From Amy…
South Dakota
A little more than a week away - the word from South Dakota is that the abortion ban is losing in the polls by a few percentage points, Planned Parenthood is pouring money into the state - the main group coordinating support of the ban would appreciate your help, if you can - they have a donor with a matching offer on board.
At the site you can, of course, watch some of their very powerful ads - but they can’t run them if they can’t buy the time.
from Muslim scholars.
H./t: NRO
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWUwNDQ5YTk5OTZlZmY1M2E 5MjUzNzQwMWQxYWEwYzY=
Way too fun!
http://www.gracebeforemeals.com/video_player.html
Got the link from Immaculate Direction–it’s a new PBS show (yes, you read that right, PBS about a priest who teaches families how to slow down, cook a real meal, and enjoy it! Crunchy Cons unite!!
First case coming…
‘Partial-birth’ cases test abortion rights’ limits
Central question facing justices: Is procedure medically necessary?
By Joan Biskupic
USA TODAY
NEW YORK — It was just after Mother’s Day in May 2003 when Ilene Jaroslaw, about four months pregnant, learned that the fetus she was carrying had a fatal spinal cord and brain defect.
Jaroslaw, then a mother of two, says she was devastated but decided immediately to have an abortion. Because she wanted to have another child — and because she had had two previous cesarean-section deliveries and an unrelated surgery on her uterus — she agreed with her doctor’s recommendation to undergo a procedure that would do as little damage as possible to the uterus.
“There was absolutely no hope at all,” says Jaroslaw, a 43-year-old lawyer in New York City who talked with USA TODAY about her experience. “This baby was not going to survive long.”
For Jaroslaw, having what Congress and critics of the procedure call a “partial-birth” abortion was an intensely personal health decision that led to a happier ending: In 2004, she got pregnant again and delivered a healthy baby girl.
The episode also made Jaroslaw a symbol of the ongoing debate over whether Congress’ effort to ban “partial-birth” abortion violates a woman’s right to end a pregnancy — a question that goes before the Supreme Court on Nov. 8. Under a federal law passed by Congress in October 2003 and tied up in the courts ever since, Jaroslaw could not legally have undergone the procedure because her life was not in danger.
Jaroslaw’s reasons for having the procedure — to preserve her ability to have more children by avoiding the hemorrhaging and perforation of the uterus that can occur with other abortion methods — would not have cleared the legal hurdle set by Congress.
That’s partly why the pair of cases that come before the Supreme Court next week are widely viewed as a major test of efforts to restrict abortion. The issue is not the fundamental question of whether abortion should be legal, first established by the court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Instead, the cases test the Republican-led Congress’ power to limit the reach of that ruling by restricting medical options for women.
The law is called the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Lawyers for the two challengers now before the Supreme Court, Eve Gartner of Planned Parenthood and Priscilla Smith of the Center for Reproductive Rights, note that there is no medical procedure known by that name and contend that the phrase is needlessly offensive and misleading.
On a more technical level, the cases put on exhibit dueling medical opinions over whether certain second-trimester abortion procedures are ever necessary.
For the court, the cases — Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Gonzales v. Carhart — represent the first significant test of whether abortion rights in America will change now that moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a key vote in favor of such rights, has retired.
Six years ago, when the justices struck down state bans on “partial-birth” abortions because the laws did not include exceptions for when a woman’s health was at risk, O’Connor cast the decisive fifth vote on the ideologically divided, nine-member court. Last term, she was replaced by Samuel Alito, a more conservative judge who, as a member of a lower court, voted for abortion restrictions that O’Connor later rejected.
The federal ban — which is similar to the state laws voided by the high court six years ago — has been rejected by three sets of U.S. district courts and appeals courts. The lower courts said Congress’ ban violates women’s rights to abortion because it lacks a health exception and is too vaguely written.
The lower court judgments conflict with Congress’ assertion that “partial-birth” procedures are never the best option to preserve a woman’s health.
“This is an excellent case to test the direction of the court on abortion rights,” Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett says.
Abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood say Jaroslaw and thousands of women like her personify the need to preserve the second-trimester procedures known in the medical community as “intact dilation and evacuation” (or intact D&E) and “dilation and extraction” (D&X).
The methods involve dilating a woman’s cervix to allow most of the fetus to emerge into the vagina intact, rather than dismembering the fetus in the uterus by using forceps and other instruments. In the intact method, a doctor then suctions out the fetus’ brain to collapse the head and allow delivery.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has reported that such methods increasingly are viewed as the safest abortion procedures for the second trimester of pregnancy, roughly the 13th to 26th weeks of gestation.
Second-trimester procedures account for about 11% of the estimated 1.3 million abortions performed in the USA each year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. It’s unclear, however, how many of those abortions are done with the intact D&E or D&X methods because no one keeps a precise count.
The Bush administration, in defending the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, has argued in court papers that Congress had solid grounds to believe that any procedure in which a doctor “partially delivers a (living) fetus intact … and then kills the fetus” is never medically necessary.
The government is appealing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in a case begun by Planned Parenthood, and a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, in a case started by Nebraska physician LeRoy Carhart.
U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement has told the justices that the “gruesome” procedure “resembles infanticide.”
Clement has said Congress’ ban is not unconstitutional because there are alternative methods of second-trimester abortions that would remain legal. Those include a standard D&E procedure in which a doctor dismembers the fetus in the uterus, and another method known as “induction,” in which a woman is given drugs that cause her to go into labor and deliver the fetus.
Groups filing briefs in support of the administration include the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The association argues that such alternative methods are medically appropriate even for women such as Jaroslaw with uterine scarring from a prior cesarean section or other uterine surgery.
Elizabeth Shadigian, a physician affiliated with the University of Michigan’s medical school who is president of the pro-life group, says there is little evidence to suggest that “partial-birth” methods are better in preserving a woman’s health.
“There is almost no data on it,” Shadigian says. “It’s not good enough that someone believes it’s better. You have to prove it’s better.” She said women should wait until studies are done on “the long-term effects of the procedure.”
In court filings, Planned Parenthood counsel Gartner says that if Congress’ ban is allowed to take effect, doctors would not be able to give their patients the best medical care.
Physicians would be “chilled from continuing to provide these procedures, … (and) women’s liberty will be infringed and their right to choose abortion unduly burdened,” Gartner says.
She also notes that the records from the cases now before the Supreme Court show several instances in which women suffering from serious medical conditions or carrying fetuses with severe anomalies would benefit from the intact D&E procedure.
“Even for women whose health condition is not compromised, intact D&E is a significantly safer method of abortion,” Gartner says.
Clement acknowledges in his filings that physicians disagree over the necessity for the intact D&E and D&X methods. However, he insists that the justices must defer to Congress’ finding that “there is substantial evidence … that partial-birth abortion is never” medically necessary.
Jaroslaw, a graduate of Harvard College and of Georgetown Law School, says she came forward to speak about her abortion because “the issues aren’t as simple as people think. Nobody in advance of a diagnosis says, ‘I want that procedure.’ What people want is proper medical care.”
Jaroslaw, a native of Flushing, N.Y., married a fellow lawyer, David, in 1992. She gave birth to a boy in 1997 and a girl in 1999. She says the children were delivered by cesarean section because she previously had uterine fibroids and other gynecological problems.
Jaroslaw says that when she became pregnant in 2003, everything looked good in early tests. “So we tell our families I’m pregnant. We tell friends. A few weeks after that, I tell people at work. I wasn’t worried.”
About 17 weeks into the pregnancy, however, a sonogram showed that part of her fetus’ brain was missing. The diagnosis was anencephaly, which is fatal.
Jaroslaw says she and her husband considered abortion the only option. She says she did not want to wait a full nine months to deliver a child that would not survive.
“The idea of being pregnant for so many more months and having people ask about the baby, it would have been a nightmare,” Jaroslaw says. She was also concerned that her children would be traumatized by having their sibling be born and die. She says she talked with her rabbi, and he supported her choice.
Jaroslaw says her desire for a third child led her doctor to recommend that she have the fetus removed intact, to avoid trauma to her uterus. “When you’ve had so many cuts in the uterus, you want as little instrumentation and probing around as possible.”
Coincidentally, she underwent the abortion as Congress was debating its ban on “partial-birth” abortion. “I asked my doctor whether, if the bill passed, the procedure I was about to have would be illegal,” Jaroslaw says. “He said yes.”
Bush signed the bill into law in November 2003.
“I’m a family person,” Jaroslaw says. “I don’t think I’m unique in my situation, except that I will talk about it. When I went back to work, people opened up to me with their own stories.”
So how might the Supreme Court — with Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, who replaced the late William Rehnquist last year — view the most recent attempt to restrict abortion?
The “partial-birth” cases arrive at the court at a time when few Americans — 15% in a Gallup Poll in May — believe abortion should be banned in all circumstances. That poll, typical of nationwide surveys, found that most Americans (53%) believe that abortion should be legal but with restrictions.
The high court generally has reflected that sentiment since Roe v. Wade, upholding abortion rights while opening the door to limits. The current cases could provide a hint of whether greater restrictions might be imposed with the new justices on the bench. However, a veteran justice — Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy — is more likely to be the key player.
In 2000, when the court voted 5-4 to strike down state bans on “partial-birth” abortion that lacked an exception for cases in which a woman’s health was at risk, the bench was deeply divided. Kennedy, who had provided a crucial fifth vote in 1992 when the justices affirmed abortion rights, bitterly dissented in 2000. He said government should be free to outlaw the “abhorrent” procedure and that states had a legitimate “concern for the life of the unborn and for the partially born.” This time, a big question will be whether Kennedy, a frequent swing vote on the court, still supports a ban on the procedure without a health exception.
If he does, the court’s reshaped conservative wing — Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, along with newcomers Roberts and Alito — could be positioned to uphold Congress’ ban. Scalia and Thomas consistently have voted against abortion rights. Roberts’ record as a lawyer in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and Alito’s rulings as a lower court judge suggest that they also are likely to take a limited view of such rights.
One of the best oxymorons ever….
From the WaPo:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10 /25/AR2006102501998.html
I love the lede:
There are really just two possibilities for Sam Harris. Either he is right and millions of Christians, Muslims and Jews are wrong. Or Sam Harris is wrong and he is so going to hell.
A choice bit:
“I think this country needs a sophisticated attack on religion,” says Van Harvey, a retired professor of religious studies at Stanford University. “But pushing moderates into the same camp as fanatics, that seems like a very crude mistake.” (me: a religious studies prof thinks we need an “attack on religion”? What kind of prof is that?)
I’ve covered ESCR and cloning and all that goes with it many times on my several blogs. My basic position is that I am in favor of adult stem cell research. I am not in favor of ESCR because it destroys life. I don’t care how tiny, how nascent it is. It’s life, it’s human life, so there. No go. I would never support, or use, therapies developed by ESCR. And I can say that without anyone going “well you’ve never been in that situation.” Um, yeah I have. And if ESCR stuff would’ve been available I would’ve said “thanks but no thanks.” I have CF-releated diabetes now, and people talk about how ESCR could “cure” diabetes. Well, I honestly don’t think compromising my deep moral principles is worth not having to shoot up some insulin every night. Sorry. As I have said before, there is a limit to my selfishness. I’m not going to sacrifice someone else to save my own life. That’s just the way it is.
Life is not something we should mess with. Birth and death are decided by God. He gives us life, he takes it away. That means no abortion, no euthanasia, and yes, I am against the death penalty (I accept the CCC’s teaching on it). This leads us down a horribly slippery-slope path of deciding what lives are and are not worth living. What is “life” to someone else is not “life” to another.
If you’ve read Tuesdays With Morrie you can see what i’m talking about. Many people would not like to live the way Morrie did. But in doing so, in choosing life, he taught Mitch Albom and the millions who have read the book incalculable, beautiful lessons. The world is a better place for people like him. Yet there are those who would say he, and others like him, weren’t really “living.” That euthanasia is the best, the preferred, the humane way to treat these case. Life is the most wonderful and precious thing we have, and we treat it so cavalierly. People smoke their lungs away, drink away their livers, are willing to kill babies that make life “complicated” and that they are “not ready for.” And on the other side, we are trying to create a world without suffering. it’s not possible. But suffering is what gives life it’s depth and breathdt. It makes it all worthwhile. I would not appreciate the small, tiny things of life if I hadn’t had to fight so hard for it. It is a wonderful gift. But people abort their babies with down syndrome or other genetic abnormalities because they think that are “helping” the baby avoid a life of suffering. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
Wow I realized after reading my last post that it was heavy on the court stuff and my own personal holiday pet peeves, not so much the hospital/clinic issues Fr. Neuhaus talks about. I got a little carried away. So here I respond to that…
If you are going to a Catholic hospital to be treated, then you should know some things, like EC, may not (indeed, should not!) be in play. I would hope the hospital demonstrates its commitment to its founding values at least that much. They are private institutions. Leave them alone. No one is making you go there and receive treatment.
Now, what if they are receiving federal funds (i.e., Faith-Based Initatives?). Well, they can’t break the law, obviously. But they must still be faithful to their missions. And if the feds think that this will break the law/compromise the spending of tax dollars, then don’t grant them to these groups. Doesn’t that sound, well, easy?
That’s the problem. Nothing with government is easy. Trust me. I work for them.
I do not claim to be an expert on the Constitution (I will leave that to Dr. Mayer, or David, thank you very much), but I did take enough Con Law in college to know that SCOTUS doesn’t really have a coherent view on what those “sixteen words” really mean, or how to apply them in a societal context.
When I took Modern American Law, Dr. Mayer assigned us a case from the text that we had to prepare and present to the class. I was assigned Lynch v. Donnelly , which regarding the display of a creche on public property. The previously decided case of Lemon v. Kurtzman provided what is known as the “Lemon test” in American law, which is three-pronged:
1. The government’s action must have a legitimate secular purpose;
2. The government’s action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and
3. The government’s action must not result in an “excessive entanglement” with Religion.
All three prongs must be met in order for something to appease the “sixteen words.” Well in Donnelly the Court decided that the creche met all those principles and thus was allowed to be displayed. So in that case the creche was OK. But the spotty application of the Lemon test has lead to a more case-by-case basis than an overarching standard.
(OK that was waaay more law-school geekery that I wanted to put in here. Oh well) So back to my point and Fr. Neuhaus.
The First Amendment’s dealings with religion are mostly a result of the fact that England had (and has), as we know, a ’state-sponsored’ religion (The COE)and the founding of America had its roots in the quest for religious freedom. They didn’t want to see a similar religious tyranny here. So the government “endorsement” of religion means, pretty simply, that the President can’t come out and declare, “since I am a Methodist, you must all be Methodists, or we’ll tax/persecute/etc. you and your families for not converting to the national religion.”
As Fr. neuhaus notes, there are two clauses: The “Establishment” clause (above) and the “free exercise” clause. And it seems to me that free exercise gets trampled an awful lot. If we’re going to have a menorah and a star and all that good stuff, why can’t we have a creche? Christmas trees are Christmas trees, not holiday trees! If a school is having a Christmas concert, they are going to sing Christmas songs , and this should not shock anyone. If you do not want your child exposed to this, do not enroll them in choir, or work it out with the director so they can not sing the Christmas stuff. When I was in high school we sang the Christmas stuff, as well as 1 or 2 Hannukah songs (which are hard to find, let me tell you). Why is it that when we’re called to be tolerant of other religions, Christianity is somehow left out? That we must be tolerant but ask nothing in return?
It seems that in all this court wrangling, common sense has been forgotten. Will it kill us all if a bunch of third graders sing “Silent Night” at their concert? No. I’m sorry, but the vast majority of good music literature is religious in nature. Deal with it . Especially at Christmas. Besides, those songs have great, touchy-feely messages the libs should love, like “Peace on Earth” and all that jazz. Can we all get on board with that?
WEll, OK, I can…but I don’t want to.
From Amy…
See, the point is…
Endowing a Human Rights Chair for a proponent of abortion makes no sense anywhere.
But especially at a Catholic university. When the honoree is a priest.
Georgetown University Law Center has named a human rights chair for a controversial priest who has been actively supportive of abortion during and after his time as a U.S. Congressman.
Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff announced the establishment of the Robert F. Drinan, SJ, Chair in Human Rights at a formal ceremony Oct. 23; Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh gave the keynote address.
“Few have accomplished as much as Fr. Drinan, and fewer still have done so much to make the world a better place,” Aleinikoff reportedly said. “This new Chair honors Fr. Drinan’s lifelong commitment to public service and will allow us to bring distinguished human rights scholars and advocates to Georgetown Law.”
Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, has called the naming of the new Chair “deeply disturbing” and “hypocritical.” The university has established a human rights chair “in the name of a heretical priest who has spent much of his lifetime advocating for the most heinous of human rights violations: abortion,” he said in a statement.
Fr. Drinan has been a strong supporter of abortion rights, during his time in public office and afterwards as well, stating that while he was personally opposed to abortion, its legality was a separate issue from its morality.
It’s hard to know what to say. This is so spectacularly expressive of that huge blind spot carried about by the tender-hearted who cannot see that when you deny human rights to any group, but especially the weakest and most defenseless, anything more you have to say about human rights rings hollow, empty, without foundation. The humblest workers in a Crisis Pregnancy Center, meeting women in their pain, looking them in the eye, offering them hope, working hard to hook up those women with resources to get them through, going home at night and pouring out their hearts to God in prayer for women and their babies - they are nobler advocates for human rights than Drinan could ever hope to be.
From NRO:
Feeling Sexy at Harvard
And The Gap is here to serve.
By C. R. Hardy
The last time I lived in Cambridge with kids was four years ago. Back then I had just two of them — and was pregnant with my third. According to my fair-minded fellow Cambridge residents, I was an overpopulating nut-case. The snickers and sneers were insufferable — most especially when I was out with my boys in a double stroller, pushing them along with my pregnant, over-sized mid-section. You could see the astonished eyes looking first at the stroller, then at my belly, then quickly at my face (to see if I was real, I assume), and then embarrassingly shifting to a store front or a passing car. Then the person would whisper to a smiling companion, well within my hearing, “She’s having another one!” As if it weren’t already obvious.
That was the fall of 2002. Though we left Harvard just before my third son was born in 2003, we are back again this year, living in Harvard graduate-student housing — now with four children.
It’s even worse this time. I had figured Cambridge was already about as anti-natalist as it could be, but this is the city where progressives never sleep. In point of fact, election 2004 showed Cambridge had become even more “blue” than it was when I was last here. Middlesex County, to which Cambridge belongs, voted Democrat by an extra 2.5 percentage points in 2004 over 2000.
My favorite sign of the times is that in my absence the GapKids that used to occupy the second floor of one of the Harvard Co-op buildings in Harvard Square was replaced with a GapBody. For those of you uninitiated into the world of Gap-lingo, allow me to explain. The Gap is a ridiculously trendy apparel company that caters to young people, and adults who want to dress like young people. GapKids is a spin-off division of The Gap that sells ridiculously trendy (and incredibly cute) clothing for kids. BabyGap is a related spin-off store that sells ridiculously trendy (and even more incredibly cute) clothing for babies. GapMaternity outfits pregnant women in, you guessed it, ridiculously trendy styles. You get the idea.
GapBody is the newest spin-off. It peddles ridiculously trendy undergarments and comfy apparel for women, because, as goes their motto, “there’s no secret to being sexy…feeling good is the sexiest thing of all.” And so, considering that those marketing majors at The Gap are well aware that Harvard Square is student-territory, and since students don’t have many kids, out goes GapKids and in comes GapBody — all of which seems to be good reasoning.
Yet consider the assumption behind the exchange: While students aren’t having many kids (naturally enough), they are, apparently, having a lot of sex — or, if not, they are at least really interested in feeling sexy. And GapBody is here to serve. According to their website, GapBody provides everything a young woman needs to help her feel sexy, including, to my great astonishment, “playful intimates for under your daytime outfits.” Why in heaven’s name students should want something playful under their daytime clothing, I have no idea. The demand for playfulness in classrooms and labs never seemed to me to be particularly high.
But I digress. The point of all this is that the shift from GapKids to GapBody is reflective of Cambridge and blue America more generally. Simply put, maternity has become for them an exotic, often baffling, custom. I remember the last time I was in the GapKids store in Harvard Square before we moved away. I had my two little boys and was five months pregnant with my third. A customer behind me in line, looking me over and observing the two little ones in the stroller, asked me in all seriousness how I was going to get around once I had my third. Surprised, and mildly humored, I explained that I fully expected that my oldest would be able to walk by the time my third was born. It was a partly facetious answer for a mostly absurd question — my eldest son could already walk, of course, but, like all kids, preferred to ride if he could. Yet it was a revealing question. I’ll be the last to make light of the difficulties involved in transporting three little kids all about Cambridge. But the tone of the question bothered me, as if it was meant to imply: “Didn’t you think over the transportation issue before you got pregnant again?” As if getting around by stroller would ever figure into my calculations over whether to have a third child.
Perhaps that’s just the way in which blue America looks at childbearing — as a cost-benefit analysis performed with the most rudimentary and imbecilic tools of measurement. The benefits are somewhat obscure: How, for example, do you measure the benefits for society of a child that grows up to join the Sisters of Charity of Mother Theresa, ministering to the poorest of the poor around the world? Or how do you measure the benefit to society of a child that will spend 18 years studying and 50 or more years thinking, producing, working, and paying taxes? Or what about the child that will grow up to cure cancer, negotiate peace in the Middle East, or discover a renewable clean source of fuel? The fact is, it’s impossible and silly even to think about it. What’s the value of a human life, considered ex ante?
But the costs — oh, the costs are so easy to calculate! So many diapers, so much formula, so many inconvenient trips around Harvard Square with one extra little guy who doesn’t fit into my double stroller.
With no more GapKids, my trips to Harvard Square will be less frequent. Instead, I’ll have to throw all the kids in my big, gas-guzzling, liberal-infuriating Suburban and drive out of Cambridge to where people still have kids and still want them. Those places seem to be getting fewer and further between in Massachusetts, though they still exist. By and large they are high-immigrant areas and poorer areas. Children are still the wealth of the poor in Massachusetts, but not the wealth — or the ambition — of the rich.
Harvard students are more interested in sex — or in feeling sexy — than in kids. Feeling sexy, however, often leads to sex, and sex often leads to kids. Ahem. Or at least to pregnancies. Which is why blue America sweepingly (and coercively) supports choice. They want the sex, but not the kids. The kids are much too costly. To the pocketbook, yes, but most of all to a particular lifestyle more interested in today’s consumption than tomorrow’s production.
Enter defense of illegal immigration (workers need to come from somewhere), abortion and the Pill (for the sexiness without the kids), and support for gay marriage (because what does sex have to do with kids, anyway?). I’m reminded of Walker Percy’s 1971 summary of what the left stands for: LEFTPAPASANE —- Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia. Think much has changed?
So it is poignant that GapBody has replaced GapKids in one of the most highly charged centers of left-wing idea-production. Another generation of Harvard students will be weaned into adulthood on a steady dose of feeling sexy (even during the day) and covering up the consequences of all that sexiness by whatever means necessary. And it probably never will occur to many of the young women at Harvard that a legitimate (and even fun!) way to use their above-average talents is to bring new people into the world with above-average talents and nurture them with all the above-average gifts they possess.
— C. R. Hardy is a mother of four small adorable kids and a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard University.
