We're at war with women

I must have missed it. Somewhere in the last half century, America - more specifically conservative America -  has declared war on women. I know this particular blog will likely not win me many friends but I can't help but say something.

I have friends on both sides of the fabled aisle, referring to how democrats and republicans sit on opposite sides of the house and senate. The cool thing about friends though, is that you can express an opinion to them and while they may not agree with you, most of the time they don't rush to burn you at the stake. After today I might have to resign myself to a few less Christmas cards or Facebook friends.

Speaking of which, I happened across a conservative friend's post on Facebook this morning. The source was a website that democrats would assume is run by bald, fat, white men in bib overalls, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon while driving around in their pick-up trucks shooting small animals with their over-sized collection of banned assault rifles.

Okay, so I couldn't actually find a picture of any bald, fat, white men in bib overalls, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon while driving around in their pick-up trucks shooting small animals but I'm guessing some liberals would just assume that these two guys have pick-up trucks and beer and guns in a common location somewhere...

I try to stay away from the wild-eyed Pat Buchanan-loving websites so I went in search of corroborative evidence - since the aforementioned conservative post claimed that our current House Minority Leader had responded in a public interview - and it was her comments that started me down this rabbit hole to begin with.

DISCLAIMER: No rabbits were harmed in the writing of this blog. There were no pick-up trucks, cheap beer or banned weapons used during the production of this free speech.

Where was I? So I found an article on what I assume is a more left-leaning website www.thinkprogress.org. The article was entitled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Warns The War On Women Isn’t Over, and sure enough, it included many of the same quotes that the darned conservative article had highlighted; only without all the crazy pictures of Nancy Pelosi. Maybe it's just me, but if you're denigrating someone for being a name-calling, ignorant knucklehead, doing it by being a name-calling, ignorant knucklehead kind of takes the shine off, if you know what I mean.

I'm sure Madam Pelosi is a fine, upstanding American, but here's where it gets ugly. This article (see above) is the second time in as many weeks where I've heard (or read) Madam Pelosi state in no uncertain terms that her Catholic faith has no bearing on her position regarding abortion. To cherry pick from the Think Progress interview - and I quote:

1. "House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blasted the GOP’s continued assault on reproductive rights in an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress on Saturday."
2. "So this is the fight. It’s a fight on family planning, contraception, as well as terminating a pregnancy and without having adequate protections for women in case of rape or incest, life of the mother. It’s so hypocritical."
3. "My faith is about, Christ is my savior, the church is his church, and has nothing to do with Priests for Life…I wouldn't even dignify whatever it is they said. It was a highly emotional statement that they made. If it were more intellectual I might have paid attention to it. He was acting hysterically."

To respond as simply as I can:

1. Using the term reproductive rights in a discussion about a person's right to choose to kill a human baby is - among other things - an oxymoron.
2. No, the fight is about preventing the unnecessary killing of human babies.
3. It is possible to be intellectual about God. But our relationship with Jesus - and by our I mean the collective church - is granted solely by God's grace through our individual faith. However, that individual faith does not allow for us to self-determine what constitutes morality. The only hysterical thing about this is that Madam Pelosi believes she can somehow justify killing babies before God.

At the risk of being sarcastic, good luck with that.

Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, while teaching on things that constitute loving our neighbor as ourselves, "The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me."

Another teaching of Jesus (perhaps more appropriate for Madam Pelosi) begins in Luke 9:46 - "An argument started among them as to which of them might be the greatest. But Jesus, knowing what they were thinking in their heart, took a child and stood him by His side, and said to them, “Whoever receives this child in My name receives Me, and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me; for the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great.”"

I'm not a woman, and to many that disqualifies me from speaking out on women's issues. However, I am a follower of Jesus Christ - a sinful, stumbling, try-again-today believer in the death and resurrection of our Savior. And that qualifies me to speak up and chastise Madam Pelosi in this instance.

Madam, this is America; and you are free to voice your opinion and you are free to believe whatever you choose to believe. If the law of the land allows abortion and you agree with that, you certainly have every right to do so. But when you step across the line of faith and profess to stand with Christ you must align yourself with Him. You can't have it both ways.

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Should we kill?

In my humble opinion, this is a sentence that should never come out of a doctor's mouth:

"I'm sorry, your baby will be born with [insert birth defect or illness here]; would you like to have it aborted?"

I know that there are most likely thousands of medical malpractice suits filed each year. [About 85,000 annually according to this report] What I did not know is that a portion of them fall into the category of Wrongful Birth.

A variety of Internet sites agree in principle that in a wrongful birth action, parents seek damages for a child born with birth defects. The claim for damages is based on the cost to parents of raising an unexpectedly defective child. There is also a companion suit known as Wrongful Life. In a wrongful life action, the child seeks damages for being born with a birth defect rather than not being born.

Let me preface my forthcoming remarks with the statement that I can in no way imagine the anguish a parent undergoes when they are faced with a newborn that will require extraordinary care. My wife and I were blessed with two healthy sons. As I suspect all parents do, we worried if anything would be wrong with our kids. My wife had amniocentesis tests during both pregnancies. And although there were a couple of things that showed up that could have had the potential of manifesting as what we would call abnormal traits, we ended up with two generally healthy - normal - boys.

The article that started me thinking about this aired on NPR this morning.


The segment highlighted Sharon and Steven Hoffman's son, Jake, who was born with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease that mainly affects Jewish families and is usually fatal by age 4 or 5.

"There's no treatment. There's no cure. There's nothing," Sharon says.

She says her doctor did not test for the disease. At six months, Jake was diagnosed with it. The couple says he lost control of his muscles and had constant seizures. He died two years later before reaching his third birthday. Sharon says she would have had an abortion if she had known.

"There is no quality of life," Sharon says. "The only thing that you would be bringing this child into the world to do is to suffer. And die."

[Previous four (4) paragraphs quoted from this NPR report]

Again, let me state that I have no idea how I would react if I had been in Mr. Hoffman's shoes.

In a veritable whirlwind of emotional upheaval, there are two main issues here:

1. Who is at fault (i.e. guilty) for a child born with serious birth defects?
2. Can we actually take a step that requires killing a child and call it mercy?

                                                        Is justice blind?

In principle, I see clear cut cases where a trained, medical professional can screw up and directly cause something harmful to happen to a child before he or she is born. I can totally understand parents taking doctors, hospitals, etc. to task for these instances.

But what about a child that, through no fault of anyone, has a birth defect? Is it fair to sue the doctor or hospital merely because a specific test wasn't run? How many parents have sat in a medical facility and said, "Is that test really necessary?" out of concern for the mother's health or maybe for financial reasons due to limitations in health care coverage.

Are we really saying that we humans should have the power of life and death over another human if that person does not meet our standard of normal? Can we blame this on advances in medical science that give us nearly unlimited ability to diagnose fetal health? Or more accurately, the failure to employ such advances in all cases?

And that brings us to the real question we should ask ourselves: do we understand the concept of life well enough to make that decision?

What do you think?

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I'm in trouble

I know it already. Any time a man decides to comment on women's issues, he's in trouble. I could've just not written this blog. It was almost like I was compelled to write it. So here goes...

                         I wonder how long I'll be in here...

NPR's Morning Edition was doing its usual great job of informing me on the way to work this morning. As I pulled into the parking lot at work, I heard this quote:

"We kind of got caught up in the moment," she says. "[We] woke up in the morning and decided that we needed to go get Plan B, because neither of us were ready for any sort of pregnancy."

Why couldn't I have gotten to work a few minutes earlier? I would've been blissfully unaware of this segment on Morning Edition and my burgeoning readership would have my vanilla commentary on last night's Super Bowl and commercials as their impression-of-X-du-jour.

But no; I had to catch this little hand-grenade of a quote before turning off my engine.

Let me fire the first salvo in my totally emotion-based response; then we'll see where this goes.

                   I'm sure I'll get it from all sides for this one...

I have to hand it to the unnamed college boyfriend. There is an awful lot of we in that quote up there which, I suspect, had a lot to do with an emotion named relief. I remember my younger days and the thought of being a father back then terrified me. Life was too much fun; who wanted to end all that and settle down?

But the real meat and potatoes of what got to me - deep down inside - was when she said, "...because neither of us were ready for any sort of pregnancy."

Say what?

Any sort of pregnancy? For a college-educated woman, I have to believe that was a total non sequitur.

Of course, the real gist of why this is roiling around in my gut since this morning is that old moral compass pointing its accusing little finger at our society's acceptance of, for lack of a better phrase, the let's not have a baby now philosophy.

Technically speaking, the Plan B pill isn't abortion as, if the rest of the article is to be believed, it prevents fertilization of the egg which prevents conception.

What it is, is a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Knowing the human proclivity toward ready, fire, aim! I'm sure the pharmaceutical manufacturers had no doubt that they could sell a passel of these Plan B pills. Ahem, in the name of preventing all types of unwanted pregnancies of course, and contributing to a better society through emergency family planning.

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed a do-over once and while; in this case as long as they have the $50 - $90 it costs for the plan B pill. I guess another thing is that otherwise educated folk, like the young lady interviewed by NPR, allow themselves the freedom to goof without having to suffer the consequences. As she said in the interview, "We kind of got caught up in the moment."

Hey. It happens, right? In fact, with the young lady in question it apparently happened twice. But perhaps more concerning is how she lifts up Plan B as some sort of, dare I say it, right, in the quote, "I can't even describe how important it was," she says. "It's an important option for girls at that age to have because ... things happen."

So there we have it. Technically, Plan B is not abortion because the effect happens prior to fertilization. But it's disturbing that we want to engineer willpower, self-control and, yes, morality out of the equation of life.

As a man, I believe men should be responsible enough to step back when, in the young lady's words, people are getting caught up in the moment. It takes two, of course. But I'm not laying this one off on women. Young men have a need to be every bit as responsible as young women.

Should Plan B be available over the counter to men and women over 18? As much as I think it sets a dangerous precedent, in America the answer should be yes.

Should Plan B be available over the counter to young men and women under 18? Not without a parent or legal guardian's consent.

That's what I think - how about you?

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