abortion
denialism | February 27, 2012There is a joke expression about surgeons, "sometimes wrong, never in doubt." Depending on how you feel about surgeons I've heard it begin "sometimes right" and "even when wrong." Applied to Rick Santorum, I think it has to be "usually wrong" if not "always wrong" given the serious of ridiculous distortions, lies, and made up statistics in the last week.
Starting with his claim that 62% of people that go to college religious graduate without their faith. It seems plausible. College expands peoples experiences and exposes them to new ideas, and such experiences are not going to always mesh…
milhayser | February 27, 2012
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk writes "counter-intuitively, demographers generally find that the conditions necessary for people to choose fewer children include radically lower child, infant and maternal mortality. [...] The less certain you are your children will live to adulthood, the more likely you are to have more of them." This makes reassuring health care vital to a world that already has seven billion human mouths to feed. But should high technology be the automatic standard? Compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has a higher rate of death in childbirth—a rate that…
denialism | February 19, 2012Many bloggers and commentators have expressed outrage over the decision by Virginia to require ultrasound examination, possibly transvaginal ultrasound, prior to women obtaining an abortion. From Bill Maher to Dahlia Lithwick people are outraged and have even suggested that it should be considered rape to force women to undergo vaginal examination by ultrasound prior to receiving abortion. Worse, it's clear from statements like this one by delegate Todd Gilbert, that there isn't a medical concern related to this intervention. It's simply designed to humiliate women and interfere with the…
denialism | February 12, 2012Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine thought fast and saved a life. My mother once worked in a labor and delivery ward to put herself through medschool in the days before Roe v Wade and this type of situation was common.
This is a great story because it illustrates two points. One, the war on abortion by the right wing is…
denialism | February 9, 2012 The states in Green have gone for Rick Santorum, who besides having a a Google problem also believes in one of the wackiest conspiracy theories there is - the climate change hoax. That is, the belief that there is a shady group of Illuminati that have power over thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, and in their greed for sweet sweet grant money scientists uniformly falsify all their data to serve this power-hungry cabal. Is that an exaggeration? Nope, that's what people who believe in the "hoax" ascribe to (see skeptical science's thorough debunking of Evans here).…
gregladen | November 25, 2010Tom Hackbarth is from Cedar, Minnesota and is a veteran member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. The district he represents is just north of where I live (I'm near 113th and the southern border of Hackbarth's district is 181st) and overlaps with Michele Bachmann's congressional district. Hackbarth is a Republican and has been re-elected to represent this district a number of times. With the Republicans taking over the Minnesota house this year, he is the new chair of the Environment and Natural resources Committee. And, when asked by reporters from our local TV station what he was…
sastyk | June 3, 2010 I was struck today by the news that the Italian region of Lombardy is going to start paying women not to have abortions. As a demographic move, it is a comparatively small and insignificant one, in a nation already well below replacement rate. If this resulted in the cancellation of every abortion in the region, it wouldn't matter very much in the great human scheme of things. What matters is whether this has effects on other nation's policies - and of course, that reproductive policies never take place fully in the great human scheme of things.
Generally speaking, I'm strongly in favor…
oracknows | April 23, 2010If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…
jstemwedel | April 15, 2010Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can't help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical…
edyong | March 17, 2010For most men, the thought of taking on the burden of pregnancy from their partners would seem like a nightmare, but it's all part and parcel of seahorse life. After mating, female seahorses and pipefish lay their eggs into a special pouch in the male's belly and he carries the developing babies to term. They may seem like a shoe-in for a Dad-of-the-year award but this apparent display of paternal perfection has several macabre twists.
A recent study showed that pregnant pipefishes can also become vampiric cannibals, absorbing some of their brood for nutrition if their own food supplies are…
razib | February 26, 2010For a hot-button issue which is arguably the social lodestar for American culture-wars people make a lot of unfounded assertions and assumptions about abortion. For example, poking around the GSS data set it's pretty evident that there isn't a sex difference in regards to the legal status of abortion. What I have found is that there may be an intensity difference between men an women among the educated pro-choice segment of the population, which might give pro-choice women the impression that there is a general difference (as people tend to extrapolate inordinately from their social milieu).…
grrlscientist | September 15, 2009This is DJ Michelangelo Signorile's interview with Pastor Steven L. Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Temple, AZ. In this interview, the pastor proclaims that he prays for President Obama to die, calls for the execution of gays and says it is not be murder if a group of gays and lesbians were gunned down with a machine gun, or if the president were assassinated. Further, this man of god does not believe the murder of Dr. George Tiller was murder. Not only that, but this man then went on to attack his (gay) interviewer insisting he must be "molesting children" and saying that he…
emjohnson | July 8, 2009Offspring Abandonment in the Ancient and Natural World
In the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex the great kingdom of Thebes is condemned following a case of mistaken identity (and a little patricide). The sordid tale begins when the infant prince is abandoned by his parents (see right) after learning of a prophecy that his son will one day murder his father, marry his mother and assume the throne. His ankles pierced with a spike, young Oedipus is sent to be abandoned atop mount Cithaeron. While this tale sets up a beautiful tragedy it also hints at a common reality in both the ancient and natural…
razib | June 6, 2009There are particular correlations about attitudes toward abortion rights within nations. For example, in the United States thereis no sex difference but more educated people tend to be pro-choice. But what are the international trends? In this post I look at attitudes toward abortion by Catholics and non-Catholics within various nations. Though Catholics tend to be slightly more pro-life, it turns out that the vast majority of the variance is between nations, not between religions. In other words, a Catholic in Germany tends to have the same attitudes as a Protestant in Germany, while a…
tqa | June 3, 2009
James Kirchick has an op-ed up in today's Wall Street Journal that addresses the reaction to the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Or so he might want to believe. In actuality, Kirchick is responding to the portion of the reaction that he wants to see, and not to the range of opinion that is out there.
There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.
Not only has Kirchick clearly missed the moral munchkins…
razib | April 26, 2009One of the arguments of some younger social conservatives (e.g., Ross Douthat) is that while the abortion wars are in stasis, the Right is losing ground when it comes to opposition to gay marriage. Is this true? Below are charts from the GSS with each column representing a year, from the mid-1970s to the 2000s (not necessarily every year, but every few years).
Looks like Ross is right.
razib | February 24, 2009New Safety, New Concerns In Tests for Down Syndrome:
The new tests take advantage of techniques that can isolate and analyze tiny bits of genetic information from the fetus that circulate in a woman's bloodstream, in this case from cells or free-floating snippets of DNA or the related molecule RNA.
At least four companies are developing such tests, including Sequenom of San Diego, which plans to be the first on the market in June. The other companies hope to have their versions on the market within a year.
"For 50 years, folks have been working to develop a noninvasive genetic test for Down…
palmd | January 21, 2009I'm one of those wacky idealists for whom January 20th was a great day. But with those high hopes, I have some fairly high expectations of our new president, one of the first of which is to repeal the Church Amendment, an HHS directive allowing health care providers to abandon proper ethics without consequence.
I've done quite a bit of blogviating about so-called conscience clauses, the rules that would allow health care providers to deny patients care not because it is outside the standard of care but because it bothers the personal beliefs of the provider. In case my previous writings…
grrlscientist | August 1, 2008tags: sex, abortion, feminism, family planning, medicaid, Department of Human and Health Services, contraceptives, birth control pills
This morning, I heard an astonishing interview on WNYC that discussed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft document that was just leaked. This document proposes to redefine nearly all forms of birth control, especially birth control pills, as a form of abortion and allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception [PDF]. Considering that roughly half of all American women use birth control pills, I think this…
grrlscientist | October 22, 2007tags: humor, cartoon, abortion, anti-choice, women, religion, blogging
Image: Jesus and Mo.