Posts Tagged ‘abortion’

With all the COVID hype, you probably missed…

Posted: July 31, 2021 by ng36b in abortion, catholic
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…the vote to kill the Hyde Amendment.

Yup, I almost missed it too.

From https://www.chausa.org/about/about/facts-statistics

Since 1973, every funding bill has contained the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of taxpayer funding for abortions, except in a few key areas. Like most things on social media, most people haven’t actually read the amendment, so I’ve copied it here:

Sec. 506. (a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.

(b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.

(c) The term “health benefits coverage” means the package of services covered by a managed care provider or organization pursuant to a contract or other arrangement.

–Hyde Amendment

Sec. 507. (a) The limitations established in the preceding section shall not apply to an abortion—

(1) if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest; or


(2) in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed.

(b) Nothing in the preceding section shall be construed as prohibiting the expenditure by a State, locality, entity, or private person of State, local, or private funds (other than a State’s or locality’s contribution of Medicaid matching funds).

(c) Nothing in the preceding section shall be construed as restricting the ability of any managed care provider from offering abortion coverage or the ability of a State or locality to contract separately with such a provider for such coverage with State funds (other than a State’s or locality’s contribution of Medicaid matching funds).

(d) (1) None of the funds made available in this Act may be made available to a Federal agency or program, or to a State or local government, if such agency, program, or government subjects any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.

(2) In this subsection, the term “health care entity” includes an individual physician or other health care professional, a hospital, a provider-sponsored organization, a health maintenance organization, a health insurance plan, or any other kind of health care facility, organization, or plan.

–Hyde Amendment

The Hyde Amendment is estimated to have stopped approximately 300,000 abortions a year. Given that abortion in the U.S. is likely responsible for a 10% decrease in population (calculated by comparing states that have and have not legalized abortion), repealing the Hyde Amendment will likely increase this to 12-13%. Sadly, black Americans are the hardest hit by abortions. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 40% of black pregnancies are terminated through abortion. That’s a staggering number when you think that every year, around half a million black babies are simply executed.

To put that in perspective, in 2016 there were approximately 17,000 murders in the entire U.S. Even with the jump in 2020, these numbers still don’t compare to abortion losses for just black Americans. When you lump in everyone else, we’re close to 1 million.

The good news is that abortion has been on the decline. After hitting a high in 1990, its been falling ever since, although its hard to tell because some states, including California, don’t report numbers to the CDC. This fall is attributed to everything from better education to better access to birth control. So if its declining, why expand funding? Why bother doing this when anyone that wants an abortion can easily get one?

Since its politics, I’m going to answer: money and power. Funding abortion through tax dollars gives places like Planned Parenthood a cash cow to milk. Just like transgender therapy, when the government pays for it, even if they don’t pay very well, you’re guaranteed a pay check. On the power side, given that there are over 600 Catholic hospitals in the U.S., repealing the Hyde Amendment forces them to either dump Medicare or go out of business. Given that these hospitals need Medicare to care for some of the poorest Americans, its a nasty way to pin these hospitals against the wall.

Should the Hyde Amendment go away, the first thing that will happen is a surge in lawsuits on any hospital that previously did not provide abortion service. After that, you’ll continue to see most abortions still performed at places like Planned Parenthood. Just like the bakery lawsuits, none of this will result in better service or better health, because its just a power and money grab, plain and simple.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Normalizing deviance on abortion and MAGA

Posted: September 5, 2020 by ng36b in abortion, Always look at the bright side of Trump, News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
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Trailer for the movie “Unplanned”, from unplannedfilm.com

The first time I heard the term “normalized deviance” was at a Project Management group meeting when one of the members (an aviator) described how dangerous it was to fly with multiple equipment waivers. As he described it, once you got used to a piece of equipment not working, it eventually just became accepted, and that lowered the drive to get it fixed. He called that “normalized deviance, and he compared it to smoking marijuana. Twenty years ago, most people considered smoking marijuana illegal. Now? We’re likely to see it legalized in less than ten years throughout the country.

Normalizing deviance comes from constantly doing something that is supposed to be wrong or illegal, and by constant exposure, cause people to accept that behavior. Marijuana use is a great example. If you attended college in the last 20 years, you probably knew someone that smoked marijuana, and they probably were an OK person. Soon it was easy to question why marijuana was illegal. Dangerous substance? So is tobacco and alcohol, but we allow those. “Gateway drug?” Probably not, according to plenty of other studies. Combine that with health and even medical benefits, and soon it is OK to openly support marijuana use.

Normalizing deviance, although it sounds bad, isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s what broke down barriers to inter-racial marriage, or rampant anti-Catholic bias among new immigrants to America. Unfortunately, in the areas of abortion and open support to President Trump, its a troubling trend. In the case of abortion, its accepted that you can’t support women’s rights without also supporting abortion. This flies in the faces of the millions of women that are pro-life, yet its simply accepted in a large part of society.

The other normalized deviance is physical altercations on any Trump supporter. It’s accepted by too many people that if you put up a Trump sign in your yard, or wear a MAGA hat in public, you’re likely to get vandalized or attacked. That shouldn’t be the case. As a young boy during the 1996 Presidential election, I remember getting signs from all three Presidential candidates, mainly because I thought it was interesting. Rampant sign destruction didn’t happen, and when signs were damaged, people didn’t justify it. That’s not the case anymore.

If conservatives continue to allow this normalized deviance, it’ll be near impossible to openly speak about abortion or support conservative candidates. While plenty of people will simply stay quiet and vote conservatively anyway, it’ll be nearly impossible to raise enthusiastic support, especially among young people who are more inclined to be open about their beliefs and opinions.

It’s not enough to simply push back. Making movies like “Unplanned” and scoring legal victories like Nick Sandmann did are good starts, but that can’t be the end state. It not enough to be grudgingly tolerated in the background. The baseline has to be that you can be a woman and be pro-life, and that you can put a sign in your yard and reasonably expect it to stay up. Until that happens, we haven’t normalized enough conservative deviance.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The politicization of science has a staggeringly high body count

Posted: July 9, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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As I’ve watched the media coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic unfold over the past several months I am continually amazed at how all aspects of the science associated with this crisis has been politicized.

Right from the beginning, when the computer models predicted a death total in the millions, the politicization was evident.  Those scientists that were predicting a far lower death count did not get anywhere near the same news converge, especially on the mainstream news stations. Could it be that the liberal journalists and politicians thought if they could generate enough hysteria governors would have no option other than shutting down states, collapsing the economy in the process just so they could influence the 2020 election?  How many businesses were destroyed because of the lockdowns?  How many deaths will result from suicides and delayed diagnosis thanks to the lockdowns? How many will have died needlessly because of the media attacks on the drug hydroxychloroquine? That was done solely because President Trump praised the drug.  Requiring masks is another example of the politicization of science.

The politicization of science is not new.  In the 1960s it led to the banning of the pesticide DDT.  This article sheds a lot of light on that deadly fiasco: Millions Died Thanks to the Mother of Environmentalism

Since the mid-1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use.

The science behind the banning of DDT did not hold up at all.

Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed.

The politicization of science reached an absurd level with all of this global warming, climate change, global climate disruption nonsense.  It is difficult to measure a body count associated with that scientific malpractice but it is there because of impacts on developing nations being denied the use of cheap fossil fuel energy sources.

No politicization of science is more deadly that the politicization associated with abortion.  Only absolute scientific fraud can deny the unmistakable scientific evidence that an unborn child is actually a live human being.  The website Wordmeter documents just how many abortions happen worldwide:

According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately125,000 abortions per day.

The Pro-Life movement needs to expand

Posted: January 25, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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President Trump at the 2020 March for Life. From denvercatholic.org

The March for Life, despite featuring President Trump as the main speaker, was nearly buried in the Google News Feed this morning. While I was digging details out of the different articles, it became very obvious that different language was used by different sides to describe each other.

For example, NPR’s headline reads:

Trump Speaks At March For Life, An Anti-Abortion Rights Demonstration

A local ABC station out of Pennsylvania had:

Locals Head to Historic March for Life in Washington D.C.

It wasn’t hard to see why. The NPR article linked Trump and being “anti-abortion.” Its deliberately linking him to opposing something, which is a negative. We are hard wired to have issues with negative people. If you sit around someone who is whining a lot, you get tired of it. The ABC station has a positive link, with people headed to something “historic” that features “life.”

It’s not just these two headlines. A search of CNN revealed the top headline as:

At March for Life, Trump shows he gets the power of abortion issue

…focused here on Trump wanting power. And Huffpost, never dissapointing me, posted this:

Trump To Attend Anti-Abortion March For Life In Person, Group Says

…insisting on inserting the “anti” portion, removing the President’s title and only saying he’s “attending,” a passive action.

This sounds like semantics. And who cares what others say? But its important, because it frames discussions we have with people. I see it when my kids tell me what their teachers push at their classrooms. I hear it when people bring up different subjects. Every conversation starts from a person’s level of understanding, and that, too often, comes from how they read an article. The article’s title often primes a reader to read it in a certain way. And if the person simply browses the title, even worse.

Although pro-life movements have made a lot of ground, they have an uphill battle against the media. They will have to change to continue to expand, especially when President Trump eventually leaves. Conveniently, Democrats have made abortion a binary issue to be in the party, and essentially no Democrat can openly support the pro-life movement. But abortion, which is a key issue for many conservatives, isn’t so for many liberal voters.

To change that, the pro-life movement should frame its movement as a scientific one, add adoption reform and also push for expanded maternity leave.

Any browsing of pro-life pictures will inevitably feature a christian cross, and likely reference the Catholic Church. That’s not a bad thing, but with so many young people not identifying with a religion, it will only serve to put the movement in a corner. Pro-life organizations should focus on adding lots of scientists to their numbers. Focus on how advances in science enable us to save babies when they are tiny. The fact that babies at the 22-24 week point can live outside the womb is a powerful scientific advancement that nobody can argue with. Seeing pictures of these children in the NICU is powerful imagery. An ultrasound picture can never compare to this. Doing this begins to make the pro-life movement the movement best linked to science, and adds further legitimacy.

Adoption reform would be an easy add to the pro-life movement. I know several people that have navigated the adoption process, and it is sad when its easier to adopt a baby from Africa than from the US. How can we call ourselves a modern society when we run good families through the ringer, especially financially, to adopt a child that needs a good home? Making adoption easier complements the pro-life movement, removing one more reason to kill a growing child. This is an easy vilification of an antiquated process, a reform that is needed, and a chance to add people who are on the fence about abortion into the pro-life movement.

While the media continues to paint pro-life as the “anti-woman” movement, the last easy win for the pro-life movement would be to advocate for maternity leave reform. More women are working outside the home, but struggle to balance having a family with a career. Children should be breast feeding for at least six months and require a lot of attention during that time. Giving women that opportunity, and finding a way to not punish businesses for that (perhaps some tax incentives?) is another great way to both remove pro-life opposition and bring more people to the pro-life side.

It’s sad when our modern society has to fight for basics like the right to live, but its a fight that should be fought.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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