all essentially over controlling women. Here is an article which has one of the most bizarre takes on the entire issue I've ever seen. The central premise is early on stated in 0ne sentence that defines all of this nonsense, in whatever creed you care to name. "Sexual relationships, while enacted privately, are public property." The twists in logic, never mind rationality, are among the most byzantine I've ever encountered. What is more, the writer doesn't seem to understand that this "philosophy" reduces children to little more than marks on a scorecard. The exhibition of marital health and fidelity is all that is important. The attempt to limit family size and indulge private acts privately for private purposes is reduced to an attempt to deceive the community, pure and simple. But ultimately, as in all other instances of this kind of obscene interference with the personal, it is the women who bear the costs, the burdens, and the responsibility. I suppose the next step would be to devise a kind of tracking bracelet for the penis and vagina so someone somewhere can determine when either is being used and where. I have no answer for this kind of inanity (or insanity). The fact that this makes sense to some people disturbs me no end, because it means that some people cannot see past the end of their own prurience. Yes, I said prurience, because to come up with this kind of thing, rather than demonstrating a balanced healthy appreciation for sex, shows an obsession with it that can only be described as prurient.

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A succinct history of the birth control pill

Time Magazine has published a fascinating 8-page history of the birth control pill. I learned many things that surprised me, including the fact that in 1957, 30 states still had laws against promoting birth control. The 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception," including providing contraception for married couples. In Griswold, Planned Parenthood's Executive Director, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School ran a medical clinic that "gave information, instruction, and medical advice to married persons as to the means of preventing conception. They examined the wife and prescribed the best contraceptive device or material for her use. Fees were usually charged, although some couples were serviced free." It's incredible to think how much the world has changed since 1965 (the birth control pill first came to market in 1959). Here's one of the opening paragraphs from the Time article, which is well worth reading in its entirety:

Its main inventor was a conservative Catholic who was looking for a treatment for infertility and instead found a guarantee of it. It was blamed for unleashing the sexual revolution among suddenly swinging singles, despite the fact that throughout the 1960s, women usually had to be married to get it. Its supporters hoped it would strengthen marriage by easing the strain of unwanted children; its critics still charge that the Pill gave rise to promiscuity, adultery and the breakdown of the family. In 1999 the Economist named it the most important scientific advance of the 20th century, but Gloria Steinem, one of the era's most influential feminists, calls its impact "overrated." One of the world's largest studies of the Pill — 46,000 women followed for nearly 40 years — was released this March. It found that women who take the Pill are less likely to die prematurely from any cause, including cancer and heart disease, yet many women still question whether the health risks outweigh the benefits.

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The Long Road To Papal Self Destruction

The legal back-and-forth over the Vatican’s position on the sexual abuse revelations seems to Americans bizarre. While certainly the Catholic Church has a large contingent, we are a traditionally Protestant nation and after ditching the Anglican’s after the Revolution, the whole question of a Church being able to deny the right of civil authority to prosecute one of its representatives for criminal acts was swallowed up in the strident secularism that, despite the current revisionist rhetoric of a very loud activist minority, characterized the first century of the Republic. Even American Catholics may be a be fuzzy on how the Vatican can try to assert diplomatic immunity for the Pope in order to block prosecutorial efforts. But the fact is, the Vatican is a State, just like Italy, Switzerland, Germany, or the United States. The Pope is the head of a political entity (technically, the Holy See, but for convenience I use the more inclusive term Vatican), with all the rights and privileges implied. The Vatican has embassies. They have not quite come out to assert that priests, being officials (and perhaps officers) of that state, have diplomatic immunity, but they have certainly acted that way for the past few decades as this scandal has percolated through the halls of St. Peter. It would be an interesting test if they did, to in fact allow that attorneys generals, D.A.s, and other law enforcement agencies have absolutely no legal grounds on which to prosecute priests. To date, the Vatican has not gone there. So what is the political relationship between, say, the Vatican and the United States? From 1797 to 1870, the United States maintained consular relations with the Papal States. We maintained diplomatic relations with the Pope as head of the Papal States from 1848 to 1868, though not at the ambassadorial level. With the loss of the Papal States in 1870, these relationships ended until 1984, although beginning in 1939 a number of presidents sent personal envoys to the Holy See for specific talks on various humanitarian issues. Diplomatic relations resumed January 10, 1984. On March 7, 1984, the Senate confirmed William A. Wilson, who had served as President Reagan’s personal envoy from 1981, as the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. The Holy See in turn named Archbishop Pio Laghi as the first Apostolic Nuncio (equivalent to ambassador) of the Holy See to the U.S. The Pope, as head of the governmental body—the Holy See—has the status of head of state. Arresting the Pope—even issuing a subpoena—is a problematic question under these circumstances, as he would technically enjoy immunity stemming from his position. The question, however, more to the point is the overall relationship of the global Church to the Vatican and the prerogatives the Pope and the Holy See seem to believe they possess in the matter of criminal actions and prosecutions of individual priests, bishops, even archbishops. That requires going back a long time. At one time, the Holy Roman Church held secular power and controlled its own territories, known as the Papal States. When this “country” was established is the subject of academic study, but a clear marker is the so-called Donation of Pepin. The Duchy of Rome was threatened materially by invading Lombards, which the Frankish ruler Pepin the Short ended around 751 C.E.

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The crassness of a public abortion

Today, I spotted a link to Mary Ann Sorrentino's Blog on Salon.com. Sorrentino reports about a woman who decided to Twitter her RU486 abortion in real-time.

27-year-old Angie Jackson decided to use Twitter as a public stage for her private decision to terminate a pregnancy using RU486, the miscarriage-inducing drug legally available in the US for a decade. Jackson, who has a 4-year-old son with special needs, says that that difficult pregnancy and outcome made her decide long ago not to have another child. She was committed to aborting future pregnancies that might occur.
Sorrentino strongly disapproves of Jackson's public display of abortion. She considers it "self-serving, exhibitionistic, and selfish: at best, it has "Bad Judgment" written all over it." I agree with Sorrentino's characterization of Jackson's craving for the limelight. Before going further, however, I should make clear that I fully support a woman's right to abort a pregnancy in the early months of the pregnancy. Although I consider an early term embryo/fetus to to be both human and alive, I don't consider a human organism lacking a reasonably-developed brain to be entitled to the legal rights of personhood. As the pregnancy gets to be further along, the argument gets correspondingly stronger (in my mind) that the fetus is a person--I thus consider the idea of an elective abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 or 9 months (e.g., for sex selection) to be the ghastly equivalent of murder. Here's more on my analysis of abortion and my rejection of the religious concept of the "soul," an ancient concept that inspires many people who are anti-abortion. As I read Sorrentino's post, I thought about a question posed to me by a good friend who is anti-abortion. I mentioned to him that I believe in a woman's right to abort for any reason in the early months of pregnancy. As we discussed the issue further, I indicated that it was too bad that some women had multiple abortions--too bad there isn't fool-proof birth control--shouldn't the invention of 100% reliable birth control be a priority for our government, so that there would be fewer accidental pregnancies, and hence, abortions? My friend stopped me and asked me why I would care about large numbers of early term abortions, given my position that an early term abortion is not tantamount to murder. He asked, "If it's not murder, why do you care that a woman uses abortion repeatedly - - 10 or 12 times in her life, to end pregnancies? You're claiming that an early term abortion is only as morally significant as trapping a mouse in a mousetrap, right? . . ." [More . . . ]

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Pro-choice by pro-athletes

Planned Parenthood plans to run this pro-choice ad on Superbowl Sunday to counter an anti-abortion ad featuring Tim Tebow. This is a sophisticated spot that gets its point across without being confrontational. I do admire the work done to put it together. Then again, I suspect that tens of millions of people will see these two ads and not a single person will change his/her opinion on the issue of abortion.

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