Month: July 2013

A Pro-Woman, Pro-Life Cause, Ctd

A reader writes:

I am beginning to feel a certain skepticism about this story because all the reporting comes from a single source, the Center for Investigative Reporting. Everything else is repetition and commentary. Even the original story seems cagey about distinguishing between failure to get voluntary, informed consent from the patients and failure to get advance approval from the state. Some of the republications have headlines alleging forced sterilization, but on careful reading the story lacks even a single claim that this took place. A passage deep in the story caught my eye:

Heinrich said he offered tubal ligations only to pregnant inmates with a history of at least three C-sections. Additional pregnancies would be dangerous for these women, Heinrich said, because scar tissue inside the uterus could tear. … ‘It was a medical problem that we had to make them aware of,’ Heinrich said. ‘It’s up to the doctor who’s delivering (your baby) … to make you aware of what’s going on. We’re at risk for not telling them.’

That is only one of the doctors involved, and he might not be telling the truth, but wouldn’t it cast a different light on the subject if all the patients who had tubal ligations had them during repeat C-sections based on a doctor’s recommendation that they were medically indicated because of a danger from future pregnancies? If you read the story carefully, it contains no instance of anyone claiming that a tubal ligation was performed without consent.

One former inmate claims that she often overheard medical staff asking other women to consent. Another says that Dr. Heinrich “pressured” her to have a tubal ligation but she refused. A third says she did not receive sufficient explanation but she consented and is glad she did. Moreover, Dr. Heinrich’s boneheaded statements about how the procedures saved the state money don’t read like the ravings of a eugenics zealot; they read like the nervous defense of someone who thinks he’s being accused of swindling the state by performing procedures it hasn’t agreed to pay for.

The more I reread the original story – as opposed to the abbreviated versions and horrified reaction pieces – the more I begin to wonder whether the real scandal might be that California is making its prisoners jump through hoops for a medical procedure that doctors would make available to private patients as a matter of course if they thought it was medically indicated. The risk of serious complication goes up quickly as the number of prior C-sections increases. (See, for example, ACOG’s opinion on why women planning to have several children should not have elective C-sections.) This case really could be one only of failure to put through paperwork, with doctors who delivered babies by C-section urging in good faith tubal ligations that they thought were medically justified.

It is unfortunate that some patients later felt pressured or inadequately informed, but that is common in every kind of medical practice. I just don’t see the similarity to sterilization scandals of an earlier era. Given the many recent examples of how stories sometimes fizzle when other reporters take a fresh look and all the information comes out, it would be good so see some genuine journalistic follow-up, not just spate of shocked commentary assuming the worst.

Another reader:

The original article says the woman who delivered her sixth child in prison was sorry she couldn’t have more. What about the life or the newborn and the other five? A mother in prison is not taking care of her children. It’s not uncommon for both parents to be in prison. Often the public pays for this, not only the costs of incarceration and (if the inmates are lucky) programming aimed at improving their life skills, but also for care of the children’s food, clothing, medical care, and shelter.

Then there are the women who have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect of their children. I have encountered many such cases over many years. It is not uncommon for there to be several children involved. They are usually put up for adoption by relatives, if they are sober, or by others, often with an incentive of payments to care for the kids until they age out of the system at 18. Meanwhile, the mom and dad who have lost their parental rights to those children can go right ahead and have more children. In Alaska that entitles the parents to another Permanent Fund Dividend check in the fall, which is usually enough to buy a fair amount of drugs and alcohol.

Let’s be clear. We are not talking about parents with somewhat below average parenting skills, or people who are poor or “marginalized” unfairly. Rather, these are parents who often have serious drug and alcohol addictions, who invite friends over to their house to drink, do meth, smoke pot or crack, who may or may not think to lock the children in the back of the house while the party is going on, which may be days. Many children witness their parents stoned out cold, or screwing each other, or screwing strangers, or fighting – verbally and physically. Other out-of-control adults may abuse the children while mom and dad are otherwise occupied.

This sordid side of bad parenting is never talked about by the so-called pro-life advocates, for whom every baby conceived should be born, no matter into what misery. It would be nice if the ardent opponents of abortion gave a damn about the kind of life many children are brought into, their privation, pain, and suffering at the hands of feckless or evil adults. But seemingly once they are born, the right-to-lifers wash their hands of them and instruct them to pull themselves up by their own Pampers. If pro-lifers were advocating for helping parents overcome addictions and learn live skills aimed at improving these children’s lives, I would be much more sympathetic to their cause. But they’re not. Those are “liberal” causes. For the so-called conservatives, after birth, you’re on your own. Be responsible and independent, kid. Dickens wrote about such people.

The World’s Most Classified Vacuum

According to the AP, the CIA allowed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, to redesign a vacuum. A former CIA official says the project was allowed because they didn’t want KSM “to go nuts.” Amy Davidson comments:

[T]he A.P. noted that vacuum-cleaner designs are passed off as diagrams of military installations in Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana.” (“The AP was unable to determine whether Mohammed ever read the famous novel.”) We may never know if there is a message in K.S.M.’s vacuum cleaner or, perhaps more interesting, if it is a decent appliance: the A.P. was told by the C.I.A. that the drawings, “ ‘should they exist,’ would be considered operational files of the CIA — among its most highly classified category of government files — and therefore exempt from ever being released to the public.”

That secrecy may be amusingly absurd when it comes to K.S.M. and his secret vacuum; it is toxically insane when it comes to the mass of prisoners at Guantánamo whose continued detention is a legal mystery.

Child Rape In Afghanistan

Robert Long highlights the endemic abuse:

The State Department has called bacha baazi a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.” For instance, one military intelligence reservist related a story about an Afghan colonel who stood before a judge after he hurt a chai boy by violently raping him: “His defense was, ‘Honestly, who hasn’t raped a chai boy? Ha ha ha.’ The judge responds, ‘You’re right. Case dismissed.’”

Cracking down on this practice is nearly impossible, as the main culprits are often the very law enforcement and military personnel that the U.S. works alongside. In the documentary “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” (2010), police officials insist that sex traffickers of young boys will be arrested; later that day, two of the same officers are filmed at a bacha baazi party.

The words of a deputy police chief:

“If they don’t f–k the asses of those boys, what should they f–k?” he asks at one point. “The p—–s of their own grandmothers? Their asses were used before, and now they want to get what they are owed.”

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Egypt’s Gift To Erdogan

Claire Berlinski notices how the Egyptian coup has given Turkey’s prime minister another chance to steer the media away from protests in Istanbul, which have not subsided:

[T]he Gezi protests were so massive, and so widely publicized, even internationally, that none of us could figure out how he’d change the subject this time, even with the customary media lockdown. “Frankly,” I said to a friend, “the only way he could do it is by announcing that he’s always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body and announcing that he’s scheduled himself for immediate gender reassignment surgery.”

I was wrong. God intervened. He handed Erdoğan a coup in Egypt, instead.

Now, to put this in context, the Turkish media barely noticed the coup in Mali, and I’d be astonished if more than 100 Turks were aware that in recent years there have also been coups in Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and Niger. But as of the Fourth of July, one would have thought, from reading the local press, that one was not in Turkey but in Egypt, which was more than passing strange. And while the world seems to believe the Egyptian coup was a “nightmare” for Erdoğan, putting an end to his ambitious foreign policy fantasies (and this is true), it it important to understand that it was simultaneously a dream come true, not only turning all foreign attention away from Turkey, but enabling him to turn all domestic attention away from Turkey, and lending credibility to his absurd claims that the Gezi Park protesters were in fact coup-plotters, despite extensive, serious research indicating that they were anything but.

Recent Dish on Turkey here, here and here.

Is Egypt Heading For A Civil War? Ctd

Michele Dunne isn’t ruling it out:

What could easily happen is a return to the sort of low-level insurgency and domestic terrorism that plagued Egypt during the 1980s and especially the 1990s. That period saw the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, a 1995 unsuccessful attempt on Mubarak’s life, a 1997 attack in which 58 tourists and four Egyptians were killed in Luxor, and many other incidents in which jihadi Islamists targeted Christians, liberals, foreigners, and government officials. Tens of thousands of Islamists were imprisoned, often for lengthy periods without charge. The Sinai will probably become much more dangerous than it already has, further setting back efforts to restart tourism and get the economy on track. Clashes between Islamist demonstrators and security forces are likely to continue, and those between armed Islamist and secular gangs might become common.

Will the post-Morsi violence become an actual civil war? Several more shoes would have to drop—a return to arms of the so-called repentant former jihadis, the drift toward extremism of more Brotherhood members, the formation of more and larger armed Islamist units in lightly governed areas of Egypt, such as Sinai and the Western Desert­—to bring about that unhappy prospect. But it can no longer be excluded altogether.

Earlier debate on the subject here.

Chicks With Boom Sticks

Documentarian Cathryne Czubek feels that female gun enthusiasts pose a challenge to the “weaker sex” stereotype:

You take these two potent symbols–woman and gun–and it electrifies this other issue of how we, and women specifically, negotiate power. You see this in the brief historical timeline in the film from Laura Browder, who says, “The history of armed women is the history of American women.” For instance, in the 1960s, some women were arming themselves in the Black Panthers and other radical movements while others were marching for peace. It opens up the issue about the instinctual nature of women that has always rattled feminism: are women different from men and more peaceful? Or are we just as fierce and warlike?

Ditto, by the way, the Pink Pistols.

Suicidal Bombers

Criminologist Adam Lankford argues that suicide bombers are driven by psychological reasons, not just ideological ones – that is, they “kill themselves to escape crises or unbearable pain”:

[When] I began watching martyrdom videos and reading case studies, letters and diary entries, what I discovered was a litany of fear, failure, guilt, shame and rage. … [F]ar from being normal, these self-destructive killers have often suffered from serious mental trauma and always demonstrate at least a few behaviors on the continuum of suicidality, such as suicide ideation, a suicide plan or previous suicide attempts.

Along similar lines, Lankford recently analyzed 185 American mass killings to learn when and why shooters die at the scene of their crimes. Joshua Keating lays out some of his findings:

Thirty-eight percent of perpetrators of mass shootings commit suicide by their own hand and 48 percent die in the attacks. (Some of those extra 10 percent could probably also be categorized as “suicide by cop.”) Lankford also found that for each additional victim killed in the attack, the shooters’ likelihood of dying was 1.2 times higher. Shooters are also far more likely to die when they bring multiple weapons to the scene and when attacking factories or warehouses rather than schools and office buildings.