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filkertomFortunately, TBogg is at the ready. The link to the original NYT column is there, but it'll likely only make you angrier.
Ross Douthat is one of the newest attempts at a "new breed" of conservative commentator. In other words, he's a shithead. Younger than Broder, folksier than Will, and less of a fascist warmongering asshole than Kristol or Krauthammer. But still doling out (ironically, given how much they all hate government aid to people) the same old shit: "We know what's best for the little people, and it'll hurt, but, oh well."
Or maybe, "We've got ours, and now we're going to get yours."
That interp disturbs me profoundly, because of its utter greed and unfairness, and in this particular case because he seems to be literally saying, "We'll make you give birth no matter your circumstances, and then we'll take your unwanted babies off your hands."
One of the commenters on Douthat's column observes that:
Ross Douthat is one of the newest attempts at a "new breed" of conservative commentator. In other words, he's a shithead. Younger than Broder, folksier than Will, and less of a fascist warmongering asshole than Kristol or Krauthammer. But still doling out (ironically, given how much they all hate government aid to people) the same old shit: "We know what's best for the little people, and it'll hurt, but, oh well."
Or maybe, "We've got ours, and now we're going to get yours."
That interp disturbs me profoundly, because of its utter greed and unfairness, and in this particular case because he seems to be literally saying, "We'll make you give birth no matter your circumstances, and then we'll take your unwanted babies off your hands."
One of the commenters on Douthat's column observes that:
Every year, in the low income school I teach in, 10-15 girls get pregnant and keep the baby. Not a single one ever - ever! - gives the baby up for adoption. Why should they? Do celebrities give up their babies? Did Bristol Palin? Do the "reality' show teen moms? On the contrary, they display their ultrasounds proudly in the middle of English class. Very few return to school. Their plans are so short sighted that they don't go past giving birth if that; the school nurse often buys cribs and strollers at church yard sales and gives them to the girls because no one is even thinking about such things, including their parents (if they have any). She also directs them to medical centers that take most coverage. The father of the baby is often nonexistent, as though the girls somehow created a child by themselves; if they do play in the picture they disappear after a year or so. The girls have no expectations for him.And another notes:
The problem with the anti-choice position lies in the extreme narrowness of its skewed viewpoint: it eliminates all context. The anti-choice argument requires prior intellectual assent to the proposition that babies are somehow conceived in the ether and born to a vacuum. The only reality it permits is the fertilized egg's biological drive to completion. It refuses to acknowledge that the readiness, willingness, and permission of the host organism -- the woman, the mother -- is essential to a fully human outcome. Her assent is the sine qua non, the first base, on the road into this world, for human life.What is it about some people that they simply can't keep their hands off other peoples' private lives?
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 05:38 pm (UTC)Either you want the govt out of your life, or you don't. Trying to force YOUR way on everybody else while screaming about govt. interference is as hypocritical as it gets.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 08:12 pm (UTC)I'm an adoptee, and it's not as painless from this side as Douchehat might suspect, either.
___________
* As in, "Let them die of it; it is what they are made for."
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 08:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 09:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 04:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 05:27 am (UTC)I feel that when you live in a community, you do have to compromise a little for the sake of everyone getting along. The only way society functions is when everyone agrees to certain things. We agree that we drive on the right side of the road and pieces of paper enchanted by the Dept. of Treasury have value for example. We should also agree that reasonable steps should be taken to prevent the spread of disease.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 07:23 am (UTC)My younger daughter has complex genetic issues and idiosyncratic reactions to some benign substances, and injecting her with foreign proteins is more of a gamble than I want to take while she's small.
But at the heart of it, it pisses me off that the only way I can keep from "mandatory" vaccination of my daughters is to claim a religious exemption. Their doctors do not agree with me that the medical issues are strong enough to justify not vaccinating, but you know what? Their doctors aren't the ones who have to live with the consequences. Ultimately it SHOULD be my decision as their parent. My oldest is nearly 18, and I've let her make decisions about her health for a while now, and if she decides the risk is worth it, that's up to her. She did, in fact, decide to get a tetanus shot not too long ago, and I supported that decision.
The other issue is that when vaccination is mandatory, and the testing of vaccines is limited, the potential for problems is huge. Now even the people who developed the HPV vaccine say that it is of limited efficacy and will probably kill more girls than it saves. It is "recommended" for girls as young as 9, despite not being tested in a controlled way in anyone younger than 15. The amount of time between a vaccine being developed and being released to the mass market (and maybe made mandatory) is often so short that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to do long-term studies of efficacy and side effects.
I'm not saying vaccines are bad, I'm saying that parents can have valid reasons for not wanting them, and I believe that if we have a right to not continue a pregnancy, if we have a right to decide when and how to treat illnesses, then there should not be punishments for choosing NOT to vaccinate children. Sure, encourage people to do it. I don't doubt that most vaccines work, and with few enough side effects on a large scale to make them worth doing, on a large scale, but some of us have VERY good reasons for not wanting that for our particular children with specific medical issues, and I shouldn't have to say I have a religious problem with it when my real reason is medical concerns that the doctors don't necessarily agree with.
In my younger daughter's case, her medical condition is SO rare that there is exactly one doctor in the world who really has a grasp of most of the research about it, and his understanding is specific to genetics, and NOT to vaccine issues. There ARE no doctors in the US who have an in-depth enough understanding of her issues to make more than an educated guess about whether she would likely tolerate vaccines, and so it comes down to me. The doctors who DON'T understand her condition make blanket statements about "oh, it's probably just fine", but when I have to spend an entire visit explaining the molecular genetics underlying her "issues"... it leaves me with less than full confidence in their ability to make a more informed decision than I can.
So yeah, it makes me stabby when people say, "People who want to restrict a woman's right to choose are bad, but by the way, you can't send your kid to school unless you vaccinate them."
It also upsets me when so-called liberals act like women who make an informed decision to birth outside a hospital are somehow being irresponsible. Worse, in the case of moms who've had cesareans in the past, some move to get court orders to order them to have another cesarean on the grounds of the baby's health.
People get up in arms about women having a right to an abortion but they don't get upset when they hear about women who are given cesareans they do not consent to, or induced without their permission (and it happens) because "what matters is a healthy baby".
For me it is all part and parcel of the question, "Do we have choice over what happens to our bodies or not? Do we trust people to make choices, or not?" And there is no political side of the fence where there is much consistency, IMO.
On the vaccination issue
Date: 2011-01-05 10:05 am (UTC)I have no answer to your other points other than a question whether it's really the same issue. Vaccination affects the whole world. Childbirth choices affect you and the baby for which you are the only possible caregiver until after the birth.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-06 07:46 pm (UTC)"Now even the people who developed the HPV vaccine say that it is of limited efficacy and will probably kill more girls than it saves."
Cite, please? And are you talking about Garadasil or Ceravix?
RE:
"Sure, encourage people to do it. I don't doubt that most vaccines work, and with few enough side effects on a large scale to make them worth doing, on a large scale, but some of us have VERY good reasons for not wanting that for our particular children with specific medical issues"
"Encouraging" does VERY little, and most people have such a poor understanding of the medical issues involved that they might THINK there's a good reason when there truly isn't. What'd happen, and the reason for making it mandatory (and why they should do away with the ignorant "religious exemption" is what we're seeing now, enough people would, generally out of ignorance, opt out to eliminate herd immunity.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-06 08:58 pm (UTC)And honestly, I'm okay with people having the choice and herd immunity not being sufficient. I'm not convinced that "the public good" is sufficient to require parents to inject their children with substances, however beneficial those substances probably are, because there is too much potential for mistakes on the part of those deciding which things are "mandatory". If more research was done on vaccines for safety and efficacy prior to their addition to the usual lineup, I might, maybe, feel differently, but I'm really not willing to force people to make their children part of the grand experiment if they feel their children may not be healthy enough to safely take part.
If our family didn't have such a history of auto immune problems and vaccine reactions, I'd be more willing to take part. Hell, I was very pro-vaccine when my oldest was born. It was just watching how sick the shots made her that changed my mind. As a parent there is nothing as demoralizing as taking a perfectly healthy child in for a well-baby visit and coming out with a screaming child who falls into a lethargic stupor and won't eat for hours and hours, and knowing that I held her while they pushed the poison in. And for her, it was poison.
K was nearly crawling (getting up on her hands and knees, rocking back and forth) at her 6 month visit, when she had that bout of shots. She didn't even try to crawl after them (stopped getting up on her hands and knees) until she was 10 months old. The farther we got from her shots, the faster she developed and caught up, to the point that at 23 months she was potty trained, running, hopping, singing the alphabet, counting to ten and talking in complete sentences. Well ahead of the curve, when she'd fallen to the lowest end of normal within 24 hours of her third bout of shots. Before that bout, she'd been well up the charts.
If the religious exemption did not exist, I would have been forced to continue, because her doctors shrugged the reactions off. We got through the whooping cough. It wasn't fun, but we got through it. I don't know how she would have done with another set of baby shots, but given how progressively bad the reactions were... I didn't want to find out.
I got all the shots available when I was young, every one of the standards, many of them duplicated when my records got lost. And now I have a host of autoimmune problems, and spent most of my childhood getting sick every 3 weeks. My mom had me at more specialists, and no one could tell her what was wrong, except that I was picking up whatever was going around, all the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 05:52 pm (UTC)I'm not saying this is the case now, but this is one thing I would rather not see our country repeat.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 07:06 pm (UTC)I don't know what time frame the book you mention covers, but I think what they did to her was horrible. And she wasn't a teenager.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 07:14 pm (UTC)The one story that was the most haunting was the woman whose mother-in-law (who felt she was scum and would leave with the kid after it was born) arranged the adoption behind her back. When she went to find her child, she threatened legal action to have documents expunged from the file because they were falsified.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 11:53 pm (UTC)I hope the pronouns weren't too confusing.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 07:40 pm (UTC)I have also been told that all women who have abortions must be single and childless, because once a woman becomes a mother, she realizes that what's in her is a real baby. And no mother would ever kill another baby. Yet, oddly enough, every woman I have know personally who had an abortion already had children. They all considered they were putting the needs of the existing children a potential, future child that they couldn't support or care for properly. Also, all of the women I have know personally who have surrendered a child for adoption have said that in the same situation again, they would terminate with great relief.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 08:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 10:34 pm (UTC)She was a rape survivor, and wanted no part of the rapist touching her ever again.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 10:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 11:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 03:51 am (UTC)I really wish that fable would go away.
Oh wow. I didn't realize I still had this icon. Cool. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 04:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 04:37 am (UTC)There aren't easy choices. Then again, my grandfather nearly disowned me for NOT getting an abortion when I was 21.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 07:26 am (UTC)Well...
Date: 2011-01-04 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 10:54 pm (UTC)(Unless you know something about the Jesuits that I don't.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 06:46 pm (UTC)http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/scalia-no-protection-women-constitution/
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 06:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 09:53 pm (UTC)Far too many people are for rights... as long as *others* using their rights don't inconvenience them.
Ignoring the right of the mother to make the decision to keep the kid or not.
Treating the birth mother so badly.
Heck, the way "kids rights" is almost an oxymoron.
In all these cases and others, recognizing these rights, giving more than the minimal lip service would be *so* "inconvenient" for various people.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 10:59 pm (UTC)but until scientists figure out how to allow men to carry a child to term themselves, all XY just need to STFU. they do NOT understand the "joy" of motherhood, they do not suffer from the "fun" of labor, they just do not get it.
and until they can, they need to stay out of it!!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-04 11:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 12:30 am (UTC)Can we please get Alan Grayson a column with as much exposure as his?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 12:42 am (UTC)After all, he did kind of look like a potato. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 02:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 12:56 am (UTC)I shudder to think of returning to those days. The Tea Partiers terrify me!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 07:28 am (UTC)People were shocked that I didn't have an abortion. I was just glad the option was there, so my kid would never have to wonder.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 03:11 am (UTC)I don't see where he's saying anything of the kind.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 05:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 07:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 02:55 pm (UTC)Douthat does not say it specifically. However, his way of guiding the reader to an inference reminds me of Daffy Duck in "Rabbit Seasoning."
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-05 03:22 pm (UTC)If this is a lame question, please accept my apology in advance. It seems to me that your youngest would qualify for a medical exemption to vaccination. In the state of Michigan where I live, medical, religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions are permitted.
Again--my girl is special needs also, and I get my share of eejit question fatigue, so please know I did not mean to add to your annoyance quotient today.