Abortion Foes Are Winning

Conservatives are winning their war against abortion by adopting tactics pioneered by liberal supporters of abortion rights.

Being pro-abortion, I do not want to see the right of a woman to obtain an abortion disappear. It is clear, however, that this is what is slowly happening and the road map is clear — conservatives are finally embracing the paternalistic, Big Brother solutions of their liberal counterparts. A case in point is the nomination of Tommy Thompson to head Health and Human Services.

Thompson is anti-abortion and was asked what, if anything, he would do about RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. RU-486 suppresses a hormone required to continue a pregnancy in the early stages.

Rather than wax on about unborn children and abortion as potentially being a murderous act, Thompson had a ready made answer. He would review the drug to make sure it was “safe.” According to Thompson,

I do not intend to roll back anything unless they are proven to be unsafe. It’s a new drug. It’s contentious. It’s controversial. And the safety concerns, as I understand it, are something that’s in question. And I think it’s my role to review the safety concerns for women in the United States on that drug (and) all drugs.

This is a clever repackaging of traditional anti-abortion views. Having lost the debate over whether or not it is moral to ever abort a pregnancy, anti-abortion activists will emphasize safety and health concerns and gradually chip away at support for legalized abortion. The beauty is that liberals, who otherwise support abortion, have laid the groundwork for this assault on abortion rights.

Liberals have established a very amorphous standard of “safety,” for example, and proclaimed that the state has a moral duty to intervene to afford citizens such safety, even when they don’t want such protection. Conservatives are preparing to deftly turn the regulatory state against abortion rights, and when the dust is cleared they will probably succeed in establishing a good deal of onerous restrictions on the procedure.

Source:

Bush Cabinet Nominee Says to Review Abortion Pill. Adam Entous, Reuters, January 19, 2001

Some Universities Announce They Won’t Carry RU-486

In several weeks, the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 drug will hit pharmacy shelves — but not at the pharmacies of health centers at many colleges and universities. Already, Emory University, The University of Georgia, Boston University, and the entire Florida public university system have announced that their health centers will offer RU-486.

There are several reasons for these decisions, perhaps the biggest begin the ridiculous restrictions that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration slapped onto the drug. Health facilities that are very close to hospitals might be able to meet the strict requirements, but most university health systems simply don’t have the sort of facilities to meet the FDA’s requirements.

An option not mentioned, but certainly on the minds of universities must also be the possibilities of lawsuits. RU-486 has a number of occasionally severe side effects and university systems might be afraid of becoming the deep pocket victims of lawsuits.

And, of course, some colleges and universities simply want to avoid getting caught up in the abortion controversy. You can bet that many state legislatures will consider bills in the coming years to withhold funds for state-sponsored universities and colleges that offer RU-486, along with heightened abortion-related protests at institutions regardless of what decision they make (with the pro-lifers being outraged if they offer it, and the pro-abortion contingent outraged if it’s not offered).

Source:

Many Campuses Won’t Offer Abortion Pill. Kris Osborn, Fox News, October 24, 2000.

Should Men Have A Right to Choose Too?

Cathy Young has a very long, very well written piece in Salon.Com about an idea originally propounded by the men’s rights movement that is likely to be tested in courts within the decade — do men have unequal rights when it comes to issue of abortion that should be solved via a legal remedy?

The basic argument simply turns pro-choice argument on its head. If women should be able to have control over entering in to parental obligations, why not men as well? The idea seems inane at first, but most of the arguments against it, in one way or another, rely on claims that abortion rights activists already say are preposterous when used by pro-lifers. Typically feminists reply that if men don’t want to have to pay child support they should keep their pants on, which is a crude version of an early argument against abortion — if women don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t sleep around. As Young notes, there is a “willingness to liberate women but not men from the unwanted consequences of sex…”

Young quotes from a Planned Parenthood pamphlet, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal,” which says, in part,

At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?

Young essentially wants to know that if they are serious about the rhetoric, why shouldn’t men have the same opportunities. And if not, why not?

Most people of the folks who support the so-called men’s right to choose typically have some scheme whereby either parent is able to forego parental obligations — women can obviously abort a fetus as a remedy, and typically the remedy for men would be to renounce parental obligations during the pregnancy.

Does this sort of thinking make sense? Up to a point there are some important insights to be taken away from this sort of argument, but ultimately it has no chance of being accepted by courts and is suspect morally. The problem for feminists, however, is that the reason most people will find the men’s right to choose arguments fallacious is the persistent sexual stereotypes which see men as economic providers for children. The idea of father simply being able to renounce their parental obligations is probably revolting non-feminists and feminists alike (who, when contemplating it, might get a hint of how pro-lifers feel about the idea of a woman being able to abort a fetus) largely because of expectations society has of fathers.

Personally I think that’s, on balance, a very good thing. Besides technological solutions on the horizon such as the male birth control pill are likely to put men and women on more equal technological footing when it comes to controlling reproduction, and a massive change of the sort proposed by those advocating for a man’s right to choose would be a very bad idea.

On the other hand there is a subset of cases of forced fatherhood which Young cites which probably does deserve additional looking into. Namely, how should the law handle the responsibilities of a man when he is forced into being a father thanks to nonconsensual sexual activity?

Young finds a couple of doozies that are stunning. In one case a woman seeking to get pregnant took advantage of a male co-worker who had passed out drunk at a party, and subsequently bragged to friends that she saved a trip to the sperm bank. In another, a woman had oral sex with a man and requested he use a condom. Afterward, unbeknownst to him, she used a syringe to retrieve semen and inseminate herself. In both cases, the mothers sued for and won child support payments from the involuntary father.

And of course there was a much-reported case of a woman convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 12 year-old. Even though the state concurred that this was in fact a criminal sexual act, the young boy was forced to pay child support when he was 18.

Some sort of legal remedy is in order for those sorts of bizarre cases, but otherwise dramatic legal changes in the way parental obligations are established would be a very bad idea.

Source:

A man’s right to choose. Cathy Young, Salon.Com, October 19, 2000.

As If RU-486 Needed Any Additional Controversy…

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally approved RU-486, it would not release the name or location of the company that would manufacture the drug for the U.S. market citing safety and security reasons. In fact it looks like it wanted to avoid a public relations problem that it’s going to have to deal with anyway — Hua Lian Pharmaceutical Company in Shanghai, China, will produce the drug.

Clearly the FDA was less concerned about safety concerns than getting attacked by anti-abortion activists for awarding the contract to China with its repressive dictatorial regime and history of extreme population control measures.

National Right to Life’s Douglas Johnson quickly attacked the FDA after the Washington Post revealed where the drug would be manufactured, telling the Associated Press,

They said they wanted to protect the company from violence or protests, but it’s ludicrous to say that it is an issue in China, where demonstrations aren’t permitted. It’s a public relations problem they want to avoid — they don’t want the association with Chinese coercive abortion practices.

This is just going to increase the level of controversy surrounding the drug and create a public relations nightmare for anti-abortion groups to latch on to. This FDA decision is likely to prove a disaster, and the FDA should seriously try to find a manufacturer in a more democratic nation to produce RU-486.

Source:

China plant to make U.S. abortion pill. The Associated Press, October 12, 2000.

RU-486 Becomes A Hot Political Issue

The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

FDA Approves RU486 — With Restrictions

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today finally approved the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 after more than 12 years of battles between pro- and anti-abortion forces. Unfortunately while they approved it, the FDA attached ridiculous restrictions to the drug that will make obtaining the drug more of a hassle for women.

The drug, originally developed in France, blocks a hormone, progesterone, which in turn causes the lining of the uterine wall to thin resulting in a spontaneous abortion. The drug is more than 90 percent effect in causing an abortion if taken within 49 days of the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual period.

In a bizarre, though not unexpected, move, the FDA placed numerous restrictions on RU486 approving it only for distribution by doctors who, as the Associated Press described it, “can operate in case a surgical abortion is needed to finish the job or in cases of severe bleeding — or to doctors who have made advance arrangements for a surgeon to provide such care to their patients.”

This is ridiculous. This would be like saying that only surgeons able to preform back surgery should be able to dispense medication for back pain. Millions of people see non-surgeons for heart and other ailments which might later call for surgery without having to find a doctor who himself is a surgeon.

The Associated Press story on the approval speculates RU486 might become an issue of debate in upcoming presidential election, but oddly claimed that

Republican candidate George W. Bush opposes abortion; his father’s administration banned RU-486 from this country in 1989. The pro-choice Clinton-Gore administration worked for seven years to bring mifepristone here.

No, actually, Clinton-Gore did absolutely nothing for the past 7 years while the FDA stood around and dragged its feet on a drug approval that should have been extraordinarily routine, and apparently did nothing to try to dissuade the FDA of the ridiculous conditions they attached to the drug.

Source:

FDA approves abortion pill. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.