Sign of the Times of the Day: A state-funded sex education website in Massachusetts tells teens an abortion is “much easier than it sounds,” “more common than you might think,” and “safe and effective, though some people may experience temporary discomfort.”
(Via: Weasel Zippers and Creative Minority Report)
April 25th, 2011 | 10:02 am
If young women indeed “do it all the time” in Massachusetts, soon there won’t be many people left in Massachusetts to “do it”. In the long term, this problem is self-correcting. Surprising, though, that the abortion community does not see in its own success the seeds of its own demise.
Or perhaps it does?
April 25th, 2011 | 10:09 am
The group responsible for the website compares unintended pregnancy to “HIV and other sexually transmitted infections,” as if pregnancy were a disease.
April 25th, 2011 | 10:35 am
In the long term, this problem is self-correcting. Surprising, though, that the abortion community does not see in its own success the seeds of its own demise.
Stuart,
This is novel take on the problem of abortion. It is self-correcting, because if all pregnancies are aborted, there will be no women in the future to have abortions. Perhaps those opposed to abortion should promote it temporarily in order to get rid of it in the long run.
Of course, in reality, the groups with the highest abortion rates (blacks and Hispanics) are actually increasing in the population. Their high abortion rate is due not to their desire to eliminate themselves from the population, but due to their high rate of unintended pregnancies. Their pregnancy rate is so much higher than would be necessary to increase their numbers in the population that even with their high abortion rate, their numbers are still increasing.
April 25th, 2011 | 10:54 am
. . . as if pregnancy were a disease.
mike,
No one regards pregnancy as a disease. Unintended pregnancies often, like diseases always, are misfortunes to be avoided if at all possible. I don’t think many Christians would deny that unintended pregnancies are to be avoided. Whatever disagreement would be over how.
April 25th, 2011 | 11:41 am
None of this is surprising to we who remember the Fistgate fiasco.
April 25th, 2011 | 11:51 am
David,
I would argue that the Christian view of pregnancies (all of them, including the “unintended” ones) are indeed “intended” by God, who is the Lord of Life and therefore “has a vote” in the creation of new life. A child is never a “misfortune”, certainly not in the same way that diseases are. It is imperative that we remember that God has granted us the special privilege (and responsibilities) of being “co-creators” of new life. It is never only up to us, and therefore a child can never be a “misfortune”.
April 25th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
Mike & David wrote: “. . . as if pregnancy were a disease.”
“No one regards pregnancy as a disease. Unintended pregnancies often, like diseases always, are misfortunes to be avoided if at all possible
Pay attention to the disease metaphor. It is, in fact, essential. Without it, you cannot make abortion a “medical” service, nor can you make a coherent argument that a pharmacist has no right to refuse to dispense pregnancy-stopping agents, unless you categorize those agents as “medicine” (things that cure or prevent diseases).
It is part of the overall left-wing framing strategy: everything they want is defined in terms that suggest science has proven it is healthy, normal, and good; everything they hate is defined in terms that suggest disease (they’re particularly fond of pathological anxieties and sexual dysfunctions, but they can turn virtually any human trait into something that sounds sick – the one that just infuriates me is the use of the word “enmeshment” to denigrate the state of having given up one’s freedom in order to become part of a larger social unit, because it pathologizes not the person, but the very act of being part of a social unit, as a dysfunction).
April 25th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
Pay attention to the disease metaphor. It is, in fact, essential. Without it, you cannot make abortion a “medical” service . . .
Blake,
I suppose, then, that prenatal care and delivery of babies by doctors in hospitals are not medical services, since pregnancy and childbirth are not diseases. And I guess medical insurance should not cover childbirth, since it is not a medical expense, and also since having a baby is purely elective.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:14 pm
I suppose, then, that prenatal care and delivery of babies by doctors in hospitals are not medical services, since pregnancy and childbirth are not diseases.
Human life includes changes. We grow, go through puberty, form families, have babies, go through menopause, and experience the aging process.
All of these things are covered by medical insurance, because changes include medical risks. That does not mean that change = disease.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:14 pm
@ David Nickol,
You’re equating medical services with diseases. They are not one and the same. One can have medical services performed, but not have a disease. I get my blood pressure checked, blood checked, and a physical done every so often, but I don’t have a disease!
If you think a doctor delivering a baby is treating a disease, then we have completely different views of what a disease is.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:25 pm
“This is novel take on the problem of abortion. It is self-correcting, because if all pregnancies are aborted, there will be no women in the future to have abortions. Perhaps those opposed to abortion should promote it temporarily in order to get rid of it in the long run.”
We don’t have to support it or endorse it–it is merely a fact: people who support abortion also tend to support contraception and, as a rule, have very small families (if they have children at all). They tend to be either secular or mildly deistic (“I’m not religious, but I am a very spiritual person”) in outlook. The few children they have tend to mirror their beliefs and practices.
In contrast, people opposed to abortion also tend to be opposed to contraception, to have larger families, and to be strongly religious in orientation. Their children tend to mirror their beliefs and practices.
Therefore, over time, the law of numbers will assert itself (as it already seems to be doing, if polls concerning public attitudes about abortion are correct), and public support for abortion will collapse, allowing the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the return of the abortion debate to the state legislatures, where public opinion will be reflected in a new wave of anti-abortion legislation.
Checkmate.
As I said, demography is destiny, and this is especially true in the United States, where our constitutional system requires a broad popular consensus to enact sweeping changes (such as the outlawing of abortion after four decades of essentially unrestricted access to abortion).
Those who think they can short-circuit this process, either by hijacking the courts or ramming through legislation with only narrow partisan backing, delude themselves. They will only set the stage for a new round of abortion fights, in the courts, in the media and in the legislatures, because any decision that makes abortion illegal without a broad-based consensus will lack legitimacy in the same way that present laws allowing abortion lack legitimacy.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:26 pm
“Of course, in reality, the groups with the highest abortion rates (blacks and Hispanics) are actually increasing in the population. Their high abortion rate is due not to their desire to eliminate themselves from the population, but due to their high rate of unintended pregnancies.”
The typical woman procuring an abortion today is white, middle class, and in her mid-twenties.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:50 pm
The typical woman procuring an abortion today is white, middle class, and in her mid-twenties.
Actually, according to the Guttmacher Institute:
So the “typical” woman procuring an abortion is in her 20s, but she is white only if you combine Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.
April 25th, 2011 | 1:59 pm
Jarrett,
My point is that medical services deal with many things that are not diseases. Pregnancy and childbirth are not diseases, yet it is almost universal for pregnant women to be under a doctor’s care and to have the baby delivered in a hospital. Whatever one things of the morality of abortion, it is foolish to say it is not a medical service because pregnancy is not a disease and so ending a pregnancy is not curing a disease. Of course pregnancy is not a disease, but ending a pregnancy is a medical procedure.
April 25th, 2011 | 2:05 pm
Stuart,
For your theory to be correct, the groups that have the highest abortion rates would have to have the lowest birth rates. But that is not the case. Blacks and Hispanics have high abortion rates and high birth rates. Non-Hispanic whites are a majority of the population, so of course in absolute numbers there are a lot of abortions among white women. But the abortion rate among white women is lower than the abortion rate among black and Hispanic women. It is true that the current trend is for white women to have fewer children, either because they conceive less or have abortions, and whites as a proportion of the population of the United States will shrink. But this will not make abortions go away if black and Hispanic women continue to have a high rate of unwanted pregnancies.
April 25th, 2011 | 3:15 pm
Stuart
I realize you use the word “tend” in your statement, but be careful with sweeping statements. My wife and I are quite devout, but we have only one child–for reasons that are none of yours or anyone else’s business.
By the way, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal beat you to the self-correcting theory of abortion years ago: he calls it The Roe Effect.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/TarantoRoeEffect.php
April 25th, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Abortion providers routinely try to pass off abortion as ‘healthcare.’ It is a lie that must be constantly resisted. Neo-natal care, on the other hand, is real healthcare, seeking to prevent the very real dangers that exist to mother and child during pregnancy. The abortionists would have us believe that abortion is like neo-natal care, when it obviously is not. It is like euthanasia, another medical procedure. The absurdity of their position is high-lighted by their speaking of unintended pregnancy as if it were a disease.
April 25th, 2011 | 3:57 pm
David, are you saying that there is no strain of thought in our culture that, consciously or unconsciously, views an unplanned pregnancy as a disease – or something very much like it?
I once read a personal blog where the author referred to the birth control pill (or the morning after pill – I don’t remember exactly) as “medicine.” I don’t know how commonly it is described that way, but the search term “birth control medicine” gets a decent number of hits on Google. (About 15% as many as “birth control pill”)
I’ve also heard people argue that if an insurance company covers treatments for erectile dysfunction, it ought to cover birth control pills. I don’t agree with that argument because I think ED is something that happens when your body is not working right, but pregnancy is something that happens when your body is working right. But there are people who disagree with me, and don’t think that’s a relevant distinction, and it seems plausible to me that part of the reason why is that many people do think of unwanted pregnancies as medical problems.
If you have a problem, and you go to a doctor to get it fixed, that sounds a lot like a disease. Not all medical procedures cure diseases: doctors also do things to prevent future disease, prevent injury, or improve health. So I’d say, yeah, delivering a baby is a medical procedure that is not “curing a disease.” But what makes something a medical procedure? Can you define “medical procedure” in such a way that it includes abortion without implying that the thing getting aborted is a parasite or some kind of disease?
April 25th, 2011 | 4:07 pm
Irritating that they chose “Maria” Talks. But I’ll try not to take the bait. Any reminder to pray to Maria, Queen of the family, for the misguided and likely desperate people who seek advice from this website is an opportunity for grace.
April 25th, 2011 | 4:20 pm
Michael,
A medical procedure is something done by trained and licensed doctors to or for patients. Purely cosmetic surgery (Botox injections, breast implants, tummy tucks) involves medical procedures and is generally not to heal or cure disease. Some cosmetic surgery may be done for very serious reasons, but a great deal of it is done because people are vain and don’t want to undergo the perfectly normal processes of aging.
A truly unwanted pregnancy (as opposed to an unplanned pregnancy) is a misfortune. Certainly if a woman is in such frail health that having a baby might kill her, helping to prevent that pregnancy is the legitimate province of medical science. Even Catholics wouldn’t dispute that. They would just rule out “artificial” methods. I think most people who use contraception do it to space children, not to avoid having them altogether. This, it seems to me, is also a legitimate area for medicine. Even Natural Family Planning that Catholics advocate was devised and is being improved by doctors and others in the medical profession.
April 25th, 2011 | 4:23 pm
Sort of unrelated question, but still important: the federal government provides millions of dollars a year to Planned Parenthood for “women’s health services,” if the propaganda is to be believed.
Where are the corresponding millions for “men’s health services”? Surely this is a violation of Title IX or some law.
April 25th, 2011 | 4:39 pm
It seems to me that an unwanted pregnancy is not, strictly speaking, a medical problem, but one of the solutions is a medical procedure.
April 25th, 2011 | 5:43 pm
David Nickol
Hard cases make bad law. The number of abortions for truly dire medical reasons are fewer than 1 percent, according to even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
April 25th, 2011 | 6:05 pm
Purely cosmetic surgery (Botox injections, breast implants, tummy tucks) involves medical procedures and is generally not to heal or cure disease.
So what makes a tummy tuck a “medical” procedure, but not a tattoo?
Because we are assigning a certain status to “medical” procedures – they are “rights”, one does not have the right to refuse to sell one. Do I have the right to refuse to do an offensive tattoo? What makes a tattoo different from killing something that is alive?
April 25th, 2011 | 7:02 pm
@David Nickol: ” Unintended pregnancies often, like diseases always, are misfortunes to be avoided if at all possible.”
They are certainly misfortunes in the eyes of the prospective parents, but it is at least debatable whether they are such from a larger perspective. If “unintended” simply means that the procreating couple, if they had had their druthers, would have taken the sex without the baby, then I’ll wager that the majority of babies throughout history have been unintended.
Modern technology has created a world in which everything has to be planned and intentional. To my mind, that is a great burden, not a blessing.
April 25th, 2011 | 9:44 pm
Blake,
I am not really sure what you are trying to say, but cosmetic surgeons are not obliged to perform surgery on anyone who asks for it and can pay for it. Specific medical treatments are not “rights” in the sense that a doctor must perform them when asked. Just go to any doctor and you will find out if you don’t have insurance and can’t pay up front if you have a “right” to be treated. (Emergency rooms, however, cannot turn patients away for inability to pay, but you don’t get a tummy tuck or an elective abortion in an emergency room.)
So what makes a tummy tuck a “medical” procedure, but not a tattoo?
Only those licensed by the state—that would be doctors—can perform cosmetic surgeries like tummy tucks.
April 26th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
So what makes a tummy tuck a “medical” procedure, but not a tattoo?
Only those licensed by the state—that would be doctors—can perform cosmetic surgeries like tummy tucks.
So if I introduced a law that required doctors to do tattoos, and everyone voted on it, and that became the law, would that make a tattoo a medical procedure?
April 26th, 2011 | 1:17 pm
Blake,
What is your definition of a medical procedure?
April 26th, 2011 | 2:27 pm
I can’t stop chuckling at this exchange, David. Best of luck at getting a straight answer!
April 26th, 2011 | 3:05 pm
Maybe it would be simpler to reverse it:
in what sense is a procedure that is performed on someone who is not ill or injured, and is not intended to prevent any illness or correct any injury or defect, a medical procedure?
Cosmetic surgery may be a parallel to that, but then perhaps it is worth asking if purely cosmetic surgery is, in fact, a medical procedure.
April 26th, 2011 | 6:55 pm
pentamom,
From Webster’s Unabridged
If it’s a procedure performed by a doctor, and basically only a doctor, then it is medical. Sometimes you might want to make a distinction between medical and surgical—which I don’t think is necessary for this discussion—but surely you would concede that surgery is medical. Would you expect medical insurance not to pay for an appendectomy because it is surgical and not medical?
If somebody other than a physician performs cosmetic surgery, he or she will be guilty of practicing medicine without a license. How you can say something (for example, a facelift) done in an operating room, using anesthesia, with surgical instruments, by doctors is not a medical procedure is beyond my imagination.
April 27th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
“If it’s a procedure performed by a doctor, and basically only a doctor, then it is medical. ”
So that gets us back to the question, if someone passes a law saying that only doctors can butcher meat, does that make butchering meat a medical procedure?
If cutting off people’s arms against their will for no medical reason becomes something doctors, and only doctors, are permitted to do is that now a medical procedure instead of assault?
I won’t quibble with the dictionary definition; the question is, is the usage on which the dictionary definition is based rationally coherent enough to form the basis for policy or argument (e.g., “It’s a medical procedure, so it’s nobody’s business but the patient’s and the doctor’s”) or is it just a reflection of a gap in human thinking that is reflected in our language?
The real point here is that calling something a “medical procedure” because of its external functional attributes really tells us nothing about the legitimacy of the procedure or under what conditions it should be permitted, but if people are going to argue as though it does, then we’re going to quibble about whether it should be called that.
April 27th, 2011 | 2:32 pm
I tend to agree with Pentamom.
“Medical” obviously comes from the Latin deponent verb “medeor,” meaning “to heal, cure, remedy, to be good for.” Indeed, “remedy” comes from the same root.
In Latin, it also has the figurative meaning “to remedy, succor, relieve, amend, correct, restore,” much as “remedy” does in English.
Of course, derivation is not meaning, but curing, healing or improving health seems to be at the heart of English usage, as it is of the Latin.
April 27th, 2011 | 6:44 pm
Pentamom and Michael PS,
Can I have your definition of “medicine,” “medical” and “medical procedure”?
I don’t think anybody bases policy decisions of any importance on whether something is classified as a medical procedure or not. Some medical procedures are illegal. Some are experimental. Insurance pays for some and not others. We could nitpick about any description in the same manner, but what is the point?
April 27th, 2011 | 8:23 pm
Pentamom and Michael PS,
Another though. I won’t provide a link, because it’s too disturbing. But if you go to the web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you will find information on “Nazi medical experiments.” They had nothing to do with “curing, healing or improving health, at least not in regard to the people being experimented on. But they are called Nazi medical experiments.
April 28th, 2011 | 5:46 am
David Nickol
Studies and experiments designed to advance medical knowledge (knowledge of the “Ars Medendi – the art of healing) are quite properly described as “medical experiments.”
No one would refer to a substance that had no therapeutic use as “a medicine,” (except as a quack medicine) although it may have other uses – as a recreational drug, for example. I would suggest that “medical procedure” is similarly restricted in ordinary usage.
April 28th, 2011 | 11:26 am
Michael PS,
If you think cosmetic surgeries are not medical procedures, I suggest looking up “cosmetic medical procedures” on Google and you’ll get over half a million hits. It seems to me that you and pentamom are arguing that certain things that doctors do, such as Botox injections, are called medical procedures, but they are not medical procedures. You want to have your own private meaning for “medical procedure.” You want to maintain that something done in an operating room, under anesthesia, with surgical instruments, by doctors, is not a “medical procedure.”
Oddly, I think you would have to acknowledge that even if you don’t consider purely cosmetic surgery to be medical, the anesthesiologist who keeps the patient anesthetized is practicing medicine.
I don’t think your example of the word medicine (as in “take your medicine”) is very helpful, since it seems to me purely a popular term. I don’t think I would call insulin a medicine, for example, even though it is a substance injected for health reasons. I don’t think people would call vitamins medicine, even though they might be prescribed by doctors for, say, pregnant women.
Would you consider those studying the aging process for the specific purpose of trying to slow, stop, or even reverse it “medical researchers”? Aging is not a “disease,” after all.
April 28th, 2011 | 2:43 pm
Cosmetic medical procedures can be seen as promoting the psychological health or well being of the patient.
Vitamin supplements do have a therapeutic use in the treatment of very serious conditions, associated with vitamin deficiency – Pellagra, ariboflavinitis, or scurvy, for example.
I agree that, in popular usage,”medicine” does tend to be limited to substances taken orally, but it is certainly used of pharmaceuticals generally, particularly in legislation. Indeed, a recent EU directive extended it to cover vitamin supplements.
April 29th, 2011 | 12:11 am
Cosmetic medical procedures can be seen as promoting the psychological health or well being of the patient.
Michael,
Yes, and that is also the argument used for late-term abortions—the life or health of the mother, with health broadly interpreted to include psychological health. I presume we have been having this discussion basically so that abortion could be said not to be a medical procedure, but now we are back to square one.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact