Children Are Killing the Planet

The latest in environmentalism– don’t have kids.

It’s a “logical” jump. If humanity is destroying the planet, then it’s only reasonable to end humanity, and that means stop having kids.

Get your tubes tied. Get your vasectomy. Remove your testicles. Remove your ovaries. That prevents you from having an abortion, too! Solve that ethical problem. Now you can have as much sex as you want while trying to get everyone else to stop consuming to save the world from catastrophic warming.

China’s already suggested their abortion policies are helping to curb global warming. Too bad all those new coal-burning power plants aren’t helping. I guess if you abort 10 babies, it offsets the carbon released by one plant for one year!

Of course, this is the extreme extreme of the pro-abortion movement (note this has nothing to do with choice– if we don’t start killing the children, we’re all going to die!).

What’s next? Soylent green? Start putting caps on the maximum age of people? (Because those old fogies don’t contribute to society, so it’s best to just kill them at age 70.)

But, in all, I don’t care if the environmentalists want to sterilize themselves for a better tomorrow. Go ahead. But we know where this kind of thinking goes. How long before Dennis Kucinich recommends the government control just how many kids a family can have and to have a “maximum age” for non-contributing members of society? All to save the planet, of course.

High Court Chickens Out

I’m not sure why the Supreme Court is avoiding a state/religion battle, especially one with such staggering implications.

I’m talking about the decision of the NY Supreme Court to force religious institutions to buy health care for their employees that covers birth control, even though the religious entities may disagree with such a practice. Here’s what the defendants in the lawsuit had to say in the brief to the USSC to try and get heard:

“If the state can compel church entities to subsidize contraceptives in violation of their religious beliefs, it can compel them to subsidize abortions as well,” the groups said in urging the court to take their case. “And if it can compel church entities to subsidize abortions, it can require hospitals owned by churches to provide them.”

They’re right. This legislation is a back-door to force religious institutions to conform to practices that the religions disagree with. Already in Connecticut, the state is forcing Catholic Hospitals to provide Plan B emergency contraception to rape victims, something that made the Catholic Bishops come out with an edict that says Plan B for rape victims is OK. The big problem here is how Plan B works.

Plan B is a larger dose of Levonorgestrel, a common birth control agent. When taken, it can prevent ovulation, prevent fertilization, or prevent implantation. The biggest objection, from a Catholic standpoint, would be the last measure, which is effectively abortion.

But it’s nice to see that THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE is alive and well, especially when it’s preventing religious organizations from practicing their beliefs.

It’s Not a Person. It Has No Personality or ‘Being’!

Something about the summer makes hardcore abortion supporters want to come out and rail against the pro-life movement. First, there’s Anna Quindlen’s magnificent piece here. Let me give you the highlights– a group of anti-abortion protesters were confronted by an amateur video-maker with the question, “How much time should a woman who gets an abortion do?” The protesters were caught off-guard, to which Quindlen says:

Those ancient notions undergird the refusal to confront the logical endpoint of criminalization. Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions?

The key to her article is that there is no clearly defined penalty for abortion. My response is– why should there be? Abortion falls under the statutes of murder– someone intentionally ends the life of someone else.

She ends with this garbage:

“I haven’t sorted out the penalties,” he said lamely. Neither, it turns out, has anyone else. But there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.

She’s trying to disconnect abortion & murder. If we do establish a separate penalty for abortion, then it’s saying the fetus is somehow different than an infant, child, or adult, as the penalties would be very different.

Jill Filipovic jumps on the bandwagon over at the PuffingTonsHost. She actually gets the idea, but then spins off into an emotionally-charged rant. Here’s where she gets it:

The definition of murder is “killing a person with malice aforethought.” If personhood is established at the moment of fertilization, and all people are invested with equal rights under the law, then there is no getting around the fact that under anti-choice legislation, women who terminate pregnancies are committing murder — or at the very least, paying someone else to do it.

She answers her own question. But, as usual, spins into the world of hypothetical “What-if” statements, which are complete waste of time as it’s an idealized question set to sabotage someone’s position. Let’s take her “unanswerable hypothetical” here:

There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box, none of which you have any connection to. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?

1) A “box of embryos” would have to be kept at specific temperatures inside the clinic, so they’d be in a structure that could resist the fire. They have no need for airborne oxygen at the moment, so smoke-inhalation is not a risk as it is to the 3-year old. The person in the most danger, therefore, is the 3-year old, and should be removed.

2) Fertility clinics are typically on the opposite end of the pro-life scale as they operate by a shotgun approach. Fertilize a bunch of embryos, take those with the best chance of implanting (usually 7 or and then inject them and see which implant and which don’t. They should be fertilizing one and implanting it directly on the uterine wall.

To which I pose another hypothetical to Jill. You meet your friend who is 5 months pregnant and she talks about how wonderful her life will be with the new baby. She knows it’s a girl and has named her Haley already. Well, at 6 months, she comes over to your house in tears. She’s found out her husband has been cheating on her and she doesn’t want the baby any more. She pulls out a coat-hanger and starts to self-abort. Do you stop her?

If you stop her, why? If you don’t, why didn’t you?

The comments on this post are also priceless. The ever-present ClevelandChick posts the following:

I’m saying potential life as in the fetus cannot survive on it’s own outside of the womb. It’s survival depends on the health of the woman carrying it who is in fact alive.

The fetus is inanimate before it pops out of the womb. It has no life, so it must just be a non-nucleic tumor, one which has lost its nuclei, like dead skin-cells.

Such denial of science is cult-like in its denial. I can see why the buy the global warming trash spewed by AlGore so easily.

You can find my entire list of responses over here at the PuffingtonsHost on page 2. Do a search for Nethicus1. And while you’re there, become a fan of me and favorite all of my posts. That way I can become a blogger for Arianna for free! Hurrah!

And our last post comes from DailyKos and the poster Devilstower:

I do not believe, do not see any reason to believe, that a small cluster of cells — cells that have no nerves, no muscles, no organs — deserves the same rights as a human being. The argument that these cells have the genetic signature of humanity is meaningless, since this is a trait shared by every cell in my thumb. Neither do I see any compelling reason to view these cells as imbued with a soul.

Obviously Devilstower doesn’t want to apply all of the knowledge he learned about biology, just some of it. Much like the eugenicists did.

The embryo in any stage is a totality of being. The difference between DT’s thumb and an embryo is that if I remove his thumb, most of his body is still there– the totality of his being has been disrupted in a minor way. However, removal of the entire embryo, or the destruction of the embryo to make stem cells, results in the destruction of the individual in its totality.

He’s also mistaken here:

Only there’s a problem. The Bush administration has supported the development of these new techniques, but they’ve not updated the regulation over using the cells.

The 2001 policy says that federal funds may not be used to study embryonic stem cells created after Aug. 9 of that year. It is based on the assumption that the only way to make the cells is by destroying human embryos — a truism in 2001 but not any longer.

The error is that the non-destructive manner in making “embryonic” stem-cells, the methods using a retro-virus to create “pluripotent” stem cells or harvesting stem-cells without harming the embryo, produce stem-cell lines that are “pluripotent” and no-longer embryonic.

It’s legal semantics that would be easily dismantled with a minor court case. In fact, I’m reasonably sure the US Attorney’s office wouldn’t oppose such a lawsuit.

So there you have it. Absurdly long post for a Thursday. Enjoy!

Socialized Medicine Recommended Abortion

But instead of an abortion, they had a perfect little baby boy. Nice to see they did get a second opinion.

If anyone tells you that abortion will be the “more humane” choice for your child, get a second opinion. They may be wrong.

But hey, it was a simple mistake. Who could have thought that with Michael Moore railing against the American insurance system? Obviously government is a much better caretaker.

Abortion, Statistics, and The New York Times

It’s been no secret that Hollywood shies away from abortion when it’s in a mainstream venue. There are some reasons for this: the possible backlash from conservative groups, the fact the subject matter may drive viewers away, or that it won’t be as distributable a film because of a controversial bit of subject matter.

But what’s the reality of it? You can’t write in abortion into “romantic comedy”. You can’t even really put it into “Action”, or to a lesser degree, “Sci-fi”. And obviously we don’t want to hear “Shrek” talking about abortion. The truth of the matter is you can’t write abortion into a mainstream movie because nobody wants to see it. It’s like making a romantic comedy about somebody who goes through diabetes then halfway through the film has to have their legs amputated. Nothing says romance like amputation!

So to have the NYT waste print on an article bemoaning the undercoverage of abortion in movies is thick. Mireya Navarro also rages against the movie “Knocked Up”, which is odd because the whole premise is that the pregnancy brings two people together. Maybe she’d be happier if she had an abortion, then moved to New York, married the intellectual effete, and then discovered she was pregnant again with triplets. Then she “reduced” the twins in her belly and just had one kid and was happy ever after.

What truly bothers me is not the “wishful thinking” of the article, but the following statement:

But in another way, both movies go out of their way to sidestep real life. Nearly two-thirds of unwanted pregnancies end in abortion, data from federal surveys shows.

Isn’t that odd? People who don’t want their pregnancies end up aborting them! Did you know that most people who want their pregnancies end up having babies? I know, it’s a shocker!

It’s like there are no editors at the NYT any more. They’re all too busy trying to save their circulation that read the work of their reporters.

Maybe we can have Mireya write an article about how lack of oxygen kills emphysema patients.

How is Partial Birth Abortion like killing thousands of Iraqis?

I have no idea. But that didn’t stop Hannah Hayes from making the connection. Bottom line: we should let women have abortions so long as the Religious Right condones military action around the globe.

*staggered look of total disbelief*

If feminists are so smart, why are they so dumb?

I was reading some recent stuff on abortion and I ran across this post over at Feministing. I think it highlights the major problem I have with feminism and liberals in general — they completely fail to take into account the “big picture” and instead fall into tired rhetoric that has been incomplete for decades.

Jen says:

Every story is always the same. That there are two opposite sides in the “abortion debate.” (Damn, do I hate that term.) Here’s the reality, folks. If you want less abortions you have to give women the tools to avoid getting pregnant when they don’t want to be. See? Not complicated. I really wish people would stop pretending that the two sides of this are no abortions ever and all abortions always.

Jen, you’ve always had the best tool to avoid getting pregnant. Your brain. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex. Don’t pretend women don’t have the power in the bedroom. The vast majority of women have sex on their terms.

You want to have sex? Great. Just beware the consequences. It’s like me hitting myself in the head with a hammer. I may like the subsequent endorphin release, but I have to take into account that at some point I may give myself a concussion, or fracture my skull. It’s a consequence of my actions. If I decided to stop hitting myself in the head, I know I wouldn’t suffer those consequences. Sex is the same way. If you have sex, the natural consequence is pregnancy.

We have tools that help avoid pregnancy, but they’re not foolproof. And when they fail, the natural consequence may be the result. Your brain should understand this.

I don’t care what you do with your body, Jen, and how you live your life. But once another person is involved and you start making life-or-death decisions for them, that’s when I have a problem.

Use your brain. It’s a tool the Pro-Life movement will never take from you.

Eat the Rice!

Seems that a staple in the diet of most of the world is causing global warming.

But the good news? Methane emissions are steadying, but are projected to increase again. But don’t worry. The big gun, CO2, is still out there, destroying the planet and approaching dangerous levels of 400 ppm (0.04%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

So the goal is to get nearly 1/3 of the world’s population (India and China) to not eat rice, and instead switch to something else. But what?

All plants decay and release CO2. Animals exhale CO2. So anything we feed people will eventually become CO2 and methane. Quite a conundrum, right?

Well, China’s got the answer: abortion!

“China is already doing a lot,” said Hu Tao, of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration.

He said China’s one-child per couple policy introduced in the early 1980s, for instance, had a side-effect of braking global warming by limiting the population to 1.3 billion against a projected 1.6 billion without the policy.

“This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” he told a conference in Oslo last month. China is the number two emitter of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, behind the United States and ahead of Russia.

I really wish I was making this up. China’s solution to global warming? Rigid population control and abortion of excess children.

I think in the next 5 years they’ll suggest that nuclear war will put so much debris into the atmosphere it’ll help counteract global warming, too. See, a positive side to everything monstrous!

Pro-Choicers Deny Pharmacists Choice

The Washington State Pharmacy Board has ruled that pharmacists have to fill the Plan B prescription regardless of any moral objections to doing so.

Women’s rights advocates celebrated with hugs and congratulations after the board made its decision at the state health building in Tumwater.

An exultant Nancy Sapiro, a lawyer for the Northwest Women’s Law Center, said the board did the right thing and followed its mission – “which is to protect patient safety and minimize barriers to health care access,” she said.

[...]Under the rules adopted Thursday, an individual pharmacist could decline to fill a prescription on moral grounds, but only if another druggist in the same shop could provide it without a hassle to the customer.

[...]Sister Sharon Park, executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference, said a pharmacist who objects to a prescription might be the only one in the shop. Not filling the prescription would put the pharmacy at risk of penalties that could include a fine or even loss of a license.

“I think it is a tragedy that we potentially put pharmacists in an untenable position,” she said. “A pharmacist may have to make a decision that violates their conscience.”

And the pro-choice steamroller moves on. I find it interesting that the movement of “Pro-Choice” has now denied pharmacists from making a choice in the matter of dispensing drugs that violate their morals.

We’d all object if a law was passed that forced Jewish eateries from serving non-Kosher food to accommodate a few customers, right? But nobody’s objecting to a few demanding that pharmacists provide abortion pills.

They don’t call them abortion pills, naturally, because that would be abomination. But “emergency contraception” works, right? Truth is, there’s nothing that’s “contraceptive” about it. Egg & sperm meet & fertilize (conception) but the overload of drugs & hormones in the “emergency contraceptive) prevent implantation, aborting the pregnancy.

So if you’re a pharmacist and you object to abortion, it doesn’t matter. If you’re the only one available to fill a prescription, then you must assist in committing murder, by your own perception.

So, the Pro Choice movement has removed the “right to choose” from pharmacists. They’ve already managed to get the “right to choose” to supersede the right to life. And they’ve been battling to squash the right of assembly and free speech of people who protest at abortion clinics. I wonder what the next right they’ve got in their cross-hairs will be?

The Progressive ‘Me’ Mentality

It’s hard not to see narcissism from the Left. We all love praise and attention, but it’s more of a mental condition of liberals/progressives. We see it with the 300 awards shows we’re forced to watch. We see it with Al Gore and Laurie David and their global warming crusade (if it really wasn’t about them, they’d telecommute their lectures or hire local talent to present it rather than burning all that carbon flying everywhere to tell people to stop burning carbon). But the biggest illustration of the “Me” syndrome is in the abortion debate.

The classic example of this is the Amy Richards ‘big jar of mayonnaise‘ editorial. Here’s a reminder:

I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ”Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?” The obstetrician wasn’t an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more.

Having felt physically fine up to this point, I got on the subway afterward, and all of a sudden, I felt ill. I didn’t want to eat anything. What I was going through seemed like a very unnatural experience. On the subway, Peter asked, ”Shouldn’t we consider having triplets?” And I had this adverse reaction: ”This is why they say it’s the woman’s choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That’s easy for you to say, but I’d have to give up my life.” Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn’t be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It’s not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don’t think that deep down I was ever considering it.

The specialist called me back at 10 p.m. I had just finished watching a Boston Pops concert at Symphony Hall. As everybody burst into applause, I watched my cellphone vibrating, grabbed it and ran into the lobby. He told me that he does a detailed sonogram before doing a selective reduction to see if one fetus appears to be struggling. The procedure involves a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus. There are a lot more complications when a woman carries multiples. And so, from the doctor’s perspective, it’s a matter of trying to save the woman this trauma. After I talked to the specialist, I told Peter, ”That’s what I’m going to do.”

I added the link in Amy’s piece because I wanted to illustrate the absurdity that choosing a “selective reduction” with potassium chloride wasn’t killing someone.

Now she’s joined by Caitlin Moran in the Times from London, responding to a pro-life documentary:

I have problems with that assumption. For one thing, I believe something very elemental and, in the most academic sense, nonChristian. One of Sawyer’s biggest postmotherhood dilemmas over abortion was trying to work out where “life” begins with a foetus, and concluding that if abortion could occur before “life” begins, that would be a “right” kind of abortion. But given that both science and philosophy continue to struggle to define what the beginning of “life” is, wouldn’t it be better to come at the debate from a different angle entirely? For if a pregnant woman has dominion over life, why should she not also have dominion over not-life? This is a concept understood by many other cultures. The Hindu goddess Kali is both Mother of the Whole Universe, and Devourer of All Things. She is life and death. If women are, by biology, commanded to host, shelter, nurture and protect life, why should they not be empowered to end life, too? I’m not advocating stoving in the heads of children, or encouraging late abortions — but then, no one is. What I am vexed with is the idea that, by having an early abortion, a woman is somehow being unfemale and, indeed, unmotherly. That the absolute essence of womanhood and maternity is to sustain life, at all costs, whatever the situation.

My belief in the ultimate sociological, emotional and practical necessity for abortion did, as I have mentioned before, become even stronger after I had my two children. It is only after you have had a nine-month pregnancy, laboured to get the child out, fed it, cared for it, sat with it until 3am, risen with it at 6am, swooned with love for it and been reduced to furious tears by it that you really understand just how important it is for a child to be wanted. And, possibly even more importantly, to be wanted by a reasonably sane, stable mother. Last year I had an abortion, and I can honestly say it was one of the least difficult decisions of my life. I’m not being flippant when I say it took me longer to decide what work-tops to have in the kitchen than whether I was prepared to spend the rest of my life being responsible for a further human being. I knew I would see my existing two daughters less, my husband less, my career would be hamstrung and, most importantly of all, I was just too tired to do it all again. I didn’t want another child, in the same way that I don’t suddenly want to move to Canada or buy a horse. While there was, of course, every chance that I might eventually be thankful for the arrival of a third child, I am, personally, not a gambler. I won’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high.

I’m too tired– you have to die. I’d love to see her to-do list. “Get new countertops, get manicure, go have a champagne brunch with friends, get abortion, meet hubby for a night at the opera.”

I am almost shocked into submission by the assertion that women should have power over death, especially the death of her own children. If she really believed it she wouldn’t have had to justify it by saying “I’m not advocating stoving in the heads of children, or encouraging late abortions — but then, no one is.”

The entire problem with Amy and Caitlin is their need to rationalize their irrational decision. For both of them their contentment with the current lifestyle is the deciding factor. Essentially, maintaining their high-profile liberal lifestyle is more important than human life.

In other words, it’s more important to be a progressive than it is to be a mother.

Child-raising is exhausting. I haven’t seen a movie in the theaters for ages, I don’t go out dancing. I haven’t touched my turntables in over 4 years. I don’t get to go to many cocktail parties.

But if I put that kind of lifestyle over the life of a child or even another human being, I would be a callous, cruel person. No amount of rationalization would change that.