May 3rd 2008
Homosexual activists rudely shouted down an academic lecture, because they didn’t agree. That’s no more impressive than the bullies here.
And my wife just reminded me how similar this is to P.Z. Myers on this phone call. Is there a pattern here?
March 16th 2008
Abortion harms women. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is taking a very strong stand on this, saying it’s time to reverse positions and overturn policies on abortions. According to today’s [London] Times Online,
Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health. This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion.
(Emphasis added.)
When I first looked at this article on the Times website, the first comment there read almost like a punch line:
“No one should ever counsel a woman….she should trust her feelings.”
Charles, Vancouver, Washington
(This comment has now moved off the front page. Click “read all comments” to find it. The ellipsis was in the original.)
We’ll come back to Charles in a moment.
Douglas Groothuis has predicted this report will not see the light of day in U.S. media, except on pro-life websites. That would be consistent with the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) response to earlier studies with similar findings. More than two years ago researchers in New Zealand, using gold-standard study methods, found that women who had undergone abortions suffer significantly increased levels of mental health troubles, including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse. These results were contrary to the researchers’ expectations.
A few months later 15 experts put their signatures under this statement in the Times of London:
“Research published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in January has shown that even women without past mental health problems are at risk of psychological ill-effects after abortion. Women who had had abortions had twice the level of mental health problems and three times the risk of major depressive illness as those who had given birth or never been pregnant.”
Research into these issues is ongoing, and there have been studies in which no negative mental health effects on women were revealed. The very real likelihood of such effects, however, has either been understated or ignored. Now the Royal College is quite responsibly recognizing that large-scale, high-quality studies are indicating that abortion can be harmful to women’s mental health.
The APA’s response to this has been to edit their “Briefing Sheet on the Impact of Abortion on Women.” On October 31, 2006, it very helpfully read,
“This fact sheet is currently being updated. For other information, please visit our homepage at www.apa.org/ppo.”
How informative. I wondered at the time if and when they would be have the courage to tell the whole story. Today, over one year and four months later, it reads,
“This fact sheet is currently being updated. For other information, please visit our homepage at www.apa.org/ppo.”
… which sounds vaguely similar to the last time. (I wonder if my Psych professors would have granted me my degree if I’d taken that long to “update” my thesis.) The APA certainly isn’t leading the charge in promoting mental health (never mind the “health effects” on the unborn child who gets killed). The Washington Times reported in 2006:
Dr. Russo pointed out that in 1969 the APA adopted the position that abortion should be a civil right. She added, “To pro-choice advocates, mental health effects are not relevant to the legal context of arguments to restrict access to abortion.”
According to Dr. Russo, pro-choice researchers have a different agenda. “To someone who believes that the decision to have a child is a personal decision, protected by a right of privacy, evidence about negative effects of abortion is important, but for a different policy goal — to provide women accurate information so they can make informed choices in their pregnancy decisionmaking process.”
The APA is a mental health organization except when it’s a civil rights organization. Try this thought experiment to see how consistent that position is. Remove the word “abortion” from that quote, and enter “using heroin” in its place. Both have advocates for and against their legalization, on civil rights grounds; both have documented mental health effects….
Which brings us back to the “punch line” we opened with here. Charles thinks it’s wrong to counsel a woman regarding abortion. “She should trust her own feelings,” he said. Do you suppose any boyfriend, husband, or one-night-stand-jerk has ever “counseled” a woman that if she didn’t get an abortion he was going to drop her right then and there–or worse? That’s the kind of “counseling” a woman doesn’t need, but I’ll wager women get more information about their future health risks from that kind of discussion than they get from Planned Parenthood.
What if a trained and qualified psychologist told a woman an abortion would likely double her risk of mental health problems, and even triple her risk of depression? Charles thinks that would be bad. “She should trust her feelings” instead. He probably views abortion as a very personal issue and a civil right. He also appears to represent an abortion-protection position that’s extreme to the point of silliness. Let’s let him go, then; we need not consider him representative of the pro-abortion position. What about the APA, though? What about the media in America? What do you suppose they’re thinking about this? Don’t ever say anything bad about abortion! You’ll give the anti-choice wackos more ammunition!
In fact, by their silence the APA and the U.S. media have been saying, for at least 16 months, Protect abortion at all costs. They’re saying that protecting abortion is far, far more important than protecting babies. That’s okay, they say; babies aren’t really persons. Now, I think that’s a really lousy argument, but I’ll grant that it’s at least an argument. By their continuing silence, though, they are also saying that protecting abortion is far more important than protecting women.
The parallel is striking. Does it mean they believe women aren’t really persons? If not, why the silence?
One further important point: changing abortion policy is not the only value at issue here. Some readers of this article have probably had abortions, others have probably encouraged someone to have an abortion, and many others have been otherwise been close to issue in a very personal way. I don’t want the policy side of the issue to blind us to the actual effects many have experienced. The research cited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists is very statistical and abstract, but it represents real women. I deplore the APA’s public disregard of these very real persons. I do not want to be guilty of the same. An article like this calls for a follow-up addressing their real-life situations.
Guilt is one likely issue, addressed very sensitively here. I’m not sure I’m qualified to go far beyond that. Every woman’s (and every family’s) experience is too different. I don’t know how to speak to it. I would welcome others’ suggestions for good articles and resources to help.
More information at Magic Statistics.
[Original links to some of the 2006 news stories have been closed by the respective newspapers. I'll vouch for the quotes, though, which were live in the news sources when I first blogged on them, as linked here. They can also be confirmed by Google searches.]
February 25th 2008
Homosexual activists in the Keystone State are blasting a public school principal simply because he is a Boy Scout leader…. the president of an organization that claims the Scouts practice discrimination by prohibiting homosexuals to be leaders said the school should not support the Scouts and should never have allowed them inside the building in their uniforms.
[From Homosexuals rip Penn. principal for wearing Boy Scout uniform (OneNewsNow.com) ]
The ostensible offense is that “the Scouts practice discrimination.” Is there not discrimination being practiced against the Scouts here, though? This Scout leader appeared on a local TV show featuring good deeds the Scouts had been doing. He was not representing the school, as far as we can tell from the report; when he’s in his Scout uniform, he is just a Scout leader who happens also to be a principal. And he got blasted for it. (It was students, not the principal, who wore their uniforms to school.)
“Discrimination” is typically used in one of two senses. The second, unfortunately, is becoming far more common than the first.
At its core it refers to making suitability judgments on the basis of factors deemed to be relevant to the issue at hand. For example, we discriminate against high school dropouts performing brain surgery. The word “discrimination” in this context always belongs in an extended clause: “wrongful or rightful discrimination on the basis of…” Whether it is right or wrong depends on whether the factors for discrimination are relevant. Character and skills are relevant. Skin color is not–unless you’re talking about hiring actors to play, say, George Washington, or George Washington Carver. Then, racial discrimination is based on relevant factors, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it.
Whether we ever had such a pure conception of how “discrimination” should be used, I do not know. I do know that as our culture was gaining awareness that racial discrimination was (almost always) wrong, we used the word “discrimination” by itself, without the rest of the extended clause, and everybody knew just what it meant. It was a useful abbreviation for the whole, because in that era, racial discrimination was the only kind that got much discussion.
Then the connotations of the word evolved toward the second sense of the term. It was, for a while, a specific label attached to a specific evil. By constant use in that context it became associated generally with evil–even though good and positive uses of the word still existed (as in high school dropouts and brain surgery). It gained an emotional overtone. Racial discrimination was and is truly wrong and evil. “Racial discrimination” was shorted to just “discrimination.” And then, “discrimination” by itself picked up the sense of being truly wrong and evil.
Concurrently and also following this evolution, “discrimination” became a word to be claimed especially by minority groups or groups who could claim they had been oppressed in some way similar to African-Americans. Often, in the early years of this process, these groups too were being wrongly discriminated against on the basis of irrelevant factors.
But then some minority groups–and I’m thinking especially of homosexual activists now–realized what they had available to them. Here was a word that evoked universally negative emotions, which the public was used to applying to minority groups. They could claim it for themselves, point to examples where they were being oppressed, and use it against anyone who stood against them.
But the Boy Scouts are a minority group, with considerably less political clout these days than the homosexual activists have. Attacks like this one on the Scout leader are surely a form of oppression. If “discrimination” just means separating out minority groups for oppressive treatment, then the homosexual activists are discriminating against the Scouts!
Actually, discrimination runs both directions: the Boy Scouts actually do discriminate against homosexuals in leadership. Homosexual activists actually and do discriminate against the Scouts. The word by itself tells us nothing about whether one group is right or the other is wrong. But somehow its emotional weight seems to land heavy on the Scouts when thrown their way. It’s because we react to the emotional tone of the word, instead of recalling what it really means.
Discrimination is wrong when it is based on irrelevant factors. The Scouts can make a case that for their character-building goals, sexual practice is relevant. I hope they also discriminate against openly promiscuous heterosexuals, too, though I don’t know how often this happens. There might be room for some argument there.
There is no room, though, for argument on this: homosexual activists cannot claim they are innocent of discrimination while the Scouts are guilty. Not unless they fill out the rest of the clause to show whether they’re discriminating based on relevant factors.
Related: Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy
External: “Boy Scouts Must Endure, Says TX Governor“
February 18th 2008
“Not tonight, dear, I have to reboot.”
Artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. “Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple,” he said to a chuckling crowd…. In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable.
Related:
… and any article you see on same-sex “marriage.”
February 12th 2008
From the Washington Times, via Family Scholars Blog, comes this news on portable polygamy:
The British government has cleared the way for husbands with multiple wives to claim welfare benefits for all their partners, fueling growing controversy over the role of Islamic Shariah law in the nation’s cultural and legal framework…. a panel of four government departments has decided that all the wives of a Muslim man may collect state benefits, provided that the marriages took place in a country where multiple spouses are legal.
And from the NY Times, a report on portable same-sex “marriage:”
A New York appellate court ruled Friday that valid out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples must be legally recognized in New York, just as the law recognizes those of heterosexual couples solemnized elsewhere. Lawyers for both sides said the ruling applied to all public and private employers in the state.
So the trend is that whatever “marriage” you can find someone to approve somewhere, has to be approved even where such a “marriage” is illegal. The polygamy issue calls to mind a difficult question that sometimes arises in missions: what to do when a man with many wives converts to Christianity. Obviously the Biblical standard is one wife with one husband, but for a second, third, etc. wife to be thrown out can place incredible hardships on her. I’ve been aware of discussion on this in the past, but I’m not current on how that issue typically gets resolved, or if there’s one preferred solution.
Nevertheless, this trend toward approving in one place whatever is approved anywhere else is destabilizing, and especially in the case of same-sex “marriage,” it encourages immoral relationships. It’s not a healthy direction to be heading.
December 21st 2007
Seen at Magic Statistics, insight on how to keep your marriage healthy:
“What matters the most is being involved in a religious organization,” says Amy Burdette, co-author of the study and a post-doctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Those who attend church more are less likely to cheat, and those who have more conservative views of the Bible are less likely to cheat.”
In addition to being good advice for living, this is also part of an ongoing series on spiritual practice and life outcomes. See the series link for information on how to interpret studies like these as evidence supporting Christianity.
