Category: The Dish

A Threat To Abortion Clinics Outside The South

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Lebanon Road Surgery Center,So far, the inane battle over whether abortion-clinic doctors must have admitting privileges at a local hospital has largely been clustered in Southern states. In Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, the needless regulatory requirement would force some or all abortion clinics to shut down; clinics have been fighting back, with some recent encouraging successes in the courts. But unconstitutional abortion restrictions are like whack-a-moles – strike one down in some state and three more states will pass them in its place.

Which brings us to Ohio. This is my home state, and an abortion clinic a few miles from where I grew up is currently suing it. Thank goodness. Take a look at the absurd scheme the state has enacted to force clinics into closing, via the Cincinnati Enquirer (emphasis mine):

The health department ordered the (Lebanon Road Surgery Center) closed, declining to grant an exception to a state rule that all outpatient surgery centers must have an agreement that allows it to transfer patients to a local hospital. The state prohibits abortion clinics from forming those agreements with public hospitals. Plus, many private hospitals, in part facing political pressure brought by abortion opponents, no longer grant abortion clinics a transfer agreement. Without it, the clinics are in violation of state rules and must be closed unless they get a variance from the health department. The Sharonville clinic had such a variance, but the health department decided in 2012 to deny it, requiring the clinic to get a hospital transfer agreement or close.

This is slightly different than the situations in Alabama, etc., where the fight is over doctors getting admitting privileges at a local hospital. The Ohio rule requires clinics to have a relationship with a hospital, in what is known as a transfer agreement. But the same Catch-22 applies to both situations, with the state effectively saying to clinics, hey, just jump through this hoop and you can stay open – oh, but p.s., jumping is illegal and we’re out of hoops.

In Ohio, all outpatient surgery centers are required to have hospital transfer agreements, but only abortion clinics are barred from seeking them with public hospitals. This is thanks to a law passed by Republican legislators last year. And don’t think they didn’t know that getting a transfer agreement from a private hospital would be virtually impossible for abortion clinics: The private system in Ohio is composed largely of religiously-affiliated hospitals. In Cincinnati, where Lebanon Road Surgery Center is located, the market is dominated by a Catholic health system that won’t even cover birth control in employee health plans.

Some insisted this whole thing was no big deal because clinics could simply seek an exemption—which the state is now refusing to grant. Emails uncovered by the Enquirer show the Governor’s office and Ohio Right to Life corresponding with health department officials about how it should reject the clinic’s exemption request. This is despite the fact that the clinic has several doctors who do have admitting privileges at several area hospitals, so clinic patients are perfectly poised to get hospital care should an emergency arise.

According to the Enquirer, two of Ohio’s 14 abortion clinics closed last year; two are in the midst of court battles over being ordered to close; and two are trying to get reprieve from the health department from the transfer-agreement rule. Can we hear again how this isn’t about banning abortion but protecting women’s health?

(Photo of Cincinnati clinic from WomensMed.com)

Semi-Professional Journalism

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Dan Savage, Samantha Allen, and others have either linked or – so as not to link – alluded to Gavin McInnes’s recent Thought Catalog hate-rant against the transgender. I tend to agree with Allen, who writes:

I refuse to link to it—that’s how bad it is. McInnes willfully misgenders all transgender people, Janet Mock included, while pathologizing them as “nuts” and fixating at great length on the state of their genitals. It’s repulsive.

McInnes’ piece doesn’t deserve a formal response.

Yep. McInnes does not simply make an argument about gender identity that falls outside conventional liberal (and, as Allen notes, medical) norms. Such an argument might be buried below what it is he did write, but it’s hard to say, given the muck surrounding any possible substance. I’m also not keen to drive traffic to something odious, but it’s viral already, and not linking just invites curiosity, so by all means, judge for yourself whether a piece containing such sentences as, “You will be totally comfortable when your daughter marries a post-op dude and you should have no problems with her smoking his blintz” is, in fact, a thoughtful dissent worthy of consideration.

This scandal reminded me of another recent one on a totally different topic, namely the one that erupted when the Times of Israel – such an authoritative title! – hosted Yochanan Gordon’s oh-so-insightful intervention, “When Genocide Is Permissible.” What do these two items have in common? Here’s a hint, from the Times of Israel’s note regarding their decision to close down Gordon’s blog:

The Times of Israel maintains an open blog platform: Once we have accepted bloggers, we allow them to post their own items. This trust has rarely been abused. We are angry and appalled that it was in this case, and will take steps to prevent a recurrence.

Now check out Thought Catalog’s “About” page:

Thought Catalog works for the same reason that the Internet works: We’re an open and non-hierarchal platform. Anyone can use Thought Catalog to articulate their ideas and stories to the world. No one is excluded from the conversation. The “all thinking is relevant” slogan embodies our networked approach to writing and content production. If you think something and want to tell the world, then it’s relevant and appropriate for Thought Catalog.

What both of these cases have in common, then, isn’t simply that an unedited, unchecked piece of writing (in one case by a well-known writer, in the other not) made it to an audience. Rather, it’s that both posts made it to their audiences in a format virtually indistinguishable from what one might quaintly call published material. Material that at least one other person read, vetted, maybe even made some changes to. This is a combination that, yes, allows some good writing to make it to the audience it deserves, but that also allows everyone who wishes to do so to formulate their most hateful thoughts as “this is what everyone’s really thinking but afraid to say”, and to do so not on a Facebook page or personal blog, but in a format that screams Real Article.

Apart from this formula leading seamlessly to things that sure sound like publications signing off on hate-filled blather, it also screws over the merely naive. The aspiring writers whose musings (almost inevitably on “privilege”) are ripe for mockery on other websites, and who may end up finding that an observation that would have done well to stay between friends has gone viral.

Have your own thoughts on Thought Catalog? Email us at dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Don’t Talk Back To Bibi

by Dish Staff

Sarah Lazare explores Israel’s frightening crackdown on dissent during the Gaza war:

Journalists deemed critical of the war have faced job termination and censure. Prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has criticized the “dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinians,” hired a personal bodyguard after being attacked while broadcasting live from Ashkelon. Israeli Knesset member Yariv Levin, chair of the Likud-Beytenu coalition, recently called for Levy to stand trial for treason—a charge that, during war, carries a death sentence.

Knesset member Haneen Zoabi—a Palestinian citizen of Israel—has been suspended from most parliamentary activities for six months due to a statement she made about the still-unidentified kidnappers of three Israeli teen residents of West Bank settlements who were found dead in June. She said of the kidnappers, “they are people who see no other way to change their reality, so they are forced to use these means…at least until Israel wises up, and until Israeli society opens up and feels the pain of the other.” Meanwhile, numerous Knesset members calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and murder of Palestinian civilians have faced no formal censure from within Israeli government or the U.S.

In a sign of the times, young Israelis who elect to do national service – a civilian alternative to conscription in the IDF – will no longer be allowed to work at the human rights organization B’Tselem, which the national service chief has decreed “acts against the state”:

In a letter to B’Tselem director Hagai Elad, Sar-Shalom Jerbi said his decision came in the wake of the fighting in Gaza. B’Tselem, whose full name is B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, sought to broadcast the names of dead Palestinian children during the 29 days of fighting. “I feel obligated to exercise my authority and discontinue state assistance to an organization that acts against the state and its soldiers, who are literally sacrificing their lives in supreme heroism to ensure the welfare and security of all citizens from all sectors suffering for years from firing on their homes,” Jerbi wrote.

National civilian service has slots for volunteers at organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, such as anti-abortion group Efrat on the right and Hotline for Migrant Workers on the left. B’Tselem has one slot for a national-service volunteer, which it received in 2012. During discussions on a bill in January, Jerbi said national civilian service would be available “only to bodies that do not subvert the existence of the state as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Is Khamenei Done With The Nuclear Talks?

by Dish Staff

The Supreme Leader has always been pessimistic about the negotiations between Tehran and Washington, but in a statement yesterday, he called them “useless”:

Speaking to Foreign Ministry officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Iranian negotiators who have conducted the talks with the United States and five other world powers, and he did not call for abandoning them. But he appeared to give succor to Iranian hard-liners who are adamantly opposed to discussions that could lead to a scaling back of Iran’s nuclear program, which they insist is intended for peaceful purposes only. The remarks came two days after President Hassan Rouhani stirred controversy in Iran by calling opponents of the talks “cowards” and telling them to go to hell. Rouhani, considered a moderate, has been pushing for an agreement that would end the crippling economic sanctions against Iran. Khamenei has consistently been far more skeptical about the talks.

Reza Haghighatnejad highlights the apparent split between Khamenei and Rouhani:

In sharp contrast with Khamenei’s address earlier today, Rouhani has talked about the impact of eased sanctions, the practicalities of working with the U.S. to combat Islamic State insurgents in Iraq, the greater opportunities to tackle world issues.  It’s not only the nuclear program that the world needs to talk about, Rouhani’s camp suggests, and last year’s historic phone call between Rouhani and U.S. president Barack Obama was a symbol Western media–and Rouhani—gladly embraced. Rouhani has even sought out public opinion within Iran, commissioning a poll earlier this year to identify just what the ordinary Iranian public thought about increased contact with the West.

At the same time, the administration has been keen to show itself as tough, practical and resolute: Javad Zarif has said one of the most important outcomes of talks has been an American shift: U.S. officials now have a clearer understanding of what they can expect from Iran. According to Zarif, he and chief negotiator Abbas Araghchi have ensured that no new sanctions have been imposed over the last year—a view dismissed today by Khamenei in front of the world’s most influential diplomats. “They say these sanctions aren’t new, but actually they are,” Khamenei said, which proved that talks over sanctions have led to nothing.

Walter Russell Mead suspects that a “grand bargain” with Iran is a dangerous fantasy, regardless of our apparently aligned interests in Iraq:

[T]he perception that a breakthrough with Iran is just around the corner will encourage the President to slight or sacrifice the interests of traditional U.S. allies in the region. It will strengthen the hand of those in the Administration who tell the President that he should stay the course in the Middle East, pursuing a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran, and supporting ‘moderate Islamists’ and pro-Muslim Brotherhood governments in places like Qatar and Turkey, even if that alienates Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.

If America takes this course, expect regional tensions to rise, rather than relax, even if things calm down in Baghdad. It’s not clear that the President’s goal of a grand bargain with Iran is within reach, or that it will deliver the kind of stability he hopes for. For one thing, it’s possible that the Iranians are less interested in reaching a pragmatic and mutually beneficial relationship with Washington than in using Obama’s hunger for a transformative and redeeming diplomatic success to lure him onto a risky and ultimately disastrous course.

This Snowden Profile Is Really About The NSA

by Dish Staff

James Bamford’s lengthy new profile of Edward Snowden, based on a series of in-person interviews in Moscow, purports to be a look at the leaker’s motivations but will more likely be remembered for its two new revelations about the NSA’s cyber-espionage activities. The first is that a cock-up at the NSA was responsible for the nationwide Internet outage Syria experienced in late 2012, not the Syrian government as everyone thought at the time:

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible.

The bigger scoop, however, is about a program codenamed MonsterMind, with which the NSA is trying to automate the process of detecting, defeating, and striking back against cyberattacks:

The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology. Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability:

Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

Yishai Schwartz pans the profile, which he says “reads like a release from a Snowden PR press office”, and Bamford’s “bewildering reluctance to ask any challenging questions at all”:

Bamford never asks why Snowden accepted—and even pursued—a series of high-level jobs in signals intelligence despite his misgivings. Bamford never pushes Snowden to face the moral complexity of his choices. And he never asks Snowden to explain whether it was responsible of him to release troves of information that not even he himself had seen. Most remarkably, Bamford seems unwilling to push Snowden on even his most outlandish claims, like Snowden’s insistence that he tried “to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that his colleagues could determine what he had taken, prepare for future leaks, and mitigate damage. Alas, Snowden explains to a sympathetic Bamford, the NSA was simply too incompetent to decipher his clues. …

Now, national security isn’t quite Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor is it a Dan Brown novel, so perhaps it might have made sense for Bamford to ask why Snowden chose this particular method for helping out his old colleagues at the NSA. And although Bamford is clearly enamored with Snowden’s brilliance (virtually the only family quotation about Snowden that Bamford thought worthy of inclusion was Snowden’s father’s proud mention of his son’s high IQ scores), it’s doubtful that Snowden’s attempts at helping were simply too clever for the combined powers of the American intelligence agencies. But again, Bamford doesn’t see fit to ask.

The piece reinforced Dreher’s sympathy for Snowden, though he acknowledges the moral dilemmas that Bamford largely elides:

If I had been in Snowden’s shoes, I might have done the same thing, out of fidelity to the moral law. As Augustine said, an immoral law is no law at all. At the same time, it is perfectly clear that a government riddled with even a thousand Snowdens, who believe they have the right to determine which of the government’s secrets to make public, could not function. Snowden may have had a clear moral mandate to become a whistleblower, but what about someone whose motives weren’t as pure as Snowden’s seem to have been? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the church, or Wall Street, I would cheer for any whistleblower who broke his (assumed) pledge of loyalty to expose grave injustice or serious wrongdoing. But national security is a more serious matter, and not one to be taken lightly. This is what troubles me about the Snowden case, even though my sympathies definitely lie with him.

Does This Look Like Humanitarian Aid To You?

by Dish Staff

Jeremy Bender scrutinizes the Russian aid convoy en route to eastern Ukraine:

The trucks of supplies have been joined by helicopters, surface-to-air missile systems, and possible anti-aircraft weapons systems. According to The Interpreter, this weapon [in the tweet above] is possibly a 9K22 Tunguska battery, which had been mounted onto a Kamaz truck. Tunguskas are anti-aircraft weapons that can fire both missiles and 30mm guns. They are capable of shooting down low-altitude aircraft, although the gun can also be used against ground troops. … The Russian convoy has raised a number of red flags, even aside from this heavy contingent of guns and armor. The convoy has failed to abide by conditions put in place by both Ukraine and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — the convoy is traveling under the ICRC flag, yet the organization has not been able to verify the contents of the trucks.

If it really is just a humanitarian convoy and not a Trojan Horse as the Ukrainian government believes, Linda Kinstler considers what Russia stands to gain by sending aid to Ukraine:

Kremlin propaganda portrays the Kiev government as fascist junta that’s committing humanitarian atrocities to its own people, oligating Russia to step in and defend its brothers over the border. Rostov, the Russian town through which the convoy is rumored to be traveling, has been trumpeted in the Russian press as the place where some 13,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled – almost certainly a huge overestimation. A relative of mine who lives there told me that volunteers have been going door to door soliciting food donations for the refugees, and that the local population has been mobilized in support of Russia’s humanitarian mission. Now, Russians will be able to cheer on the humanitarian convoy as it passes through their towns, bolstering Putin’s already sky-high approval ratings at home. It will also be a welcome sight for those in Ukraine who feel abandoned by Poroshenko’s government. “The population of Donetsk is going to look out and say, ‘the Russians care about us,’” says Kipp.

Sending the convoy also buys Putin insurance against the separatists, who could very well bring their fight back across the border if things don’t go their way in Ukraine.

Previous Dish on the possibility of a Russian invasion here and here.

Can The Anti-War Movement Defeat Clinton?

by Dish Staff

Probably not. Weigel highlights the hawkishness of Democrats, period:

When Bill Clinton was president, Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to support military action—if Bill Clinton said it was necessary. Not sold yet? Consider that the mainstream left position on Iraq, from 2002 to 2008—from Al Gore to Howard Dean to Barack Obama—was that America needed to focus its might and money on the conflict in Afghanistan. And consider that Democrats voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton after he came out for military actions in Pakistan with or without the approval of the country’s government, and she disagreed.

The evidence, I think, is that the entire country is more skeptical of foreign intervention in the wake of the disastrous Iraq war, but that Democrats have remained generally supportive of foreign intervention if it’s backed by their president and directed toward a stated goal. Clinton’s stances on Iran negotiations and Israel are more problematic. But if you’re wondering whether there’s an anti-war movement ready to beat her, ask yourself when was the last time you saw a left-wing anti-war protest. Who was the president?

Nate Silver figures that “the odds that a challenger will emerge from the left flank of the Democratic Party and overtake Clinton remain low”:

As my colleague Harry Enten pointed out in May, Clinton has generally done as well or better in polls of liberal Democrats as among other types of Democrats. Between September and March, an average of 70 percent of liberal Democrats named her as their top choice for the 2016 nomination as compared to 65 percent of Democrats overall. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted more recently showed Clinton with 72 percent of the primary vote among liberal Democrats as compared to 66 percent of all Democrats. And a CNN poll conducted last month gave her 66 percent of the liberal Democratic vote against 67 percent of all Democrats.

The CNN poll is slightly more recent than the others, but if there’s been a meaningful change in how rank-and-file liberal Democrats perceive Clinton, you’d have to squint to see it. Perhaps more important, it’s extremely rare to see a non-incumbent candidate poll so strongly so early. In the earliest stages of the 2008 Democratic nomination race, Clinton was polling between 25 percent and 40 percent of the vote — not between 60 percent and 70 percent, as she is now. Clinton could lose quite a bit of Democratic support and still be in a strong position.

Kilgore seconds Silver:

Now Nate issues all the usual disclaimers about strange things sometimes happening betwixt the lip and the cup, and it’s all true; it’s still very “early” and all. But on the other hand, we’re just seventeen months away from the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, and every day that passes makes the task of knocking off a heavy front-runner there more daunting. At just a few weeks after this point eight years ago, Barack Obama was headlining the Harkin Steak Fry. John Edwards had basically never stopped campaigning in Iowa after running a close second there in 2004. As her deputy campaign manager Mike Henry famously (if unsuccessfully) argued in the spring of 2007, Clinton was walking into a big trap in Iowa, one that snared her fatally (not just because she lost the Caucuses, but because of the vast resources she expended while losing). If there are any such storm clouds on the horizon now, I don’t see them.

Regardless, Clinton’s recent unforced errors made Cassidy call Clinton’s campaign skills into question:

For a professional politician, these are rookie errors. For a politician who has been under intense scrutiny for more than twenty years, they were almost inexplicable.

The benign explanation is that, since leaving the State Department, Clinton’s gotten a bit rusty, and that’s why she went out on book tour: to sharpen up and get her errors in early. As anybody who has seen her perform in public can testify, she is knowledgeable, brimming with energy, personable, and even, on occasion, funny. Once she regains her sea legs, the optimistic argument goes, these attributes will come across to the public at large, and she’ll be fine.

That may well happen. But she’s been “out there” for quite a while now, and this was another self-inflicted blow. Does she still have the self-discipline and determination that it takes to stay on-message twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire Presidential campaign? The answer isn’t immediately obvious.

 

 

Libertarian Morality

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

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Dismissing the naysayers, Damon Linker argues that the Libertarian moment has indeed arrived … sort of:

America clearly is becoming more libertarian — it’s just that the transformation is happening in morality and culture, not in economic, tax, and regulatory policy. The swift and broad-based triumph of the movement for gay marriage and the rapid rise in acceptance of marijuana legalization are the most obvious examples. But the source of these changes is deeper than the policies themselves — and may lead to other changes down the road.

Linker asserts that the prevailing cultural attitude in America right now is one of radical non-judgment: 

Consider the phenomenon of Miriam Weeks (Belle Knox), the Duke University undergrad who’s become a breakout celebrity (and something of a libertarian folk hero) for proudly admitting that she works as a porn actress to pay for her education. Pornography is obviously nothing new. But what is new — aside from its easy and costless availability online in effectively infinite quantities and varieties — is the claim that we shouldn’t judge Weeks’ decision to earn a living by having sex for money and in public, which is often the subtext behind discussion of her job choice. At least when the discussion isn’t explicitly framed to make her look like a saint for “empowering women and sex workers.”

In our libertarian paradise, moral judgments are perfectly acceptable, as long as they praise and never blame.

I take issue with that last quip – libertarian-minded folks are plenty capable of placing blame at the feet of people who deserve it. We have no problem expressing moral disapproval of an administration that rains death on innocent people, or of the insane militarization of our police force and the attendant terror it’s causing. We cast stones at those who let their own discomfort come before women’s safety and those who think any abuse by the state is warranted once someone has committed a crime. These are absolutely moral judgements – you don’t have mere differences of opinion on whether it’s okay to kill Pakistani children and African-American teenagers. We just don’t tend to be big on blaming people for failing to live up to some arbitrarily constructed sexual-morality code.

That’s not to say libertarians are all polyamorous pro-porn potheads (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In some places out west, self-proclaimed libertarians often look much more like Mormons than libertines. The only libertarian line in the sand on things like these involves government force, and it’s perfectly possible to be horrified at prostitution, gay strip clubs, and marijuana edibles and still not want them banned or regulated onerously. That is not an anti-libertarian position.

I understand the kind of cultural libertarianism Linker is writing about is oft predicated on the opposite – people’s personal desire not to be judged for their behavior becomes a rallying cry for less stigma generally. But I also submit that stigma reduction isn’t only the feel-good ra-ra bullshit some purport it to be. I, too, cringe at talk of how porn “empowers” women (what empowers women depends on the woman; individual women may feel empowered by sex work, just as individual women may feel empowered by mastering French, but neither present a net gain or loss for feminism). But I do believe that a “woman’s decision to earn a living by having sex” should be allowed, without abuse or jail time or insane regulations. And if you want people to stop treating sex workers’ lives as expendable and start supporting policies that treat sex work like any other kind of work, then reducing stigma goes a long way.

(Image via Flickr)

Agree? Disagree? Email us at dish@andrewsullivan.com

Blaming Lead, Not Hormones

by Dish Staff

Yglesias flags a study that links declining teen pregnancy rates to the decline of leaded gasoline:

What [researcher Jessica Wolpow Reyes] does is take advantage of the fact that leaded gasoline was phased out unevenly across states in the late-1970s and early-1980s to generate some not-quite-experimental data. You can see the results here:

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(Source: Jessica Wolpow Reyes)

Similar results are found for related “risky” behaviors such as the odds of having sex and drinking at an early age.

It’s worth reflecting on the ways in which the political system is rigged to congenitally under-regulate these kind of health hazards. If you, as a politician, take a stand that goes against the financial interests of some group of incumbent industries your reward is that significant social ills are alleviated … Fifteen to 20 years after your proposal is phased into place. No governor or president – and very few senior legislators – sticks around long enough to claim credit for these things.

Kevin Drum, anti-lead advocate, is far from surprised:

This is not a brand-new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. …

The neurological basis for the lead-crime theory suggests that childhood lead exposure affects parts of the brain that have to do with judgment, impulse control, and executive functions. This means that lead exposure is likely to be associated not just with violent crime, but with juvenile misbehavior, drug use, teen pregnancy, and other risky behaviors. And that turns out to be the case. Reyes finds correlations with behavioral problems starting at a young age; teen pregnancy; and violent crime rates among older children.