The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Wright and Wrong

3.18.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 4 of 4)

If Hillary can't win her party's nomination then she takes John McCain with her as well. Call it the Bear Stearns Effect, but on economic grounds alone, McCain now has as much chance of winning in November as Herbert Hoover. It was always going to be hard for a Republican, any Republican to win after eight years of George W Bush. A candidate as obnoxious to his own party as John McCain reduces his party's already faint prospects even more, but now that the whole financial edifice of Wall Street is seriously cracking, the prospects of a Republican win are virtually non-existent. McCain's only claim to fame is that he is less disagreeable than Hillary, but if she is no longer the competition then even that card no longer has any value. Advantage Obama -- game, set and match. The prospects for both Hillary and John McCain now have as much value as a Bear Stearns stock option -- save your money and spend it on Bobby Jindal 2012 bumper stickers, it will do a lot more good.
-- Christopher Holland
Canberra, Australia

KOOPED UP
Re: Daniel Allott's Safe, Legal, and Dishonest and George Neumayr's Reverse Discrimination:

In the past few days, Drudge has linked to: a) a story of how the Royal College of Psychiatrists has found that abortion tends to cause mental illness, leading to a call for lowering the age at which a baby can be aborted for certain reasons; and a call for making it more informed consent (cf. Allott) by warning the client that mental illness might result from abortion (women as second victims, Allott); b) a Planned Parenthood fundraiser caught affirming the idea of aborting black babies (another way for liberals to keep blacks down).

1) An assistant to Surgeon General Koop put forth a preliminary draft on the health and mental health effects of abortion as if it were a report from Koop. Some still mistakenly think it was an official report. Virtually all of the sources cited were pro-abortion people. What the British scientists are recommending as procedures required in consultation before an abortion are similar to those for which Pro-Life people are attacked as being inhumane. Note that before Roe v Wade, some states had laws that allowed abortion if a psychiatrist certified that it was necessary for the client's mental health. Likewise, a person could avoid the draft if a psychiatrist certified that the person had a disqualifying mental illness. Human Life Review showed that in both cases of certification -- abortion and the draft -- psychiatrists were untrue to science and were lying. Without saying that the psychiatrists and doctors involved in abortions are lying now, the comments on the Royal College of Psychiatrists' new findings ask: how can a psychiatrist justify saying that an abortion is for the client's mental health when it is precisely often the abortion that causes mental health problems, rather than the birth?

2) Congress refused Koop money to study the question; the apparent reason was that it knew that if Koop came up with an official finding that abortion produces bad health and mental health results, there would be grounds for executive decrees, court findings, and new laws limiting abortions. Note that when Congress did find that there are no medical grounds for the procedure called partial-birth abortion, the Supreme Court used that finding to uphold the possibility of partial-birth abortion bans, whereas it had previously ruled versions of the laws unconstitutional. A panel of constitutional scholars on C-Span even said that the wording in that decision by the often ambivalent Justice Kennedy -- including focus on bad effects on the woman -- could be used to overthrow Roe v Wade, and they predicted that it will be overthrown. It did not seem that they meant one more Justice would be required, as some seem to think; just the right case and the right arguments.

3) Some mental illness reduces a person's freedom so much, that they are not making a human choice or at least a serious (mortal sin, if a sin) moral choice -- what is called reduced capacity. Note that there is some probability that if a woman has had an abortion, she now has mental health problems. So her capacity for future moral decisions is reduced. Thus a ban on allowing a human choice of abortion by a person who has had an abortion is reasonable, since the woman might not be capable of an informed, free choice. On the other hand, a ban on allowing a person a human choice of abortion by a person who has not had a previous abortion is also reasonable, since there is some significant probability that she will be reducing her capacity to fully act as a human being, since there is some significant probability that the choice to have an abortion will cause her to be a person with mental illness. The ban in this case would be similar to banning drugs on the grounds that they harm the person's mental health and capacity to fully act as a human being -- making her in some sense a victim.

4) Some predict that a key factor in reducing abortions will be lawsuits by women against the abortionists. The fact that abortion causes mental health problems could be grounds to sue the doctor and possibly any psychiatrist involved, either because the client had not been informed of such possible effects or because the client has been the victim of a procedure that causes such effects, even if she had been warned of such possible effects. In the latter case, it could be similar to a doctor being sued for doing a procedure that tends to harm the client -- I'm sure you can think of many examples; indeed, the possibility that a doctor might do such things is precisely why there are medical boards and certifications.

5) Regarding the desire to commit subtle genocide: About 30 years ago, the Los Angeles Times did a multi-part series on Hispanic immigrants. Included in their analysis was the writers' observation that one major reason for resistance to Hispanic immigration was that they are Catholics. There was fear the U.S. would be inundated with brown Catholics, who tend to have larger families besides. I doubt if even the authors of the series expected the numbers to become as large as they have. But the main point here is the disdain for certain kinds of people in principle, not just because and when they are here illegally. Similarly and worse, Planned Parenthood has been found to have favored the further method of dealing with the undesired (here meaning blacks and blacks on welfare): abort them.

6) I recall that before virtually all anti-abortion laws were overthrown by Roe v. Wade, the Republican Senator Jacob Javits was the first to shock the conscience by saying that abortion should be legalized in order to save the government welfare payments. For many, that idea is no longer shocking or unacceptable. If you look closely at the ads now showing on Iowa TV, they can certainly be interpreted as a subtle form of that killing approach: the ads call for funding institutions in the reproductive area on the grounds of reducing government expenditure for babies born; some of these institutions who request funding in the ads provide abortion either as a back-up method for the anti-people attitudes or as the first method in the case of pregnancy. I remind you: when Javits used the same basic approach about 40 years ago, it was considered shocking; now the same basic approach is shown on Iowa television as an ad during primetime. My, how the flighty have fallen!

7) I also recall a statement by a reporter named Tracy or Tracey in the liberal National Catholic Reporter newspaper about 30 years ago: he said that during the Carter administration, the government had sterilized one-third of all American Native American women as part of a deliberate government policy.

8) So the overall approach includes: prevent conception, sterilize the women, kill the unborn by abortion. This is what John Paul II meant by a culture of death.
-- Richard L.A. Schaefer
Dubuque, Iowa

HAIL JULIUS CAESAR
Re: B. Gunn's letter (under "Baton Rouge Bobby") in Reader Mail's Jindal Bells:

I agree with B. Gunn about J.C. Watts. He has all of the qualities attributed to Obama -- engaging personality, great speaking style, and, if I may be so shallow, very good looks. And, he is an accomplished man of substance. A winning choice!
-- Carol Shannon

Letter to the Editor

topics:
John McCain, Television, Economics, Catholicism, Islam, Abortion, Constitution, Law, Supreme Court, Military, NATO, Immigration