Many pro-lifers still decline to use any vaccine that was not ethically derived, choosing instead to face the risk of contracting and spreading preventable, often fatal diseases.
Whatever is keeping Americans from taking full advantage of vaccines, this potential new shingles vaccine is a step in the right direction, and pro-lifers are rightly heartened by the possible advent of at least one ethically-derived vaccine. It’s a bit early to celebrate, though.
Read the rest at the Register.
Chinese couples will soon be permitted by the state to have two children. According to the New York Times, the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua has announced that the Communist party is relaxing its decades-old population control policy, which brutally punished couples for having more than one child.
Read the rest at the Register.
Was it a senseless tragedy, or was it a slice of richly deserved jungle justice when the hitchBOT, a hitchhiking “robot” (actually just a vaguely humanoid prop with a computer chip in it) got curbstomped by some jackass in an Eagles jersey, ending a sojourn over two continents?
We can probably all agree that an adult who beats up someone else’s robot for no reason is a jerk. Fine. But what about when kids beat up robots? Are they just jerks in training? Or are they onto something?
Tech Insider reports that Japanese researchers are working on programming assistive robots to avoid large groups of young children, because they’ve noticed that little kids have a tendency to push, hit, kick and throw things at robots they find wandering around public spaces:
If there’s one other thing we learned from the study, it’s that young kids may possess frightening moral principles about robots.
… nearly three-quarters of the 28 kids interviewed “perceived the robot as human-like,” yet decided to abuse it anyway. That and 35% of the kids who beat up the robot actually did so “for enjoyment.”
The researchers go on to conclude:
From this finding, we speculate that, although one might consider that human-likeness might help moderating the abuse, humanlikeness is probably not that powerful way to moderate robot abuse. […] [W]e face a question: whether the increase of human-likeness in a robot simply leads to the increase of children’s empathy for it, or favors its abuse from children with a lack of empathy for it
“Frightening moral principles”? “Yet decided to abuse it anyway”? I’m not going to argue that it’s okay for kids to go whacking stuff (although the “abuse” caught on the videos in the Tech Insider post don’t strike me as horrific). I’m just curious about what would motivate kids to want to do it. Is it just because they’re bad kids, and do these findings point to some terrifying truth about man’s inhumanity to manlike robots?
The kids weren’t just indiscriminately violent toward robots; they were more violent toward robots who were designed to be more humanlike, and the story implies that this phenomenon demonstrates some moral failing in the kids. But I think it demonstrates that kids are smarter than adults.
Adults tend to speak as if machines may actually be able to achieve humanity once they’ve been programmed to imitate it well enough. We’ve been prodding this idea since Isaac Asimov was in short pants. When adults are confronted with something that looks and sounds as behaves like a human, but which may or may not be human, we may laugh, or shake our heads, or feel ashamed, or meekly submit, asking ourselves, “Well, what does it mean to be human, after all?”
But when it happens to kids, it makes them mad.
I remember being that kid. I didn’t just dislike ventriloquist’s dummies; I was angryat them. I felt that someone was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, and I resented it. The world was very confusing, and I was expected to swallow unreasonable and nonsensical ideas every single day (the world is round? The sun isn’t really moving? Baking chocolate doesn’t taste good, even though it’s chocolate? What the hell, adults?). The last thing I needed was more flim flammery.
The story continues:
[T]he more human a robot looks — and fails to pass out of the “uncanny valley” of robot creepiness — the more likely it may be to attract the tiny fisticuffs of toddlers. If true, the implications could be profound, both in practical terms (protecting robots) as well as ethical ones (human morality).
Practical implications, sure. If an old lady needs a robot to carry her groceries, they should protect the robot. But ethical implications? Also yes — but not the ones that the researchers seem to think.
For kids, “is this a real person or isn’t it?” isn’t just an unsettling intellectual exercise – it’s a matter of life and death. They don’t know what is real and what is not real, what is human and what is not human, and it’s very important that they figure it out. When they can’t, it makes them angry. A robot is not a person, and when adults expect them to behave as if it is one, they will put the impostor in its place with their small fists and feet. And, God help us, they’re onto something that so many of us are allowing ourselves to ignore.
We stroke our chins over how much autonomy human-shaped robots ought to have … and at the same time, we shrug and speak of “line item” costs when what we have in our hands — literally, in our hands, dripping with real human blood — is demonstrably a human being.
It is a good thing to rebel against bad things, and blurring the line between human and non-human is a very bad thing indeed. Is this human, or is this not? It matters. It matters. If we can decide, by fiat, that a manufactured thing should be treated with the respect that we owe to human beings, then we can decide, by fiat, that a human being can be treated like a sack of parts. This is happening now, today, constantly, horribly. It matters.
And the robot researchers talk about troubling ethical implications. Well, show a fifteen-week fetus to those Japanese children, and ask them if it’s okay to slice it up and sell the pieces. Then we can talk about “ethical implications.” Then we can talk about who has “frightening moral principles.”
Hold the line, kids. It really is a matter of life and death.
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image is a screenshot grabbed from the video found here.
In great men, two traits go together: strength and control. Power, and the knowledge of how to use that power, and when, and why.
There’s no merit in producing testosterone; but there is great merit, for the whole world, when men learn how to use it, and when they learn how to be in control of it, rather than letting it control them. Great men know when to hold their strength in check, and how to use it for the right things. Great men use their strength to protect.
Read the rest at the Register.
Photo of boy holding salamander by Simcha Fisher:
Yes, the videos are working. And yes, it helps when you write to your rep! Or at least it seems to have worked in my state of NH, where the executive council just voted to snatch $639,000 in state funding away from Planned Parenthood. That accounts for about a third of their public funding. (Their federal funding is, of course, untouched.) The $639,000 will go to four other health clinics.
According to the local TV news site:
Republican councilor Chris Sununu was at the center of attention Wednesday. He has previously voted to support Planned Parenthood contracts. In 2011, when the council rejected a contract with Planned Parenthood, he was one of two Republicans to buck his party and vote in favor of the contract. Sununu is now widely known to be considering a run for governor in 2016. He said he received more than 1,000 messages from constituents and they overwhelmingly urged him to reject the contract.
Sununu comes from a family of socially useless conservatives, but he obviously believes that the politically expedient thing, at least right now, is to back away from the increasingly toxic Planned Parenthood.
Sununu said multiple times that he is pro-choice and thinks the state should look for other providers to contract with for family planning services.
“Things are different now,”he said. “We have to take a step back and just take a pause and say ‘Is this a company and a business that we should be actively engaging (with)?’”
No, friend, it is not.
It doesn’t look like council has the muscle to force an investigation of Planned Parenthood right now. Our governor, who is lackluster on a good day, thinks there’s nothing to see here. But there are eight more videos to come. They appear to be increasingly damning, and I have high hopes that at least some states will investigate the deeply corrupt monolith that is Planned Parenthood, and will find malfeasance and fraud as well as violations of federal law. We may really see the foundation beginning to crack at last.
And yes, I’m taking some pleasure in thinking about how badly Cecile Richards must be sleeping, wondering what else is out there. May she have a change of heart as she squirms.
The main takeaway? Take the time to write those letters, even if it’s just an auto-generated email from a pro-life site. Even if your reps only listen to you because they want to keep their jobs, they may actually be listening!
On Wednesday, NH voted to withdraw nearly $650,000 of state funding from Planned Parenthood. Even the pro-choice legislatures of our state have long chafed against funding the top-heavy, corrupt, inefficient monolith of Planned Parenthood — not because we love babies, but because we hate wasting money.
Naturally, people concerned about the poor are upset about the vote to defund, because Planned Parenthood is like the classic abusive boyfriend: They’ve got us convinced that we need them, we’re going to be lost without them, we’re no goodwithout them, we’ll never make it on our own.
Yes, well.
New Hampshire is actually a pretty good state to be a poor woman in (it’s rated 7th in the nation for the quality of its healthcare).
I should know, having been a poor woman in New Hampshire for the last forty years, give or take a few sojourns north and south. I have always gotten free, excellent prenatal care and postpartum care, free pap smears, free breast exams, free STD testing, and — well, I’ve been offered free birth control, if by “offered” you mean bombarded with non-stop, wall-to-wall, relentless harangues about how important it is for me to get my free birth control now now now. Even when I told them I didn’t want it, they put a bag of condoms in my suitcase at the hospital anyway.
I have gotten all of these things for free. And I have never set foot in a Planned Parenthood.
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
NH has offered free medical care to children, pregnant women and the elderly and disabled for years, and it recently expanded Medicaid to cover all poor people. Here is a pdf of the handbook that lists (starting on page 15) all the services which are free to poor people. It includes preventative care, including regular wellness check-ups, and all prenatal care, including nurse midwife services, pregnancy related services, services for conditions that might complicate pregnancy, lab work, birthing centers, family planning, medically necessary hysterectomy, prescription drugs, and a myriad of programs to help you have a healthy pregnancy. They literally pay you to take care of your baby, offering cash incentives for well-child check-ups.
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
New Hampshire will take the $600,000+ they were going to give to Planned Parenthood and instead will distribute it among the Concord Feminist Health Center, the Joan G. Lovering Health Center on the Seacoast and Weeks Medical Center in the North Country.
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
New Hampshire’s Let No Woman Be Overlooked Breast and Cervical Cancer Programoffers
women’s health exams, mammograms, pap test, and pelvic exams to women age 21-64 who have no health insurance or have insurance that does not pay for screening tests and with family incomes at or below 250% of the Federal Poverty Level.
Here is the list of sites which offer free mammograms and pap smears:
Berlin Coos County Family Health Services – North 752-2900
Colebrook Indian Stream Community Health Center, Inc. 237-8336
Concord Concord Hospital Family Health Center, Concord 227-7000×2921
Conway White Mountain Community Health Center 447-8900 x305
Derry Women’s Health Associates 421-2526
Franconia Ammonoosuc Community Health Services 444-2464 x0
Franklin Health First Family Care Center 934-0177
Gorham Coos County Family Health Services – South 466-2741
Groveton Weeks Medical Center 788-2521
Hillsboro Concord Hospital Family Health Center, Hillsboro 464-3434
Keene Cheshire Medical Center 354-6679
Laconia LRG Healthcare 524-3211 x2940
Lebanon Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center 653-9321
Littleton Ammonoosuc Community Health Services 444-2464 x0
Manchester Catholic Medical Center 626-2626
Manchester Elliot Hospital 668-3067
Manchester Manchester Community Health Center 626-9500
Nashua Lamprey Health Care 883-1626
Nashua St. Joseph Hospital 882-3000 x67188
Newmarket Lamprey Health Care 659-3106 x7455
Newport Newport Health Center 863-4100
North Conway Memorial Hospital 356-5461 x2388
Peterborough Monadnock Community Hospital 924-1795
Plymouth Speare Memorial Hospital 536-1104
Portsmouth Families First of the Greater Seacoast 422-8208 x222
Raymond Lamprey Health Care 895-3351 x7390
Somersworth Goodwin Community Health Center 749-2346
Warren Ammonoosuc Community Health Services 444-2464 x 0
Whitefield Ammonoosuc Community Health Services 444-2464 x 0
Wolfeboro Huggins Hospital 569-7500
Woodsville Ammonoosuc Community Health Services 444-2464 x 0
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
Uninsured people can get STD testing, pregnancy tests, counselling, and ultrasounds at these clinics around the state. My daughter volunteered at one of these clinics. It’s a few blocks away from Planned Parenthood, and unlike Planned Parenthood, but like many of the other clinics around the state, it also offers things like free diapers and baby clothes, car seats and strollers, parenting classes, and help navigating social services.
Without $650,000 from the state.
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
Here is a list of FDA certified mammography facilities. It includes nearly 9,000 places where women can get mammograms. Planned Parenthood is not one of them. Not one. Because they don’t offer mammograms, but only referrals (i.e. a piece of paper with an actual doctor’s address on it) for mammograms.
But what would we do without Planned Parenthood?
The truth is, most of what Planned Parenthood offers is abortion. That’s their cash cow. The reason they say it’s only 3% of their business is because they count everything that goes along with abortion as an individual service: you go in because you’re pregnant, and they give you a pregnancy test, and an STD test, and an abortion, maybe some antibiotics, and a box of birth control pills. Guess what? Planned Parenthood just provided five services — and abortion was a mere 20%. Now mix in a bunch of teenagers who stop by to get free condoms, and it’s pretty easy to get that number down to 3%.
It’s a stupid game, but it works. And it makes people think,
What would we do without Planned Parenthood?
We would do fine.
We would do fine.
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Many Americans call themselves pro-choice, but are uncomfortable with unlimited abortion on demand, and these videos could help tip the balance in their hearts. But even as we hope and pray that the videos accomplish this conversion, let’s not forget another large population of Americans, whose hearts matter just as much: the population of women who have had abortions.
***
“I Don’t Own My Child’s Body” is the weirdly melodramatic title of a parenting piece from CNN Living. (It’s from 2012, but is making the rounds again.) You can see from the URL that the original title was probably something more like, “Give Grandma a Hug” — and that’s really all the piece is about. The author’s kid sometimes doesn’t feel like hugging or kissing somebody, so her mom doesn’t make her:
She doesn’t have to hug or kiss anyone just because I say so, not even me. I will not override my own child’s currently strong instincts to back off from touching someone who she chooses not to touch.
Okay, lady. Big deal. I don’t make my kid take off her favorite outfit, which happens to be a heavily upholstered puppy costume, but it’s because (a) it’s not hurting anyone, and (b) I’m saving my strength for the big battles. And I also don’t make my kids hug or kiss people they don’t want to hug or kiss. Like the author’s child, they are required to be polite, but not in a way that skeeves them out. But then the author goes on to say:
I figure her body is actually hers, not mine.
She then quotes a mental health clinician who says that insisting that your child hug a relative
sends a message that there are certain situations [when] it’s not up to them what they do with their bodies … If they are obligated to be affectionate even if they don’t want to, it makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse later on.
She backs this up with a warning from parenting blogger Jennifer Lehr:
“Certainly no parent would wish for their teenager or adult child to feel pressure to reciprocate unwanted sexual advances, yet many teach their children at a young age that it’s their job to use their bodies to make others happy,” [Lehr] said
The readers of the piece largely agreed with the author, many of them immediately bringing up the phrase “rape culture.” They firmly believe that there is a direct, possibly inevitable line between “Please give Grammy a kiss, because it makes her happy” and “Please put out for the entire varsity football team, because it makes you valuable as a person.”
I suppose it’s possible that some kids could make that connection, but only if there are other severe problems with the family of origin or with the child’s mental or emotional health. Healthy families with standard-issue kids do not need to be on permanent freak-out mode about their kids’ bodies. What you do is you tell your kids, “Look, unless I say it’s okay, like at the doctor’s office, nobody is supposed to touch you under your clothes, and nobody is supposed to get near the parts of your bodies that are covered by underwear. And if somebody does something that makes you feel creepy, you tell Mom or Dad right away.” And then you give them lots and lots of examples of normal affectionate behavior, so they can tell the difference between things you go along with, and things you fight.
This article, with its ludicrous leap of logic, reminded me of a phenomenon I see more and more: the most progressive parents, those who embrace every modern degradation of sex, marriage, and childbearing, are the ones who are the most likely to go completely overboard when trying to keep their children safe. I don’t know a darn thing about the author of this article, but if she’s writing for a major news outlet, chances are she’s not pro-life. Her audience certainly isn’t likely to be. And yet here she is, saying, “I don’t own my child’s body.”
I’m going to try really hard not to talk about abortion here, because I don’t want to have the same old, same old, same old conversation. I know that pro-lifers will say, “If you don’t own your child’s body, then you don’t have the right to murder him in the womb!” and pro-choicers will say, “If a child owns his own body, then so do I, and that includes anything that might be inside my body, like a parasitic fetus!”
So let’s not even talk about that phrase, “I don’t own my child’s body.” Let’s talk about why this kind of article is so common — why, as our culture accepts more and more horrors as commonplace, there is an attendant increase in hysteria over little things, trivial dangers, potential risks.
Why do we fret over the dangers of hugging, but shrug aside — well, death? The death of babies. The crushing of heads, the marketing of organs. How is this possible?
It’s not enough to say, “Hypocrisy! Evil!” I believe the two phenomena, the hyper-tenderness and the cruelty, are actually related: one comes from the other.
We look around, compare our world to that of our grandparents, and the guilt seeps in like blood through a bandage. We know there is something amiss – all of us do. And so we compensate by making sure that we’re assiduous about bodily integrity and safety for our chosen children.
Extremism is a very convenient mask for existential negligence and evil. When we get hysterical over something minor, we feel like we’ve done our duty — we’ve hit all the right notes: I CARE about my child. I THINK about how I am raising her. I have GUIDING PRINCIPLES that sometimes make other people feel uncomfortable. I’m not AFRAID to tackle the hard issues.
And once you’ve hit the right notes, it’s easier to tell yourself that you’re singing a tune that is very beautiful indeed — never mind that that “Ave Maria“ and “Deutschland Uber Alles” have a lot of notes in common, too. It’s no coincidence that modern people are capable of both deep cruelty and overly fastidious care: these are two sides of the same coin.
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It helps to know which organs you are hoping to retrieve, Nucatola explains:
So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium [head], in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex, because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium.
Read the rest at the Register, including video highlights, full video, and full transcript
Catholics who are in dissent from the Church – those who reject Church teaching on contraception, or male priesthood, or whatever — often say that the Church is right about everything else, but regrettably wrong about this one issue.
And those of us who are not in dissent respond incredulously, “How could that be? How could the Church be right about the resurrection, and transubstantiation, and eternal life, but wrong about this one issue? How do you even swallow that idea?”
But it’s just as senseless to say, “I care so deeply about this one important moral issue that I refuse to even acknowledge that there are other important moral issues.” And yet this is exactly what we’re hearing in the wake of the four paper’s joint editorial condemning the death penalty in the U.S. The comboxes are pretty much wall-to-wall reiterations of this argument: “Death penalty for criminals? Who cares? What I care about as a Catholic is ending the slaughter of the innocent unborn!”
This attitude displays a deep and disastrous misunderstanding of the consistency and interconnectedness of Church doctrine. The Church is consistent. Utterly consistent. All of her teachings spring from a unified understanding of what God is like and what human life is for.
So if we are going to pish-tush at some teaching of the Church — like the teaching that the death penalty is only to be used as a last resort when there is no other way of keeping society safe* — calling it “marginal” or “liberal,” or saying that we just can’t get ourselves to care about it? Then we are very close to being in dissent. At very least, we have what I might call a “dissenting mentality”: pretending to submit to the guidance of the Church, but actually only adhering to and defending the doctrines which appeal to us, while ignoring, scorning, or even openly defying the ones which we don’t like.
[the following paragraph added at 11 eastern for clarity:] I’m not talking about people who truly believe that the death penalty is, in some cases, the only way to keep society safe. I believe they are wrong, and that in this country, in this century, there is no compelling reason to execute any prisoner. But who I’m talking about is people who openly reject what the Catechism teaches: who say, “The hell with that. Blood demands blood. Some people are just scum of the earth, and justice demands that we wipe them clean.”
If some doctrine makes us uneasy, and we admit that we don’t like it or understand it? No problem! That’s just being honest, and we all have some catching up to do. So pray, pray, pray, turn it constantly over to God, beg for understanding and the grace to submit, and have passionate arguments with people you respect. That’s fine. God never commands us to be instantly calm and happy about All the Catholic Things.
But for your own soul’s sake, if you have reservations or doubts, don’t be flippant or nasty about them, or, God forbid, proud of them. Belligerently parading around with a “dissenting mentality” is like going to a friend’s house, greeting the host nicely, displaying perfect manners during dinner, — and then going to the bathroom and crapping all over the floor. And then writing a gracious thank-you note for a lovely evening.
Guess what? It’s all one house. If you want to be a good guest, you have to behave yourself in every room.
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