Abortion of 12-Year-Old Incest Victim Opposed
SATIRICUS
ABORTION OF 12-YEAR-OLD INCEST VICTIM OPPOSED
STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. (AP) --- A Michigan prosecutor requested a court
order preventing parents of a 12-year-old girl who is six months pregnant by
her 17-year-old brother from taking her to another state for a late-term
abortion.
"I don't believe it's in the 12-year-old's best interest," Assistant Macomb
County Prosecutor Jennifer Faunce said in today's Detroit Free Press. . . .
Michigan has banned abortions past the 24th week of pregnancy since 1974,
unless the woman's life is in danger. The girl is in her 27th week.
Her parents had planned to take her to Kansas for the abortion. Kansas law
bans abortions after the 22nd week, including those for fetuses with severe,
life-threatening abnormalities and deformities. It allows the procedure only to
save the life of the mother or if the pregnancy would cause irreversible harm
to a "major bodily function."
Dr. George Tiller, the owner of a Kansas abortion clinic, has cited that
last clause as permission to perform late-term abortions to prevent damage to a
woman's mental health.
Lauren Tomayko, a court-appointed attorney for the girl's parents, said the
family did not wish her to comment.
The girl's parents learned of her pregnancy less than two weeks ago,
according to Faunce. The family lives in a two-bedroom apartment, where the
girl and her brother share a room. The siblings said they had intercourse once,
Faunce said, adding that the girl is now staying with a relative.
No charges have been filed against the brother, but police are
investigating. . . .
A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Maureen Van Hoven, said the
prosecutor's actions contradict recent efforts to limit girls' access to
abortion by involving parents.
"The whole idea for parental notification is that parents need to be
involved in making decisions about their children. Now we have parents who are
involved in a decision about their child, and that's gone out the window," she
said. "It's their child, and they have decided what's best for her."
But Erin Wilson of Right to Life of Michigan said the fetus should be
saved.
"What occurred was unspeakably tragic and it cannot be erased. Neither the
young mother nor her unborn child are to blame," said Erin Wilson of Right to
Life of Michigan. "They are both victims, and neither one should be victimized
further.". . . .
Not a Republican
<199807172110...@ladder01.news.aol.com>...
>Excerpt from the Friday, July 17, 1998 Associated Press news story:
>
> "What occurred was unspeakably tragic and it cannot be erased. Neither
the
>young mother nor her unborn child are to blame," said Erin Wilson of Right
to
>Life of Michigan. "They are both victims, and neither one should be
victimized
>further.". . . .
>
I couldn't say it any better. Thanks for posting.
SATIRICUS
"What occurred was unspeakably tragic and it cannot be erased. Neither the
young mother nor her unborn child are to blame," said Erin Wilson of Right to
Life of Michigan. "They are both victims, and neither one should be victimized
further.". . . .
_____________________________________
Not a Republican (forg...@nospam.com): "I couldn't say it any better (than
Erin Wilson of Right to Life of Michigan). Thanks for posting."
I disagree. Forcing a 12-year-old victim of incest to carry a fetus to term
would only be victimizing that kid twice over and then some. The decision of
the girl's parents to seek an aboriton for their child should be respected. The
Government has no business sticking its nose into such private family matters.
After all, this is NOT Nazi Germany which banned all abortions and where the
Government was the ultimate authority in reproduction matters.
-- SATIRICUS REX ?:^)
The Vitameatavegamin of Politics
The Proper Tonic for Not-So-Happy, Pep-less People Who are Pooped Out on
Politics
"IN VITAMEATAVEGAMIN EST VINO MIRABILIS!" -- SATIRICUS REX
I. B. Withee
SATIRICUS wrote in message
<199807181648...@ladder03.news.aol.com>...
Of course not Robot Rex, you would prefer that they be allowed to marry and
probably are really upset that their "rights" to do so are being denied like
you homosexuals claim your "special" rights are.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/6371/index.html
I.B. Withee
Not a Republican
<199807181648...@ladder03.news.aol.com>...
>Excerpt from the Friday, July 17, 1998 Associated Press news story:
>
>
>>>Not a Republican (forg...@nospam.com): said
>>> "What occurred was unspeakably tragic and it cannot be erased.
Neither the
>>>young mother nor her unborn child are to blame," said Erin Wilson of
Right to
>>>Life of Michigan. "They are both victims, and neither one should be
victimized
>>>further.". . . .
>
>>Erin Wilson of Right to Life of Michigan). Thanks for posting."
>
> I disagree. Forcing a 12-year-old victim of incest to carry a fetus to
term
>would only be victimizing that kid twice over and then some. The decision
of
>the girl's parents to seek an aboriton for their child should be respected.
The
>Government has no business sticking its nose into such private family
matters.
>
> After all, this is NOT Nazi Germany which banned all abortions and where
the
>Government was the ultimate authority in reproduction matters.
>
First of all, kindly adhere to response conventions used by the rest of us.
Now, on to the matter at hand.
Odd that you speak of Nazi Germany, where the humanity of Jews was denied
and stripped by their Supreme Court, paving the way for the legal
extermination of six million people. Your post also strips the unborn of
their inherent humanity in your mind, so that paves the way for my question:
If the unborn child in question had been a two-week-old healthy child, and
the parents said that, because the child had been conceived in tragic
incest, it should be killed by lethal injection, would you respect their
'right to decide?' Or, would you side with 'government interference' in a
private reproductive matter?
SATIRICUS
"What occurred was unspeakably tragic and it cannot be erased. Neither the
young mother nor her unborn child are to blame," said Erin Wilson of Right to
Life of Michigan. "They are both victims, and neither one should be victimized
further.". . . .
_____________________________________
Not a Republican (forg...@nospam.com): "I couldn't say it any better (than
Erin Wilson of Right to Life of Michigan). Thanks for posting."
SATIRICUS REX: "I disagree. Forcing a 12-year-old victim of incest to carry a
fetus to term
would only be victimizing that kid twice over and then some. The decision of
the girl's parents to seek an aboriton for their child should be respected. The
Government has no business sticking its nose into such private family matters.
After all, this is NOT Nazi Germany which banned all abortions and where the
Government was the ultimate authority in reproduction matters."
I. B. Withee" <imwi...@wcnet.net): "Of course not, Robot Rex, you would
prefer that they be allowed to marry and probably are really upset that their
'rights' to do so are being denied like you homosexuals claim your 'special'
rights are."
Since I support the right of the parents of the 12-year-old incest victim to
seek an abortion for their child, *why* would you then say that I likewise
support the right of the brother and sister to marry instead????
Moreover, whatever makes you think I am homosexual?
As to homosexuals and the GOP, it is ironic that the legacy of Ronald Reagan
has produced the very forces which are even-handedly calling for gay rights
today.
Excerpt from:
THE SOUTHERN CAPTIVITY OF THE GOP
by Christopher Caldwell, senior writer for the conservative Weekly Standard
from the June 1998 edition of Atlantic magazine
There is an ideological component to Clinton's success and the Republicans'
failure. The end of the Cold War, the increasing significance of information
technology, and the growth of identity politics have caused a social revolution
since the badly misunderstood 1980s. It's difficult to tell exactly what is
going on, but in today's politics, such subjects for discussion as Communist
imperialism and welfare queens have been replaced by gay rights, women in the
workplace, environmentalism and smoking. On those issues, the country has moved
leftward. In 1984, the Republicans held a convention that was at times cheerily
anti-homosexual and triumphed at the polls. In 1992, the party was punished for
a Houston convention at which Pat Buchanan made his ostensibly less
controversial remarks about culture war. Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt
once teasingly drew a distinction between "liberals" and "Americans" while
discussing water use, and pushed a plan to allow oil drilling on national
wildlife refuges. (This same Mr. Watt also disallowed the mellow Beach Boys
music group from performing in concert on the Washington, D.C. Mall because, he
said, they would draw "undesirables.") By 1997, the New Jersey Republican Party
was begging its leaders to improve the party's image by joining the Sierra
Club.
This is in part of how successful political parties create their own
monsters. Just as Roosevelt's and Truman's labor legislation helped Irish and
Polish and Italian members of the working class move to the suburbs (where they
became Republicans), Reaganomics helped to create a mass upper-middle class, a
national culture of childless yuppies who want gay rights, bike trails and
smoke-free restaurants. One top Republican consultant estimates that 35 to 40%
of the electorate now votes on a cluster of issues created by "New Class"
professionals---abortion rights, women's rights, the environment, health care
and education. He calls it the "Hillary cluster." The political theorist Jean
Bethke Elshtain calls it, more revealingly, "real politics."
And with this new landscape of issues, Republicans aren't even on the map.
Because of the Reagan victory, the Democrats went through a period of
globalization and the end of Communism amid self-doubt and soul-searching. The
experience left them a supple party that quickly became familiar with the
Hillary cluster of issues. Bill Clinton's ideology here is necessarily an
inchoate (imperfectly formed or formulated) one, and in his heart of hearts, he
may be to the left of where the country is, but he is the first President to
understand what the Hillary cluster is not on one side or the other of a
partisan fault line (and that is his greatest contribution to American
politics).
The American people are not "for" or "against" gay rights. They
overwhelmingly say they favor equal rights for gays---but then draw the line at
gays in the military. They're for AIDS-research funding---but think gays are
pushing their agenda too fast. Americans aren't "for" or "against"
environmentalism. They believe that global warming is going on---but waffle on
whether major steps should be taken to block it. They have shown a tolerance
for paying more taxes to protect the environment, but few list it as their #1
concern when asked by pollsters.
Such jagged political lines make Americans' ideology look ambiguous by old
definitions. In fact, the Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe doubts
whether the old polarity of "conservatives" and "liberals" is any longer
meaningful, at least on the increasingly important cultural issues. The big
question is whther this blending of conservatives and liberals is happening at
the party level---whether President Clinton has effected a wholesale change in
his party. Ed Goeas and other Republican pollsters say there's no indication
that Clinton is enticing people back to the Democrats. The best evidence,
however, from 1996 exit polls is that the Democrats are no longer a liberal
party---or at least they are far less liberal than the Republicans are
conservative. Whereas 58% of Republicans identity themselves as conservatives,
only a third of Democrats identify themselves as liberal.
To the Republicans, it doesn't much matter. They've missed all of this, and
continue to campaign against the Democrats they wish they were contesting:
against Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy, and against Jesse Jackson and his
urban policy. They treat the past two presidential elections---the back-to-back
disasters that either party has suffered since Roosevelt clobbered Herbert
Hoover and Alf Landon in 1932 and 1936---as aberrations, much as certain
Democrats throughout the 1980s insisted that the only "typical" elections since
Truman were in 1960 and 1976. According to Jim Chapin, for decades a New York
Democratic activist and now the senior policy adviser to the city's public
advocate, "Republicans remind me of us in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They
say, 'If you lay out your policies without telling people what those policies
are, they approve of them.' So what! Voters are merely making judgments based
on the credibility of the party as an institution. And they're right. In 1980,
I knew if people understood what many liberal Democrats REALLY wanted, our vote
would go down."
People are finding out that the Republicans don't want anything at all,
other than to re-elect enough of their own members to keep enjoying the fruits
of a congressional majority. Lacking a voice on the new 1990s issues, the
Republicans are retreating to the issues on which they used to have a voice. In
this, they resemble those "boomerang kids," who after their first career
reversal return home in their late 20s to live with their parents. Republicans
are going home to Ronald Reagan but are finding that theirs is no longer the
only house on the block promoting the most popular part of his
agenda---free-market economics. They're finding that there's nothing to do
around the house except to dress up their old ideas in the clothes of
Clintonite insincerity. Where is the broad argument of a "natural majority"
here?
There is none. The Republicans ARE too conservative: their deference to
their southern base is persuading much of the country that their vision is a
sour and crabby one. But they're too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat
from shrinking the government indicates. At the same time, the Republicans have
passed none of the reforms that ingratiated the party with the "radical
middle.". . . .
The Republican Party is an obsolescent (going out of use; becoming
obsolete) one. It may continue to rule, disguised as a majority by electoral
legerdemain (sleight of hand; a display of skill or adroitness). But it will be
a long time before the party is again able to rule from a place in Americans'
hearts.
_____________________________________________
Not a Republican: "First of all, kindly adhere to response conventions used by
the rest of us."
Thank you, but NO thank you, dearie. I prefer to discuss issues in a lucid
and sane manner.
Not a Republican: "Odd that you speak of Nazi Germany, where the humanity of
Jews was denied and stripped by their Supreme Court, paving the way for the
legal extermination of six million people."
"Odd"? Why it's not at all odd, since I'm addressing the issue of a
government (Nazi Germany) empowered with the ultimate authority in reproductive
matters by the support of its own Religious Right (the German Protestant Church
and later, the German Catholic Church, too).
Excerpts from the book "MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND: Women, the Family and
Nazi Politics" by Claudia Koonz (1987, St. Martin's Press, 541 pages long
comprised of 430 pages of text and 110 pages of footnotes and attributions):
From pages 240-241:
Protestant women (in Nazi Germany) welcomed a state that promised support
for their talents as mothers and organizers. Protestant social workers had for
years lobbied for state subsidies to encourage marriage and support large
families. In addition, they had developed a network of rest centers for
over-worked mothers and organized homemaker helpers for large families.
Protestant women had joined the national alarm about the falling birthrate,
calling it "family suicide," or "Volk murder." Protestant social workers
(unlike their Catholic counterparts) emphasized quality as well as quantity and
urged that "racially" substandard people not be allowed to bear children. One
specialist called for "a new morality, a new will for purity, healthy marriages
and healthy families---together with physically, spiritually and
psychologically healthy children." During the Depression, the Inner Mission,
the progressive Protestant national welfare institution, spurred on by a sense
of economic emergency, appointed commissions, formed study groups and published
studies related to eugenic schemes to improve the race.
The Nazi Party, by contrast, formulated no specific plans to implement the
racial notions that Hitler had advocated for over a decade. Although Hitler
fulminated against the Jews and "racial poisoning," Nazi doctrine contained no
specific eugenic proposals. But after making himself dictator, Hitler adopted
as his own the programs that Protestants had long advocated. During the summer
of 1933, the (Nazi) government announced both the marriage loan and the forced
sterilization programs. Meta Eyl, the newly appointed director of the Nazi
Women's League (Frauenbund), hailed the reforms, especially the latter (the
forced sterilizations programs). "Only when the entire Volk (German people)
recognizes the need for this sterilization law and its benefits can Adolf
Hitler's will be fulfilled," Eyl said.
The organization backed other edicts that increased punishments for
abortion, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution. Since the 1920s, the
Protestant Standing Committee for Racial Hygiene and Racial Protection had
produced pamphlets urging individuals to place the public good above their own
individualistic happiness by participating in the scientific program to remove
genetic defects from the German race. Eugenic scientists complained about the
burden of Germany's 180,000 feebleminded, 80,000 schizophrenics, 20,000--25,000
manic depressives, 60, 000 epileptics and about 30,000 blind or deaf-and-dumb
citizens. Armed with the latest "scientific" discoveries, Protestant
eugenicists expected to cooperate with the government to prevent "damaged"
citizens from transferring their genetic defects to the next generation.
(Nazi) women leaders welcomed this opportunity to expand and modernize
their concern about motherhood. Childbearing and rearing had entered into the
forefront of national interest, and Protestant women saw themselves in the
vanguard of the movement. Women, instead of feeling like failures because they
could not emulate masculine traits, could return to their "proper place" and
reign unchallenged as the purifiers of national life. The "motherly type"
praised by (Nazi) sociologist Kirkpatrick had triumphed over the bothersome
"protester types" (feminists) who cared only about entering "masculine
careers."
According to the official record, the cooperation proceeded splendidly.
Nazis and Protestants, each with a different creed, cooperated together around
a shared concern for motherhood. But the private record, hundreds of activity
reports and memos carefully preserved at the Protestant Central Archives in
Berlin, reveals a complex picture. The monthly communications sent to von
Grone's office ranged, according to one woman's summary, "from enthusiastic
agreement to absolute rejection." Protestant women expressed universal
gratitude for the strong male leadership that promised to protect their
endangered feminine sphere within which they could reconstruct their own
institutions. Beneath the surface of calm of Von Grone's official statements,
Protestant women reported bickering, feuding, power plays and scandal at every
level. The authoritarian state, which imposed public silence, unleashed
conflicts among groups of citizens by forcing individuals to confront their own
religious, moral and political values. The State that swore to uphold family
values tore at family ties, pulling children into the Hitler Youth, mothers
into volunteer service and fathers into Nazi Party activities and rallies. . .
.
(Nazi German) Protestant women faced a conundrum: While they welcomed a
strong centralized government that esteemed motherhood, they fought against the
encroachments that such a state would naturally make into Protestant territory.
Hitler's rule, far from streamlining social programs, created conflicting
bureaus, bitter feuds and duplication far worse than the "confusion" so
commonly attacked by conservatives during the (earlier, pre-Nazi) Weimar
Republic. In addition to jurisdictional strife between church and state,
Protestant concerns coalesced around the impact of social programs and Nazi
paganism.
________________________________________________
Not a Republican: "Your post also strips the unborn of their inherent humanity
in your mind, so that paves the way for my question: If the unborn child in
question had been a two-week-old healthy child, and the parents said that,
because the child had been conceived in tragic incest, it should be killed by
lethal injection, would you respect their 'right to decide?'"
What a bogus comparison! A two-week-old healthy child is one which has
already been born as the result of a desired pregnancy and/or a consentual sex
act.
But now, allow me to ask you a related question based NOT on a theoretical
case BUT an actual one. First the case:
M E D I C A L M I R A C L E O R M O R A L M I S T A K E ?
> Transcript from the news segment on the Saturday, January 31, 1998 edition of
the CBS Saturday Evening News with John Roberts (with Sharyl Attkinsson filling
in for Roberts)
CBS News Anchor Sharyl Attkinsson: "A Texas hospital has been ordered to
pay millions of dollars in a negligence case to the parents of a severely
disabled child born prematurely. It's a case of modern medical technology being
able to save a new life. But as Jim Axelrod reports, the parents wonder: Was
it a life worth saving?"
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod in San Filipe, Texas: "Sydney Miller is 7 years
old *but* she can't feed herself, walk, talk or see. She will need
round-the-clock care ---- forever."
Mark Miller, Sydney's father: "She will outlive both of us. And that's a
travesty."
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod: "Her parents blame the hospital where Sydney was
born weighing just one-and-a-half pounds and suffering catastropic medical
problems. Nearing the 22nd week of her pregnancy, Karla Miller developed a
serious infection. Doctors recommended inducing labor in order to save her
life."
Karla Miller, Sydney's mother: "We had no control (over the situation)
when we went into that hospital."
Mark Miller: "Karla's life was in danger. We were not preparing for a
birth then. We were preparing for a tragic miscarriage."
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod: "The Millers had told the hospital to allow
Sydney to die. But the hospital and its parent corporation, Columbia HCA, did
not see Sydney's birth as a miscarriage at all. And they say the Millers were
informed about and consented to everything the doctors planned to keep Sydney
alive. The hospital's policy: 'Any baby born that weighs at least 1.1 lbs or
more will be resuscitated.'"
Dr. Ferdinand Plavidal, Chief of Obstetrics, Women's Hospital of Texas:
"This baby deserved at least initial resuscitation. We aren't really
speculating what the outcome will be when we deliver babies. But we also can't
predict the outcomes. We do the best job we can. We work with the babies the
best way we can. But Medicine has never been able to guarantee outcomes."
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod: "Michael Sydow was the Miller's attorney when
they sued the hospital for negligence."
Michael Sydow, the Millers' Lawyer: "Trying to force unfortunate children
miscarried early in pregnancy to live is human experimentation."
John Serpe, the Hospital's Lawyer: "Some of the babies will end up with
complications such as Sydney Miller suffers from. But that's nobody's fault.'
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod: "That's NOT what a Houston jury decided
recently. The jury awarded the Millers more than $70,000,000.00
(seventy-million dollars)."
Mark Miller, the father: "(In caring for a child with such catastrophic
health problems who also is blind, can't walk, can't talk and can't feed
herself,) You learn the definition of 'eternity.' We're going to care for our
daughter until the two of us die."
CBS reporter Jim Axelrod: "It may be the hardest question in health care:
Is this little girl's life a medical miracle OR a moral mistake?
This has been Jim Axelrod, CBS News, reporting from San Filipe, Texas."
_________________________________
So, in yours, the individual reader's opinion, is the hospital-enforced
resuscitation of babies born so early in pregnancy of such low birth weight and
such catastrophic health problems (because of induced labor on the mother for
health-related reasons of life and death) a medical miracle OR moral mistake?
Why?
Not a Republican: "Or, would you side with 'government interference' in a
private reproductive matter?"
Duhhhhhh! In your perverted example, the child, the result of a desired
pregnancy and/or a consentual sex act, has ALREADY been produced! Therefore, it
doesn't even genuinely qualify as a "private reproductive matter" as you so
disingenuously label it because the desired result, a healthy child, has
already been born.
And now, another compelling question: Can freezing OR unfreezing human
embryos = Abortion?
Excerpt from the Tuesday, February 17, 1998 USA Today "Nationline" news briefs
colum:
A woman has given birth to a healthy baby after the embryo had been frozen
for more than seven years, then thawed and implanted in her womb, said
officials in Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center in suburban Los Angeles.
The 8-pound, 15-ounce baby, born Monday, February 16, was hailed as "the oldest
newborn in the world," although a hospital in Philadelphia later said that two
months ago, a baby was born there from an embryo also frozen for more than
seven years. The freezing of human embryos is a relatively new technique, but
it is not known how long embryos can be frozen and remain viable.
_________________
Anti-abortion extremists claim that a human embryo is a person from the
moment of conception. They also claim that abortion is murder. However, those
extremists have remained strangely quiet on the issue of frozen human embryos.
Frozen embryos are fertilized human eggs which are kept on ice for
*possible* though NOT certain future use by the parents. In other words,
although they serve as fail-safes in case any of the parents' existing children
should die, the frozen human embryos are NOT assured of any eventual
transplantation into a human womb. Indeed, they may eventually become EITHER
unviable for transplantation because of age OR simply discarded at the parents'
request or deaths.
> Points of Information about Frozen Human Embryo standards from various
Associated Press News stories:
--- 70% of frozen embryos survive thawing.
--- Most couples trying to have a child through assisted reproduction need
multiple embryos in case the first implantation is unsuccessful or until much
later when they want more children.
--- As many as 100,000 frozen embryos are stored across the country, by
some estimates. They are a result of assisted reproductive technologies
including in vitro fertilization, in which eggs taken from a woman's ovaries
are fertilized with sperm in the lab.
--- About the baby born in California from the frozen embryo: The embryo
was originally frozen in 1989 after the couple underwent infertility treatment.
--- Since it's not clear how long frozen sperm survive intact, and until
recently eggs were considered too fragile to expose to extreme cold,
freeze-storing already-formed embryos eliminates at least one uncertain step,
doctors say.
--- In a landmark 1995 case, Kass vs. Kass, a New York state appellate
court allowed a Long Island man to donate his and his ex-wife's five frozen
embryos for research, reversing a previous decision by a judge who had given
custody to the wife for implantation. She then appealed to the state's highest
court, which has issued a stay on the lower court's order until the case is
heard in March (1998).
--- One model for frozen human embryo legislation is the consent form now
being used at the New York University Medical Center, where about 2,000 frozen
embryos are stored. Available options, in case the male partner dies, are for
the fertilized eggs to be transferred to the woman, donated for research,
destroyed, or some other option to be filled in. In case of the woman's death,
the choices are similar, except the man could permit the embryo to be
transferred to another woman.
--- Consent forms authorizing human embryo freezing are not standardized
across the country, and many don't address situations such as illness, changes
in financial situations, or divorce.
--- Currently, as many as 20,000 of the estimated 100,000 human embryos may
be subjects of legal disputes, but no firm figures are available.
--- In New York, state Sen. Roy Goodman has introduced a bill that would
formalize who gets custody of the frozen embryos -- especially in case of
death, divorce or separation -- and how they're used. It would make an
agreement between the two partners legally binding.
--- The absence of U.S. laws regulating the future of stored embryos could
leave a growing number of them in legal limbo with people struggling to decide
what to do on a case-by-case basis, sometimes in court, Goodman says.
--- Earlier this month (February 1998), the American Bar Association voted
to sidetrack indefinitely a proposal for what would have been its first-ever
policy on frozen embryos.
--- In Great Britain, frozen embryos can be kept no longer than five years
unless a couple directs otherwise. French law also applies the five-year limit.
--- Some consider couples' donating unused embryos for research as a
contribution to society. But the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has
condemned such actions as "a pre-natal massacre."
--- On the other hand, Dr. James Grifo, head of the New York University
frozen embryo program, says: "Embryos are not like living people. Most embryos
created in a woman's body don't make babies, because even nature discards many
of them early on. It's like a tree that throws off seeds. How many trees grow
from them?"
___________________________________
Therefore, I challenge you to weigh in with your opinion on this subject:
> Does freezing human embryos but never using them and/or discarding them =
Abortion?
> If so, does that mean that those never-used or discarded frozen human
embryos are in essence being "murdered"?
> Why or why not?
Not a Republican
You really do miss the connection between Nazi Germany's decision on the
'human' status of Jews and our own high Court's decision on the 'humanity'
of the unborn? Or do you just ignore it? Ah...
SATIRICUS
between Nazi Germany's decision on the 'human' status of Jews and our own high
Court's decision on the 'humanity' of the unborn? Or do you just ignore it?"
Excerpt from page 150 of "MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND: Women, the Family and Nazi
Politics" by Claudia Koonz (1987, St. Martin's Press, 541 pages long comprised
of 430 pages of text and 110 pages of footnotes and attributions):
. . . (In Nazi Germany,) Propaganda advocated sterilization to eliminate
the "unfit" from mainstream "Aryan" population (white "good-stock" Germans
overall, NOT JUST the master-race elite). Eugenics experts noticed, however,
that the "most racially undesirable" people displayed the least ability to
grasp the "fundamental truth" that their bodies belong to the State. To
reinforce the propaganda, in July 1933, Hitler's cabinet passed a law that
required social workers and nurses to report all "genetically defective"
individuals to the health authorities, who would decide whether they out to be
sterilized. The government described its racial policies in technical-sounding
terms to offset the moral reservations that inevitably arose. "Racial
scientists" compared Hitler to Copernicus and Galileo, who revolutionized
understanding of the physical universe. Genetic laws, said racial scientists,
would determine the future of the human race; policy-makers' only option was
whether to use genetic knowledge to advance humankind or to refuse to apply
science and allow racial degeneration to destroy the German Aryan people.
Nazi leaders may have been unqiue in their fanaticism, but belief in
eugenics and, more generally, biological thinking about sociological problems
flourished in both capitalistic and communist nations during the entire
inter-war period (1918-1939). In 1927, to take just one of many examples, the
U.S. Supreme Court held the constitutionality of Virginia's involuntary
sterilization law. But in other nations, sterilization programs for the most
part remained *voluntary.* Only in Germany did the full power of an
authoritarian state direct its energy at a thorough "weeding out" of "life
unworthy of life," which included (depending on the official in charge) people
with supposedly hereditary diseases such as epilepsy, schizophrenia (as
evidenced by moodiness or temper tantrums, indifferent housekeeping in women or
irregular employment patterns in men), deafness, dumbness, prostitution, mental
retardation and certain forms of venereal disease.
________________________________________
Select excerpts from pages 94-174
(In the wake of the 1928 crash of Wall Street and the beginning of the
worldwide Great Depression, Germany's recovery from massive unemployment and
economic collapse after World War I was nipped in the bud.) Helpless and
resigned, Germans awaited their fate. Fear of collapse itself became a
self-fulfiling prophecy. Outside the political arena, another battlefield
opened up.
In wartime, a foreign menace solidifies citizens into a common front. But
economic collapse opened up fronts that cut through the social fabric of
(Germany during the Wiemar Republic years of the late 1920s). Workers voted
Communist and complained bitterly (although they did not dare risk their jobs
by striking) against capitalists. Anti-Semitic (Anti-Jewish) publicists found
growing audiences for their scurrilous attacks on the international plot to
destroy finance. Youthful protesters scorned their parents' values. Clergymen
combated atheism they found everywhere. Everyone had a favorite theory; but no
one produced a solution. Besides rekindling these traditional antagonisms, the
crisis unleashed an unprecedented biologiclaly based "war" that tore at the
remnants of social solidarity. As the Depression deepened, the "sex war," which
had broken out in the wake of women's demands for equality half a century
before, flared up anew. Concern about the family formed the core of the
Depression discourse about fundamental values. Whatever people *thought* about
the Depression, they *experienced* it in their families and focused their
anxieties on the changes they observed in moral codes and cultural trends.
Erich Fromm conducted a study of some of these private fears on the eve of
the Great Depression that reveals how people cathected public disorder onto
private anxieties. Fromm distributed a 500-questio survey to a thousand
working-class Germans. Most findings did not surprise him --- except one.
People (even those with progressive social ideas in other areas) replied with
unexpected vehemence to questions about women's new role in society. Whether
they discussed women's makeup, bobbed hair or their place in the labor force,
respondents displayed strong emotions. Fromm concluded, "The vigorous reactions
point clearly to the amount of emotion which lurks behind apparently marginal
problems like cosmetics. Here is an opportunity for political propaganda
writers . . . to use for their purposes."
The respondents viewed modernity for women as "immoral" or "un-German," or
"not worthy of women." These staunch socialists may have voted for the left,
but they experienced changing mores with the anxieties of the right.
Parenthetically, Fromm noted the disappointing frequency with which
working-class respondents expressed cultural attitudes remarkably similar to
Nazi viewpoints. People of all classes rallied to a bourgeois standard of
respectability that combined patriotism with fixed ideas about appropriate
manners, morals and sexual attitudes. When society broke apart, they looked for
a cause and found it not too far from home in the New Woman who, in the popular
mind, earned her own money and refused to settle into a wifely role.
Contemporaries feared that economic emergency unleashed a social war. "The
times in which we live reach their low point in the relationship between the
sexes . . . hostility plays the dominant role. An invisible revolution has
taken place. The less noble characteristics surface . . . we revert to a lower
stage in social evolution. . . . " This acrimony, which occurred beyond the
limits of formal politics, pulled women into a nationwide and deeply emotional
debate. "I can think of nothing more revolutionary than continued employment,"
warned one Reichstag delegate. Misogynist (hatred against women in the
workplace) laments had been increasing throughout the 1920s, but their tone
became virulent after 1929. Social scientists pronounced Germany society sick
and looked for a virus. Just as Hitler found it in the Jew, opponents of
women's emancipation discovered the source in the New Woman. "The low point of
German cultural life and morality has coincided with the high point of
emancipation for women." Equality between the sexes, argued two opponents of
women's emancipation (Hugo Sellheim and Max Hirsch), produced cultural decline.
Feminists, ran the ubiquitous complaint, wanted to become like men and steal
men's personalities as well as their jobs and social status. Career women, they
alleged, rejected marriage and belonged to "the third sex" (euphemism for
alleging they were lesbians).
Respected professors wrote weighty books about "The Psychopathology of the
Women's Movement" and "Sexual Character and National Strength;" "Basic Problems
of Feminism" and "Feminism and Cultural Demise: The Erotic Roots of Women's
Emancipation." Sociologists warned about "The Nation In Danger: The Declining
Birth Rate and Its Consequences for Germany's Future;" "Murder of the Future;"
and "The Extreme Worship and Weakening of Women." Political scientists worried
about "The Rule of the Inferior." The tone of this assault marshaled
"scientific" evidence and medicalized terminology to concentrate broad
disorientation on one powerful symbol. . . .
Conservatives saw the restoration of family as the most effective method of
preventing socialist revolution, while socialists worked for pragmatic reforms
that would help parents cope with modern problems. "Marriage is the life and
death of our People!" declared one conservative, and lamented dramatically
falling birth- and marriage rates. What happened when husbands became idle
(from massive unemployment) and women shouldered financial responsibility? As
during wartime (in World War I), the social order (in Germany) became
topsy-turvy, except now that men stayed at home instead of marching away (to
war). . . .
Women with jobs suffered from overwork while their husbands sat idle and
sometimes began to drink heavily. Fearing they might hurt their husbands'
pride, wives hesitated to ask for help with the housework and cooking. Neither
mothers nor fathers seemed to be able to control the youth. Crime, juvenile
delinquency, suicide, out-of-wedlock briths and venereal disease increased. All
these signs of social disintegration (in late 1920s Germany) fed the anxiety
that the family itself would lose hold over its members. . . .
Hundreds of thousands remained homeless after their welfare benefits
expired. Living in tent colonies,on the outskirts of major cities, people
despaired of ever working again. They attempted to keep up the illusion of
order even amid economic chaos. . . . As in wartime, the government called on
women to make sacrifices for the good of the nation, and when conditions failed
to improve, women were blamed for the disruption of family life.
At the heart of the hysteria about the disappearing family lay a deep fear
that women would abandon their traditional roles. Politicians who disagreed
about every other subject drew the same conclusion when they looked at studies
on women in the work force: Because women employees' jobless rates remained at
10% as men's rose to 30%, and women's wages remained at about 60% of men's,
even within the same job categories, legislators and social scientists declared
that women "stole" men's jobs and emasculated the family father. To clinch the
argument, they observed that women with jobs outside their homes bore fewer
children than full-time housewives. From these assertions, lawmakers concluded
that if women could be eliminated from the labor force, men would once again
find jobs and stability would be restored. Opposition to women's emancipation,
which had gained force during the 1920s, not intruded directly into working
women's lives. In the wake of the Inflation, married women had lost their right
to employment in government jobs, a clear breechof the German Constitution.
The war between the sexes did not automatically pit women against men. Some
women sided with men in the assault against working women. The BDF, the
Protestant women's federation, and other civic associations opposed women's
right to work. "The Federation of German Women's Associations [BDF] urges that
working women ought to share fully the sacrifices and deprivations that are
vested upon the entire population by economic emergency. The Federation does
not intend to be a lobby for women's interests.
BDF leader Marie Baum suggested, "The best way to solve the problem of the
employed mother is to make it possible for her to quit her job and devote all
her energies to motherhood." Women's-rights advocates sometimes reacted to
men's hostility by swearing off women's rights altogether. It ought to be
noted, however, that middle-class women's organizations defended women teachers
and social workers who were threatened with dismissal.
Two religious organizations kept their distance from the drive to return
women to their homes. Jewish women appreciated the irrational component of
popular hysteria about the Woman Question because they linked it with mounting
anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish sentiments). Even though the pages of their
periodical featured articles on traditional women's duties, Jewish women argued
forcefully against anyone who questioned women's or Jews' fundamental human
equality and loyalty to Germany. . . .
Catholic women's organizations defended women's right to employment from a
very different perspective. Because Catholic associations included a sizable
constituency of working-class and peasant women, the leaders insisted that
women --- even mothers --- absolutely depended upon their wages to support
their families and relatives. Catholic periodicals based their defense of
women's employment on the fact that women worked from unselfish and not
careerist motivations. . . .
By contrast, during the 1920s, a formidable force of anti-feminists had
coalesced. In addition to the Protestant federation and the Housewives Union,
over a million women belonged to organizations affiliated with the Catholic
Church. . . . Without either education or upbringing that might have prepared
them to take advantage of their new rights, these women wanted "Emancipation
from Emancipation" --- a slogan later taken up by Nazi ideologist Alfred
Rosenberg. Two-thirds of all married German women considered themselves
housewives. Swearing to reinforce, not threaten, male prerogatives, they set
out to defend traditional morality against decadence, which they linked to
large cities and poor people. Aiming to purify public morality by curbing male
sexual license and saving endangered youth, housewives built their own
subculture within religious and civic institutions and swelled the ranks of
women's patriotica and civic associations. As liberals praised the
unprecedented freeom of 1920s Weimar Republic culture in Germany, these
traditionalists established their own protection against too much liberty.
In defending a mythic vision of the ideal family, they launched a crusade
against modernity with political implications that became visible years later.
. . . Besides defending their feminine role and responsibilities as women,
these conservative middle-class women counterattacked by accusing men of
failing in their responsibility to guarantee public order. While misogynists
(those who hateful sentiments about women, especially about their place in the
labor force) scapegoated women, public figures now blamed the Depression on a
failure of masculine will. "Men today are absolutely worthless," wrote one
stalwart woman academic from the old women's movement. "He cannot protect his
life, his property or his freedom!" Turning the dominant rhetoric around, women
replied in effect, "Yes, we will sacrifice, but only when everyone else does."
When the major institutions of society collapse (as they did in post-World War
I Germany) citizens perceive their futures as threatened, and self-interest
merges with sacrifice. The common good and individual advantage match. As in
wartime, the national fate rested with the women who would revive morale by
their contributions on the nonpolitical sphere. . . . Masculine individualism,
they argued, had produced financial and moral bankruptcy; only women could
restore the collectivist spirit by treating the psychological depression that
followed in the wake of economic disaster. . . .
The women who flocked to conservative women's associations railed against
men's default in their duties; and they stressed their own readiness to
sacrifice. However, another theme emerged with full force: Conservative women
expected a payoff. These women did not intend to return to their homes, but
relinquished their claim to masculine turf with the understanding they could
pioneer their own social "space," their "Libensraum" (living room). Before
Hitler used "Libensraum" to popularize conquest in the East, women had applied
it in their own way, as "a space in which to live," or "living room" inside
Germany --- a social space where domestic tranquility and traditional values
reigned. Thus, women commonly used the term to describe a "space" beyond the
materialist and abrasive masculine world of business, class struggle and high
politics. . . .
To counteract economic dislocation, Germans from all backgrounds concurred
that the familiy (like a precious natural resource) ought to be protected. This
put women at the nexus of the debate about ethical values, national health and
social cohesion. . . . The debate about childbirth highlighted the contrast
between conservatives and progressives. Right and Left polarized absolutely.
Catholics remained staunchly reactionary; Protestants and Jews wavered in the
middle; and Socialists and Communists called for more birth-control centers.
All sides, it is important to remember, defended the family as an institution
but disagreed about how best to support it. . . . The Left believed that
families could be saved only by increasing husbands' and wives' control over
their lives (thus, their call for more effective birth control). Throughout the
Weimar Republic in Germany, Socialist and Communist women had supported
measures to ease the burdens of employed wives and mothers. Acknowledging the
reality in Germany that more than 10% of all new mothers did not have husbands,
Leftists wanted to legalize children born to unmarried mothers, to end harsh
laws against abortion and to reform family law. They found it unjust that, for
example, anyone convicted of assisting at an abortion was sentenced to seven
years of hard labor and that an adulterous husband whose wife won a divorce
against him still retained decisive rights over the couple's children.
Working-class women protested, too, that a husband could, and often did,
legally prevent his wife from using contraception. Socialist women advocated
that abstinence and birth control and cautiously followed the lead of women
doctors in supporting women doctors to save mothers' lives. Draconian rules,
they said, would never produced an ordered society. A Communist Reichstag
delegate put the case simply: "Punishments have not prevented the population
decline; they have demonstrated only that women will risk prison, illness and
sickness in order not to bring unwanted children into the world."
A progressive filmmaker dramatized the plight of German young people in a
movie entitled "CYNAKALI" (Cynical) that produced an explosive controversy. Two
idealistic workers, Hedwig and Paul, fall deeply in love. They decide to live
together in equality and independence. Eventually, when they both have saved
enough money, they plan to marry; but in the depths of the Depression, they
barely earn enough to get by. Despite job insecurity, the two live blissfully
together and dream of the future. Then they both lose their jobs, and Hedwig
discovers she is pregnant. Paul, driven by destitution, steals groceries so
they can eat; his amateurish efforts lead directly to his arrest and
imprisonment. Hedwig, wild with desperation, decides to have an abortion. she
goes to a quack who bungles the operation and dies. Censors in most German
states banned "CYNAKALI" in response to women's organizations' protests. Where
it was shown, women picketed with signs warning that the film was lewd and
immoral. The slightest hint that "good" people might land, through no fault of
their own, in "bad" situations, met with implacable hostility; and the
suggestion that a safe abortion might offer a human solution to economic
problems aroused outrage from conservative women's groups. Women whose lives
centered on home, husband and housework perceived any relaxation of moral
standards as an assault on their tiny kingdoms.
Erich Fromm's questionnaire, the movie "CYNAKALI, popular novels and the
women's press attest to the depths of the controversy over men's and women's
proper roles. Hitler, as the most outspoken opponent of women in politics,
emerged as the strongest spokesman for the strong-man ideal. Women might
organize, argue, lobby and volunteer, but many believed only a powerful man
could bring other men back to order. Hitler embodied both the shabby
respectability of the "little man" and the military swagger of the commanding
personality. His political success revealed itself anew with each Depression
election. . . .
From the early days of the Nazi Party, women's and men's support peaked at
different points. Thoughout the 1920s, when the Nazi vote remained low, many
fewer women than men cast their ballots for Nazi candidates; and generally,
despite their lack of political experience, women voters' party loyalty ot
Catholic and Nationalist parties remained slightly stronger than men's. After
1928, women voters switched to the Nazi Party more slowly than men, but
beginning with the July 1932 elections, they, like many new voters, converted
quickly --- even after many men, it appears, deserted Hitler's party, which
seemed stalemated. It may also be that women who had not previously voted at
all tended to cast their first ballots for Nazi candidates. This would indicate
their Nazi enthusiasm motivated them to finally get out and vote. . . .
On the Woman Question, Nazis achieved no agreement whatsoever. Hitler
showered sentimental prose on the "ideal mothers" of Germany, and (Hitler's own
master Nazi propagandist) Julius Streicher published soft-core pornography
demeaning women. Nazi women themselves carved out their own sphere at the
margins of Party activity, as well on the fringes of bourgeois respectability.
. . .
On the eve of Hitler's electoral triumphs, opponents issued blistering
attacks on National Socialism (Naziism) and the Woman Question. Supported by
funds from the Catholic Church, a psychologist published a scathing expose' of
Nazi ideals about women; the moderate liberal People's Party issued warnings
that women would be turned into breeding machines if the Nazis took over.
Socialist women collected Nazi men's misogynistic (rabidly anti-woman)
statements and published them in a booklet that they then distributed to
Socialist speakers. These authors assumed that information and quotations would
speak for themselves; any woman reading Nazi statements about women, they
assumed, would recoil. This anti-Nazi propaganda makes sad reading. The authors
naively assumed that women reading blatantly anti-feminist statements would
waver in their attachment to Naziism. In reasonable, well-structured essays,
non-Nazi authors criticized their enemy.
Tragically, they neither comprehended nor countered the deep emotional
basis of Hitler's appeal. Nazis depended upon speeches and rallies, holding
their audiences with myth, bigotry, ritual and violence. Election results
showed that rationality did not prevail against passion and prejudice. . . .
From the first, Hitler's opponents directly attacked his traditional political
opinions, but the core of his social revolution (sex and race) remained largely
unnoticed. . . .
After Hitler became dictator, he directed the energies he had onced used to
destroy orderly society under the earlier Weimar democracy to the establishment
of discipline in his dictatorship. This meant that his male followers left the
streets and moved into offices, and their estwhile enemies were either
murdered, driven into exile or imprisoned. . . . Women Nazis confronted a very
different situation. They had anticipated that Hitler's victory would empower
them to do battle against non-Nazi women rivals within the female sphere (who
for the most part had not been arrested). Nazi women, dedicated to motherhood,
resolved to convert the unconvinced in the "old" women's movement, religious
groups and civic clubs to join their cause. They need not have bothered because
middle-class women decided to collaborate of their own accord. Even more
astonishing, the old-time Nazi women themselves were excluded from the newly
formed women's bureaucracy. Male leaders distrusted them for precisely the
energy, autonomy and commitment prized in men Nazis.
Women old-timers watched from the sidelines as the newcomers received
accolades and appointments to office. The more "respectable" women from the
member organizations of the BDF, together with civic women's groups from whom
Nazi leaders had anticipated resistance, quickly declared their allegiance and
asked for posts. These women shared Hitler's overall program for a "new
Germany" and admired authoritarian government. Like other non-Nazis on the
right, they overlooked Hitler's fanatical and racist notions and anticipated
that the office of Chancellor of Germany would force moderation on him. . . .
The easy capitulation of those German women troubles us still, for one
would expect their membership in a women's-rights organization would have
immunized Germany's women against Nazi promises --- if for no other reason than
because the level of violence (verbal and physical) reached such horrifying
proportions. But the member associations of the BDF yielded quickly. Nazi
leaders who anticipated a long fight found themselves confronted with a surfeit
of new volunteers for their cause. Before 1933, the BDF had already defaulted
on its commitment to married women's right to work. Rather than insisting on
their inalienable human equality, bourgois women had bargained for benefits in
exchange for contributions to the national good. In other words, they used
their special "feminine" qualities to gain privileges. A decade-long encounter
with democracy left them disillusioned, divided and hopelessly alienated from
the liberal wing of their own women's rights movement. The possibility of a
women's coalition against the rising tide of Hitlerism never was even a remote
possibility. Because women had not, even after decades of organizing, achieved
sufficient power to stand their ground in a male-dominated political forum,
their tactics made sense in some ways. Women dedicated themselves to improving
their women's world rather than competing in a political contest they could not
win. Recognizing their weakness, they cultivated their separate culture and
institutions beyond concerns they defined as "masculine." But, by making these
pragmatic choices, they shed the claim they once had to special virtue.
An English woman who had lived in Berlin in 1933 watched the collapse of
women's organizations and asked, "Was it not very like the attitude of the old
lady, who, when asked why she curtsied to the devil, replied, 'Ah, well, one
can never tell.'"
The feminist "fortress" in Germany collapsed. But Kirkpatrick's "fortress"
metaphor had been inappropriate in the first place. Women's organizations,
athough massive in membership, resembled networks with grids reaching into most
remote villages and towns. They had no walls around their separate sphere.
Thus, women leaders who might have objected to the Nazi regime actually led
their followers into the new state in the expectation that their cooperation
would give them leverage.
_________________________________
From Pages 355-356:
Jewish women (in Nazi Germany) felt institutional betrayal in very personal
ways as their non-Jewish counterparts in Protestant, Catholic and civic women's
organizations faced the decision whether to expel all "non-Aryans" (non-German
stock). . . .
The Jewish Women's League took an independent stance in relation to issues
concerning race and reproduction. Jewish women tended to be more supportive
than Catholics of birth control, and more skeptical than Protestants about
abortion. Articles in the Jewish women's periodical press argued that while
abortion was morally wrong, it did not constitute a crime. Like Catholic women
pacifists, the Jewish Women's League called for peace among all nations. But
unlike either Protestant and Catholics, they warned about racial conflict
within Germany. As Jews, they linked growing misogyny (hatred for women,
especially in the workplace) and rising anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish sentiments),
and they asked their non-Jewish colleagues in the women's movement to join them
in defense of human equality and dignity in the face of both.
______________________________________________