Work your way through this plainly biased reporting. What’s striking is how the reporter tries to overwhelm you with bill numbers, quotes about different amended versions of bills, and obtuse analysis about what is or isn’t extreme, to obscure this basic fact: when faced with a law that gave legal rights to babies accidentally born alive, and that specifically said it had no other impact on abortion laws, Barack Obama used his power to kill the bill.
The thought of babies being exposed in America - not in a Communist dictatorship, but in America - should be absolutely revolting to any civilized person. Yet there was Obama, approaching this issue skeptically because he was afraid that it might impinge on abortion rights.
if that fetus, or child—however way you want to describe it—is now outside the mothers’ womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s non viable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, (the fetus is) not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.
So in Obama’s world view, the rights of newborns - and if it is “outside the mothers’ womb,” it is not a fetus - are so negligible that the possibility that the law might require a second opinion on whether some babies are in fact alive was too high a burden to place on a woman seeking an abortion.
…essentially adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physicians to induce labor and perform an abortions. Now if that’s the case… I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.
The bill was specifically about babies who came out alive. Obama couldn’t take his eyes off of his abortion dogma long enough to see that there were babies being exposed, left to die in closets. Faced with evidence that this monstrous practice was occurring in his state, Obama couldn’t bring himself to get worked up about it. Instead, he took the opportunity to rise in defense of abortion rights, and to criticize and kill the bill that tried to save the lives of living, breathing babies.
This sort of abortion uber alles philosophy is monstrous. We ought not expose babies. Those who see a bill written to ensure that living, breathing babies are not intentionally killed, and are primarily concerned with the burden on abortion rights of requiring a second opinion in a few marginal cases have priorities that leave me utterly aghast.
If scientists take this no further than helping the blind to see, I will be terribly disappointed. I want x-ray and infrared visions, and the ability to zoom. Perhaps also the ability to network my eyes with others. Science has already let me down by letting us get to 2008 without flying cars; I hope they don’t now further disappoint by restricting bionic eye research to letting the blind see the visible spectrum.
I’m going to avoid saying anything witty because these just aren’t funny.
From the NYT, via Megan McArdle, we learn that the number of parents — generally, well-educated yuppie types — are choosing to not vaccinate their kids:
SAN DIEGO — In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, The parents who objected to their children being inoculated are among a small but growing number of vaccine skeptics in California and other states who take advantage of exemptions to laws requiring vaccinations for school-age children.
The exemptions have been growing since the early 1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public health officials and physicians find disturbing.
Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots — the measles vaccine, for instance, is only 95 percent effective — and to those children too young to receive certain vaccines.
Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.
…
In 1991, less than 1 percent of children in the states with personal-belief exemptions went without vaccines based on the exemption; by 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, the percentage had increased to 2.54 percent, said Saad B. Omer, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
And from ABC, via PZ Myers, we can watch Creationists seriously mess with the mids of their kids:
Now consider the Finnish rock band called The Leningrad Cowboys. A little while ago, they held a concert in Russia, in which - to the screaming applause of Russkie teen-agers - they got the Red Army Choir to join them on stage for a performance of “Sweet Home Alabama.” In English.
As Jamie often notes, real-life technology is advancing faster than the creators of Star Trek imagined. On one front, however, Gene Roddenberry appears to have overshot the mark, though only a bit. Here’s a interesting snippet of debate about how genetic engineering is likely to intersect with reproductive freedom and abortion policy:
The author makes much of the arbitrary line in the sand she’s drawn wherein she places high value on individual liberty for women to control their own bodies and timing of reproduction yet she devalues the individual choice of embryonic trait selection which leads me to question whether she stands for principle or outcome. If the principle of individual liberty is paramount, as we see with free speech cases where disagreeble speech is frequently defended, then we should expect support for individual exercise of reproductive freedom even when one may personally disagree with the choice made. If the outcome is of the highest importance, then we should see the jettisoning of principle when it is no longer convenient. I believe the author is arguing the latter position and this may come to be exploited by those who oppose her viewpoints on abortion, for if one jettisons principle when it is inconvenient to one’s immediate concerns then it becomes harder to argue on the basis of principle when one’s position is threatened.
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!
Tom posted this at 2:28 PM EDT on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 as Brave New Worlds
