Here’s an issue NARAL won’t touch. What happens when the sacrosanct right to kill a fetus at any stage of development for any reason gets to be politically incorrect? A fascinating piece in Sunday’s New York Times reports on what has been happening in India. Over the last decade or so, with ultra-sound technology becoming more and more available, women are aborting increasing numbers of fetuses found to be female. The resulting imbalance is getting extreme. In Punjab, India’s most fertile agricultural region, there are now only 8 girls born for every 10 boys. There’s a word for this: eugenics. The grimmer fact is that nothing seems to be able to stop it. A law was passed in 1994 outlawing ultrasound tests for gender, but it is basically impossible to enforce. Sexist eugenics is only one possibility, of course. Before too long, we’ll find all sorts of reasons to abort fetuses – wrong gender, genetic predispositions to certain diseases, wrong sexual orientation, and on and on. It seems to me that it will be impossible to stop this without the kind of intervention in abortion rights that pro-choicers refuse to countenance. At which point, pro-choicers will have to accept that eugenics are indistinguishable from their crusade or reverse or nuance their position on abortion. Hmmm. Over to you, Ms Michelman.
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: David Broder complained yesterday of President George Bush’s silence over the home-coming of the Hainan detainees, race riots in Cincinnati, and other sundry events. Jake Tapper’s rather excellent piece (yes, he can be fair sometimes) about W’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum is the most effective rebuke. Silence is sometimes golden. But I think Jake misses something deeper about Bush’s reticence. Yes, I know some of you think he keeps quiet because he can’t open his mouth without a malapropism falling out, but he has excellent speech-writers who have shown he can excel if he wants. The real reason, I suspect, is something deeper. What Bush is signaling is a message about the place of politics in our national life. That place should be restricted, limned, demarcated. Part of the damage Bill Clinton did to our culture and our politics was to fuse the two seamlessly, the glue being his incessant blather and emotional incontinence. The politicization of culture was a horrible thing to watch; but the complete absorption of politics by entertainment was even worse. By his silence, Bush is actually saying something extremely important: these two fields of human life, though often connected, are categorically separate. If only the pundits and press would stop a minute and l-i-s-t-e-n.
DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: Goes this week, in an early showing, to Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation paleocon, for his interview in National Review Online. Paleocons are deeply dismayed by the news that teen births are at a 30-year low and that illegitimacy rates seem to have slowed, and even slightly declined, recently. How did that happen in – gasp – the Clinton years? Well, one response is simply to deny that it happened at all. Rector was asked, “What do the latest illegitimacy numbers mean? Is this good news, as the press is reporting – fewer births to teens?” Rectors answered: “Those numbers are absolute nonsense and they are deliberate distortions. The fact of the matter is that illegitimacy rose rather substantially in this period. One way to understand the distortion here is to understand that only about 14 percent of out-of-wedlock births occur to girls under age 18.” Fair enough. Fewer teen births are surely a good thing, but they aren’t as important as illegitimacy rates. But did they rise “rather substantially?” The actual rise is 1 percent, according to the CDC, and that is “due to the continued increase in the number of unmarried women of childbearing age.” So no real increase in the rate of illegitimacy. And among blacks, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, the percentage born to unmarried mothers actually declined by a tiny amount, 0.3 percent, and since 1994, the percentage of black children born to married women has risen by about 5 percent. However you look at it, it’s pretty good news – at least stable or in the right direction. “Absolute nonsense?” “Deliberate distortion?” Please. These are splutters of someone losing a debate. Well, actually this is the coup de grace worthy of Derbyshire: “There are only four governors in the entire country who even speak favorably of marriage. The rest keep silent on the issue.” What country is Robert Rector living in?
REALITY BITES: Fresh from their victory over the evil pharmaceutical companies, African countries, now freed from the burden of colonial pillage, are gearing up to do … very, very little. You won’t read this in the New York Times but the Washington Post has a smart piece today by Karen DeYoung (I’d expect no less from her) which provides a reality check. There are squabbles between international aid agencies as to who gets to distribute the goodies, fights over whether to provide drugs subsidized by patent-owning companies or by thieves in India, and resentment by the kleptocratic governments in sub-Saharan Africa that they are being pushed around by Western do-gooders. The biggest worry is that there aren’t enough funds to both finance the drug distribution and prevention efforts – or worse, that the treatments themselves will undermine the idea that prevention is still vital. The brutal truth is, as we have found in the U.S., that the availability of good treatment lessens the fear of the virus and therefore precautions taken to prevent it. If that happens in educated alert populations in the West, won’t it be even worse in Africa? This quote is priceless: “The exclusive focus on the issue of patent rights and prices of drugs really has overridden the much more fundamental question of how you actually get these services out and how you blunt the epidemic itself,” said one international health official who asked not to be identified… “It’s so politically incorrect to say, but we may have to sit by and just see these millions of [already infected] people die. Very few public health professionals are willing to take on the wrath of AIDS activists by saying that. But a whole lot of them talk about this in private.” I wonder why that guy asked not to be identified. The awful truth is not exactly popular among the grandstanders who are exploiting the AIDS crisis for their own ideological purposes. But it should be the starting block for a real effort to halt or slow this awful epidemic.
THE TIMES VERSUS MEDICAL PROGRESS II: Check out Robert Pear’s piece in today’s New York Times on state programs to subsidize prescription drugs for the elderly, or to squeeze price discounts from drug companies. A couple of things are interesting about this article. The first is that nowhere is there any statement as to the actual costs of these programs – current or projected. The second is that nowhere is there any account of how cutting pharmaceutical profits could impede future drug research. For the Times, a huge new entitlement apparently costs nothing and can never do any harm. No wonder the writer is befuddled at why the Congress might actually be leery of jumping in to create a potentially budget
-breaking new entitlement to supplement or replace the state ones. When every program is easily affordable and carries no problematic consequences, why not be in favor of it?
The Dish 