Interesting Opinion Piece: Why I Am Pro-Life

Why I Am Pro-Life

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 27, 2012   

HARD-LINE conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he “came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason,” Walsh said. That came in the wake of the Senate hopeful in Missouri, Representative Todd Akin, remarking that pregnancy as a result of “legitimate rape” is rare because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.”

 

These were not slips of the tongue. These are the authentic voices of an ever-more-assertive far-right Republican base that is intent on using uncompromising positions on abortion to not only unseat more centrist Republicans — Mourdock defeated the moderate Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in the primary — but to overturn the mainstream consensus in America on this issue. That consensus says that those who choose to oppose abortion in their own lives for reasons of faith or philosophy should be respected, but those women who want to make a different personal choice over what happens with their own bodies should be respected, and have the legal protection to do so, as well.

But judging from the unscientific — borderline crazy — statements opposing abortion that we’re hearing lately, there is reason to believe that this delicate balance could be threatened if Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, and their even more extreme allies, get elected. So to those who want to protect a woman’s right to control what happens with her own body, let me offer just one piece of advice: to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. And we must stop letting Republicans name themselves “pro-life” and Democrats as “pro-choice.” It is a huge distortion.

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet.

You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. You can call yourself a “pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative.” I will never refer to someone who pickets Planned Parenthood but lobbies against common-sense gun laws as “pro-life.”

“Pro-life” can mean only one thing: “respect for the sanctity of life.” And there is no way that respect for the sanctity of life can mean we are obligated to protect every fertilized egg in a woman’s body, no matter how that egg got fertilized, but we are not obligated to protect every living person from being shot with a concealed automatic weapon. I have no respect for someone who relies on voodoo science to declare that a woman’s body can distinguish a “legitimate” rape, but then declares — when 99 percent of all climate scientists conclude that climate change poses a danger to the sanctity of all life on the planet — that global warming is just a hoax.

The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. That radical narrowing of our concern for the sanctity of life is leading to terrible distortions in our society.

Respect for life has to include respect for how that life is lived, enhanced and protected — not only at the moment of conception but afterward, in the course of that life. That’s why, for me, the most “pro-life” politician in America is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While he supports a woman’s right to choose, he has also used his position to promote a whole set of policies that enhance everyone’s quality of life — from his ban on smoking in bars and city parks to reduce cancer, to his ban on the sale in New York City of giant sugary drinks to combat obesity and diabetes, to his requirement for posting calorie counts on menus in chain restaurants, to his push to reinstate the expired federal ban on assault weapons and other forms of common-sense gun control, to his support for early childhood education, to his support for mitigating disruptive climate change.

Now that is what I call “pro-life.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 28, 2012
A phrase in this version of the article has been changed to “every fertilized egg in a woman’s body” from “in a woman’s ovary.”

WTF?

WTF?!

Mourdock: ‘God Intended’ Pregnancy


Richard Mourdock recently had an epiphany. During a debate Tuesday, the Indiana Republican running for Senate explained, “I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.” Naturally this didn’t sit well with everyone, and Mitt Romney, who’s trying to win a presidential election for God’s sake, was quick to disassociate himself from his fellow Republican, his campaign issuing a statement confirming that the former Massachusetts governor “disagrees with Richard Mourdock’s comments, and they do not reflect his views.” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, however, is more focused on a GOP takeover of the Senate and was happy to jump to Mourdock’s defense. “To try and construe his words as anything other than a restatement of that belief [that life is a gift from God] is irresponsible and ridiculous,” Cornyn said.

--from The Daily Beast, 10/24/12

Scary: One in Three Women Have No Retirement Plans

LIMRA Research: One In Three Women Have Not Planned For Retirement


By MSturdevant
On October 22, 2012

One in three women have not planned for retirement, according to study results released Monday by Windsor-based LIMRA, an insurance research firm.

The study found that women are less involved in retirement and investment than men with one-third of women saying they are monitoring or managing their retirement savings compared with 46 percent of men. Two-thirds of women said they were not confident they would be able to live in the retirement lifestyle of their choosing.

The survey of 3,763 U.S. adults who are not retired was conducted in May.

Women, on average, have 40 percent less than men in their retirement savings, according to LIMRA research.

“Engaging and educating women should be a top priority of our industry,” said Alison Salka, LIMRA’s director of Retirement Research. “There are approximately 16.6 million women within 10 years of retirement, (age 55 to 70 and not yet retired). Our research reveals that many of them are financially unprepared for retirement and because of their lack of knowledge and understanding of our products and services, are not taking the steps to reduce the risk that they run out of money in retirement.”

-- from Courant.com

Let's Talk about Eggs.

We Need to Talk About Our Eggs
By SARAH ELIZABETH RICHARDS


Published: October 22, 2012

WHEN I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, “You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs.”

She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. “Now everything is a rush,” she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger.

In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues — their OB-GYNs — unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, “Do you plan to have a family?”

OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an “ask me first” approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship? And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm?

But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman: she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use.

Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be “offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging,” and deemed it “experimental.”

Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems.

The procedure isn’t a panacea. It’s terribly expensive — often $10,000 to $15,000 — and is not usually covered by insurance. In addition, there’s a worrisome lack of data regarding the success rates of eggs frozen by the women at the end of their baby-making days. The majority of the women in the four studies reviewed by the society were under 35, and it warned against giving women who want to delay childbearing “false hope” that their frozen eggs will work when they are ready to get pregnant years later. Although estimates of the number of American women who have frozen their eggs for nonmedical reasons are in the thousands, very few have yet returned to thaw them — there are only a couple of thousand babies born from frozen eggs in the world.

Women should be allowed to come to their own conclusions and take their own risks — there’s a fine line between doctors’ “mentioning” and “suggesting” the procedure — but this is an option they should be hearing about from their OB-GYNs. To standardize the message, professional groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should create pamphlets that doctors can give to patients. OB-GYN residents also can learn suggested scripts that present the information in a nonbiased, nonalarmist way.

I first learned about egg freezing from a friend who had talked to her OB-GYN about whether she should freeze, given her family’s history of premature menopause. When I asked my doctor about the procedure, she said she had heard that the success rates had recently improved and gave me the name of a respected fertility doctor. As a result, I stashed away several batches of eggs between the ages of 36 and 38 — just before the cutoff at which many doctors no longer consider eggs worthwhile to save.

I was fortunate, because I knew to ask. We must go one step further and expect OB-GYNs to bring up family planning at every annual visit, so that women have the information they need to choose to take charge of their fertility. Perhaps more women will think about freezing in their early to mid-30s, when their chances of success are greater. Or maybe, after being asked about their plans from their very first visit, more will decide to start families when their eggs are at their prime, and won’t even need to freeze.

Sarah Elizabeth Richards is the author of the forthcoming book “Motherhood, Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It.”

How You Talk about Sex Is Everything

I read the below article today and thought to myself: Really?  Here we go again, another statement about how women use rape when it's convenient.  And while I think it's so wrong that this Wisconsin state representative is defending what his father said to him about rape, I also think it may be a lesson of what happens when we have "THE" conversation with our kids. 

If his father conveyed a different message to his son, perhaps the importance of respecting the woman he has sex with, how he has a responsibility to take precautions to avoid an unwanted pregnancy and how to take those precautions, a more valuable lesson would have been taught.  Instead, he portrayed women as dangerous villains who will quickly turn and lie to cover up a possible mistake.  And what's more unfortunate, even as an older, more experienced individual, he does not recognize the problem with that lesson and the need to point it out as a problem.

It made me realize just how important that uncomfortable "birds-and-the-bees" conversation with our children is.  That conversation goes beyond the technical and maybe should include topics such as rape for both sexes. 

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Thursday, Oct 11, 2012 09:31 AM EDT


Wisconsin GOPer: “Some girls rape easy”

A Republican state Rep. defends his father's warning that premarital sex "may be rape the next morning"

By Jillian Rayfield

Wisconsin state Rep. Roger Rivard is trying to defend himself for repeating his father’s advice to him when he was younger, that “some girls rape easy.”


Rivard, a Republican, had made the initial remarks in December to a local newspaper, when discussing a case where a 17-year old high school student was charged with sexual assault by an underage girl. He said that his father had warned him that even if you think the sex is consensual, ”Some girls rape easy.”


The remarks have resurfaced during Rivard’s reelection campaign, and so he explained himself to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel thusly:


“He told the Journal Sentinel that his father had advised him not to have premarital sex, and he took that seriously.


‘He also told me one thing, “If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,”‘ Rivard said. ‘Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she’s not going to say, “Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.” All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she’s underage. And he just said, “Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,” he said, “they rape so easy.”


‘What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, “If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.” So the way he said it was, “Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.”‘


‘So it’s been kind of taken out of context.’”


He later said in a statement: ”Sexual assault is a crime that unfortunately is misunderstood and my comments have the potential to be misunderstood as well. Rape is a horrible act of violence. Sexual assault unfortunately often goes unreported to police. I have four daughters and three granddaughters and I understand the importance of making sure that awareness of this crime is taken very seriously.”

Pakistan Erupts in Anger Over Taliban’s Shooting of Schoolgirl

By DECLAN WALSH
Published: October 10, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/world/asia/pakistan-erupts-in-anger-over-talibans-shooting-of-malala-yousafzai.html  

 

I was very sad to hear this terrible injustice in Pakistan.
 

The New York Times

A Taliban gunman singled out and shot the girl, Malala Yousafzai, on Tuesday, and a spokesman said it was in retaliation for her work in promoting girls’ education and children’s rights in the northwestern Swat Valley, near the Afghan border.

 

Ms. Yousafzai was removed from immediate danger after the operation in a military hospital in Peshawar early Wednesday, during which surgeons removed a bullet that had passed through her head and lodged in her shoulder, one hospital official said.

 

The government kept a Boeing jet from the national carrier, Pakistan International Airlines, on standby at the Peshawar airport to fly Ms. Yousafzai to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for emergency treatment if necessary, although senior officials said she was too weak to fly.

 

“She is improving. But she is still unconscious,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, whose only son was shot dead by the Taliban in 2010. He said Ms. Yousafzai remained on a ventilator.

 

Mr. Hussain announced a government reward of more than $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of her attackers. “Whoever has done it is not a human and does not have a human soul,” he said.

 

Across the rest of the country, Pakistanis reacted with outrage to the attack on the girl, whose eloquent and determined advocacy of girls’ education had made her powerful symbol of resistance to Taliban ideology.

 

“Malala is our pride. She became an icon for the country,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.

The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, visited the Peshawar hospital where Ms. Yousafzai was being treated; in a rare public statement he condemned the “twisted ideology” of the “cowards” who had attacked her. Her parents and another teacher from her school remained at her side in the hospital.

 

The cricket star turned opposition politician Imran Khan offered to pay for her treatment, while officials from his party parried accusations that they were soft on the Taliban.

 

Last weekend Mr. Khan led a motor cavalcade of supporters to the edge of the tribal belt as part of a demonstration against American drone strikes in the area — a theme that, until now at least, has frequently been a more concentrated focus of public anger than Taliban violence.

 

Even Jamaat ud Dawa, the charity wing of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which follows a different strain of Islam from the Taliban, condemned the attack. “Shameful, despicable, barbaric attempt,” read a message on the group’s official Twitter feed. “Curse b upon assassins and perpetrators.”

 

The anger was amplified by the Taliban’s brazen claims of responsibility for the shooting, and avowals that the group would attack Ms. Yousafzai again if it got a second chance. Reports circulated that the Taliban had also promised to target her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who privately appealed to neighbors from Swat not to visit the hospital in case of a second attack.

 

In the Swat Valley, private schools remained closed in protest over the attack.

 

Some commentators wondered whether the shooting would galvanize public opinion against the Taliban in the same way as a video that aired in 2009, showing a Taliban fighter flogging a teenage girl in Swat, had primed public opinion for a large military offensive against the militants that summer.

 

“The time to root out terrorism has come,” Bushra Gohar of the Awami National Party, which governs Swat and the surrounding Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, told Parliament.

 

But no military drive is in the offing in Swat for the moment, officials say — in fact, a large army contingent has occupied the picturesque mountain valley since 2009, which contributed to alarm by the prospect of a Taliban resurgence in the area.

 

Among some commentators, there was a sense that rage was redundant: that unless Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders drop all equivocation about Islamist extremism, the country is likely to suffer further such traumas.

 

“We are infected with the cancer of extremism, and unless it is cut out we will slide ever further into the bestiality that this latest atrocity exemplifies,” read an editorial in The News International, a major English-language daily.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.