Day: February 26, 2001

Drug Addict Charged With Killing Her Fetus

South Carolina is on the cutting edge of a controversial practice that will someday be decided by the Supreme Court — can women who take illegal drugs during her pregnancy be charged with child abuse?

South Carolina considers a fetus in the third trimester to be a person. As such, the law considers a woman who takes an illegal drug in the third trimester to be administering drugs to a child — a form of child abuse.

In May, South Carolina plans to place Regina McKnight on trial for the second time on charges that she smoked crack cocaine throughout the third trimester of her pregnancy which caused her unborn child to be stillborn. Among other crimes, McKnight has been charged with homicide.

McKnight’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this year after jurors admitted they had performed searches on the Internet about homicide by child abuse.

Feminists argue that the statute, if interpreted in this way, is so broad that it could be used to charge any woman who doesn’t follow precisely what the state thinks is the best pre-natal care.

Writing for Women’s ENews, Siobhan Morrissey, notes a previous case in which a woman spent 40 hours in labor and yet still refused to undergo the Caesarian section operation that her attending physicians recommended. In that case, doctors feared the fetus might be put into distress and considered invoking the child abuse law to force the woman to undergo the surgical procedure. She gave birth to a healthy child, however, before the law could be invoked.

South Carolina has also engaged in some extremely questionable law enforcement activities. In a case taken up by the Supreme Court, a South Carolina hospital took urine samples from pregnant women seeking prenatal care without their consent or knowledge. The hospital notified police about any women whose urine test showed evidence of drug use.

And, of course, there is the ever-present fear among feminists that laws that treat a fetus — even a late third-term fetus — as a person is the first step on the way to outlawing abortion.

Certainly some of South Carolina’s actions seem questionable, but at the same time if late third term abortions are ethically questionable — and polls show that most Americans are extremely uncomfortable with such abortions except to save a mother’s life — then smoking crack while in the 8th month of pregnancy seems equally questionable. Moreover, illegal drug use can do irreparable harm to what is essentially a fully formed human infant capable of living outside of the womb not to save a mother’s life or health, nor to erase the stigma of rape or incest, but simply to satisfy an addict’s need for drugs.

Even many hardcore supporters of abortion have come out strongly opposed to something like sex-selective abortion, and one wonders how those folks will oppose mothers who want to abort a female fetus while defending those who would expose dangerous drugs to fetuses that they fully intend to carry to term.

Source:

Cocaine user charged with fetal murder. Siobhan Morrissey, Women’s Enews, February 20, 2001.

IRS to Accomplish what the KKK Couldn’t: Shutting Down The Chicago Defender

One of the components of George W. Bush’s tax relief plan was a repeal of the estate tax. While it initially looked to be an easy early victory, a campaign started a couple weeks ago by billionaires in favor of the estate tax gave Democrats and other opponents of the tax a temporary boost. The basic argument of the billionaires was that a) without the tax, rich people will leave their inheritance to their children which gives them an unfair advantage, and b) without the tax charitable giving will decline.

Perhaps in their next paid advertisements the billionaires will cite the plight of The Chicago Defender as the sort of thing that proves the wonders that can be had by the estate tax.

Earlier in the century, The Defender was the most popular black newspaper, period. Started in 1905 by RObert Abbott with a 25 cent investment and a 300 copy print run, The Defender was the premier black newspaper by World War I with a total readership of upwards of 500,000. For twenty years, Langston Hughes wrote a weekly column for the paper and it played an instrumental role in many of the social and political movements of its day. The paper was, for example, one of the primary advocates of the northern migration of blacks that occurred after World War I.

Abbott didn’t achieve that level of success without some powerful enemies. Because of its coverage of lynchings and other racially tinged issues, white distributors in the South refused to carry the newspaper. The KKK threatened anyone who dared cell the paper and occasionally tried to confiscate copies of the paper that made their way south.

Although the Defender doesn’t have the national impact it once did, today it does have a paid daily circulation of 230,000, making it the fourth largest daily paper in Chicago. Unfortunately it’s run into an enemy that might finally be able to do what the KKK couldn’t: shut The Defender down. The latest enemy is the Internal Revenue Service.

Abbott’s nephew, John Sengstacke, took over publication of the paper. Sengstacke expanded the reach of his uncle’s news empire by buying several other black newspapers. In addition Sengstacke founded the National Negro Publishers Association which is now known as the National Newspaper Publishers Association. But despite all his good works Sengstacke committed the one unforgivable sin in the eyes of the IRS — he died.

Because he died and because The Defender was completely privately owned. At his death Sengstacke’s estate was worth about $10 million, and the IRS wants his heirs to pay a $4 million inheritance tax. Sengstacke’s family would like to keep the newspaper business within the family, but the only way it could meet the $4 million bill the IRS has socked it with would be to sell the paper.

Conservative News Service reports that the family has tried to reach a compromise with the IRS for a deferred tax payment plan which would allow the family to keep the paper and pay the taxes gradually, but the IRS is insisting that they pay the full amount.

This is the reality of the death tax. People who started with nothing and build up relatively modest estates compared to the billionaires who so love the tax end up being unable to keep the small business they created within their families. Instead privately owned papers end up in the hands of large corporations who have the advantage of never dying.

The billionaires in favor of the death tax are essentially arguing that at death every successful small businessman such as Sengstacke should be required to liquidate his assets or else waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers who can set up foundations and other arrangements that avoid the estate tax penalty but still leave heirs in control of their wealth (this is how, for example, the heirs to Henry Ford maintained control over the Ford Motor Company without having to pay exorbitant death taxes).

It is simply not the government’s role to determine how the wealth of dead people could be best allocated. That role is best left to those who actually earned said wealth. The estate tax should be repealed.

Source:

Legendary black-owned newspaper threatened by death tax. Gene J. Koprowski, Conservative News Service, February 22, 2001.

The Chicago Defender. PBS, No Date Given.

XFL Ratings Continue Downward Slide

After last week’s XFL ratings were released, there were a number of stories with quotes from Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol trying to spin the low ratings. I wonder how they’re going to spin the fact that the overnight ratings for this weekend’s game on NBC was a dismal 2.9.

Of course that rating couldn’t have been helped by a low-scoring game played under ugly weather conditions. NBC says it is definitely committed to a two year run, but look for chinks in that commitment. The other day McMahon was quoted to the effect that it might take a year longer than he thought for the league to hit profitability.

A good sign of a sinking ship is the rats lining up to jump off. Honda already decided against any further involvement with the XFL (Honda blamed the in-your-face attitude, but the low ratings probably had more to do with it).

The way things are going, by the middle of the XFL season (mid-March), ratings might be hovering closer to the 2.0 level and at that point NBC might be better off with their former Saturday Night Movie format.

Gore Still A Loser

The Miami-Herald recently completed its own recount of the Miami Dade “undervote” totals. The result?

Al Gore would have netted no more than 49 votes if a manual recount of Miami-Dade’s ballots had been completed, according to the review, which was sponsored by The Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder. That would have been 140 too few to overcome Bush’s lead, even when joined with Gore gains in Volusia, Palm Beach and Broward counties — the three other counties where Gore had requested manual recounts.

Project Entropia Beta Signup Begins March 1

The MMORPG Project Entropia will begin taking applications for beta testers beginning March 1. I mention this primarily to clarify something I wrote many months ago questioning the legitimacy of the game.

Specifically, the game has a pseudo-banking functions which lets you exchange real money online with other players in an interesting attempt to create a market-like system within the game. I was originally very skeptical about the game given the numerous regulations on money transfers.

Anyway, it turns out my skepticism was unwarranted and that this and similar online pseudo-banking schemes are at the moment not covered by banking regulations within the United States. PayPal, for example, also falls outside of the U.S. banking regulatory structure.

This state of affairs is unlikely to last long, however, as agencies which are used to spying on bank transactions are already lobbying to bring these new economic experiments under the same umbrella of regulations, but for the moment they’re completely legal and relatively regulation free.

Can Mites Smite Congo’s Cassava Problems?

Most people in the West have never heard of it, but in many parts of the developing world cassava is the most important food crop. In the war weary Democratic Republic of the Congo, cassava is a primary source of food for tens of millions of people.

Unfortunately, cassava crops in the Congo are under attack from the cassava green mite which, in many ways, is the cassava’s equivalent of the locust. Between the ongoing civil war and the green mite, cassava yields are down sharply threatening famine in Congo.

The International Institute for Tropical Agriculture hopes to head off starvation by fighting fire with fire — or in this case mite with mite. The IITA hopes to send thousands of samples of high-yield strains of cassava to the Congo accompanied by thousands of predator mites which happen to think the green mite makes a great meal. The hope is that the predator mites can dispatch the green mites and avoid a humanitarian disaster.

The IITA’s Alfred Dixon told The BBC that the predator mite is safe. “It is perfectly safe. We have tested it in laboratory and field conditions — there is no harmful side effect.” Apparently after the run out of green mites to eat, the predator mites are likely to die off as there isn’t much else that it eats, aside from green mites, that can be found in the Congo.

Source:

Saving Congo’s cassava. The BBC, February 18, 2001.