Ah! The Sweet Sound of Spin!

Dakota Voice is running this story today, basically an updated version of an older anti-abortion argument. There's a beautiful irony here considering I found this on a Republican pro-life lobby and as ever it's loaded in favour of the pro-life argument.

When you think about abortion, think of something. Imagine a child…

This child’s future is a broken home…

He will be abandoned by his father…

His single mother will struggle to raise him…

Despite the hardships, he will endure…

This child will become the first African American president.

Life: Imagine the potential.

That's the thing about choice, President Barack Obama's mother didn't choose to terminate that pregnancy and if she had, history would be different.

What pro-lifers never get is that this is about choice - one option cannot fit everyone. For some women, abortion will be the wrong choice, for others, it will be the right one. We cannot judge what any foetus will become because we don't know how life will influence them; for every black president or musical prodigy, there will be many others which life leaves by the wayside.

We can know with a reasonable degree of certainty the outcome of many genetic diseases, however. We know the pain and suffering that some children will have to endure as they lose a desperate battle for life in the hours and days after they are born - sure to die.

Many others will have deprived lives, may die of starvation or suffer from malnutrition or disease. Still more will become petty criminals, living life on the fringes of society and spending much of their lives in an out of prison.

UPDATE:

Rowan Pelling's moving account (in the generally awful Daily Mail and right-wing) is an inspiration to those faced with the dilemma of termination. Of her first pregnancy, a child suffering with Patau syndrome, Pelling writes:

"I recognise that it can seem near impossible that anyone could terminate a foetus at this late stage, when its claims to existence appear so tangible. But I am certain that if my first baby had not been diagnosed with Patau syndrome until the 20-week scan I would have still made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.

"This knowledge, which will be abhorrent to some, has brought home to me the fact that other people’s agonies, situations and choices are often impossible to imagine from any distance. Can I really understand, say, the dilemma faced by a pregnant woman who endures brutish social deprivation and domestic violence?"

This is the choice (and a future we can't predict) that pro-lifers want to take away.

Look at this picture and tell me your loving God made this I dare you.

Glenn Stanton Is (Gender) Confused

With apologies to Cole Porter:

"Birds do, bees do it, even ignorant Yankeeeees do it...."

I love Dakota Voice, just when you think they've dredged into the deepest, darkest trenches of Conservative idiocy, they come with something new - this time it's Glenn Stanton. It's quite a short post, so you can see the video and Bob Ellis' comments here.

Stanton has been invited onto the Dr Phil show to discuss "Gender confusion" which Ellis has confused with homosexuality in his tags. Homosexual folks aren't confused about their gender - that's transsexuals you dolt! Homosexuals are attracted to people of the same gender.

Says Ellis:

"Due to a variety of environmental factors, children can become confused about their sexuality, what their proper role is and how they should act."

Which is bullshit, of course. Since Ellis is a God-fearing throwback, he cannot accept that. Even Stanton has this to say about gender dysphoria in children (the full article is here).

"Is it normal and healthy for young children to participate in cross-sex behavior? Of course! The whole world of a child is exploration. The role of the parent is to make sure their children explore and learn about their world in safe and directed ways."

Which is fair enough, but regrettably Stanton doesn't really understand what he's actually burbling about so this advice is misguided and wrong. The behaviour he alludes to is perfectly normal in normal children. His religiously formed guidance won't work in a truly dysphoric person. Our own NHS has this to say:

"The symptoms of gender dysphoria usually appear at a very young age. Children may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities. In most cases, this kind of behaviour is just a normal part of growing up, but in cases of gender dysphoria, it persists into later childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

"The exact cause of gender dysphoria is unknown. It is currently classed as a psychiatric condition (relating to the mind), but many recent studies have suggested that it is more to do with biological development (relating to the body). There is ongoing research into what causes it."

Key here is the observation that a person with true dysphoria will refuse to wear clothes "appropriate" to their gender even at young age. (I did myself as a very young child. Children often dress up in alternative outfits - from the opposite sex to their favourite superhero - yet when they do, we don't assume they will grow up and go around dressed as Batman.)

Normal children just grow out of it! Biology and sexual identity will take over. Parental guidance (as promoted by Stanton) is a good thing; but our parents can't really influence our ultimate sexual identity: any more than zombie-worshipping plonkers can make God appear out of thin air.

Stanton says, Dr. Kennth Zucker:

"...one of the world's leading authorities on gender confusion in children, calls this dynamic "family noise" which he explains as unhealthy relationships between mother and father, parents and child, as well as sibling to sibling. He says allowing a boy to live as a girl might solve the immediate anxiety of such a child, but it would ignore the larger problem driving such desire, and it fails to serve the child and the family."

Does he indeed? Actually, we're not told what, precisely Dr. Zucker said that Stanton hasn't manipulated into his own words and since there is no real citation, there is no way to check, but googling does reveal why Zucker was chosen. TSRoadmap.com (who represent the opposing case) describes him thus:

"Ken Zucker is a psychologist at the Clarke Institute (aka "Jurassic Clarke") in Toronto. Zucker is famous for forcing gender-variant children into reparative therapy to conform to his expectations for male and female behavior in children. He considers transsexual women a 'bad outcome' for gay men."Zucker is a darling of the 'ex-gay' movement because of his work 'curing' gender-variant children. "

Now I won't go as far as alluding to Zucker as a quack, but shit, I'm sure I can hear ducks around here somewhere. Now, I think I'll go and pop some sheer stockings on. Oooo that feels soooo gooooood.

How Stupid Are These People?

Marie Jon a new writer over the uber-conservative Dakota blog, Dakota Voice looks to be a fun girl. Between all the hand-wringing about lies and deceit she claims to like Dubya, saying:

"Bush leaves office with a very low popularity rating in large part because of the one-sided, biased media. You’ll soon find out just how pervasive the media has been in persuading America’s electorate. In the months to come, President-elect Obama will be spoken of in glowing terms. The drive-by media will continue to lie. As our country moves in the wrong direction because of Obama’s policies, only good writes-ups and happy talk will be heard from our “in-the-tank spinmeisters.”

There's a grain of truth there. Some of the American media is very, very pro-Bush. Yet even with the media behind him, swing voters looked at the disastrous fiscal legacy and incredulous stupidity of the woman many saw as his eventual successor [McCain still is a dead man walking, politically] and thought, fuck that!

Obama is the great white hope - despite being part black. He's intelligent, articulate and so far, seems to have his head screwed on. Time will tell.

It's a sad reflection on the Bush years that the opposition fielded both a woman and African-American and won: brilliantly. I hope this has set a precedent in this country where the vacuous rub shoulders with the brilliant - in the corridors of power.

America is hated and despised in many parts of the world with good reason. Dubya led the west into an unjust war and his financial planning brought the world's financial systems to their knees. Islamic terrorism is more rife than ever before even though America has not been attacked recently, they have lost a lot of good men.

This is a man who was an alcoholic; a wastrel who has never had to balance his cheque book. A bloke who once suggested that "god" had spoken to him. Google for Bushisms and you might chuckle for a while before realising that this tongue-tied imbecile was barely able to produce a cogent sentence when he wasn't reading from a prepared speech - that someone else had written.

Yet blinded by some force that I am unable to fathom, people still profess to like the man.

Personally, I wish these people would realise the truth - not this selective biblical truth, but a scientific truth where even the nasty answers are acceptable when they happen to be the right ones.

American Conservatives (Still) Don't Get It

I love Dakota Voice. Rather like Christian Voice, it claims to represent family values and so on but when it comes to the crunch it's a small band of ultra-conservative buffoons led by a bloke with far too much time on his hands.

Leading from a story in the Telegraph, and letting a few facts slip by, DV's Bob Ellis almost recites scripture in gleefully informing us of how us pro-choicers are wrong to give women the chance to decide what happens to their unborn children. Of course, he doesn't say that in so many words, what he says is this:

"Better to leave life and death up to the Author of Life, and not take death into our own hands by killing innocent children.

Which is clichéd and highly emotive rhetoric: and he knows it.

The problem with Bob is he just won't accept the simple fact that there probably is no god. Even an idiot should be able to see that nature is the author of life. Pro-choicers would no more go around "killing innocent children" than he would. If you believe in a god, you might accept that a superior being kicked life off, but there's no evidence at all - none - that we're controlled on a daily basis.

Bob and his followers (and there are many like him, mostly descended from Catholic tradition) believe that life begins at conception. Technically it does but that life does not become remotely sentient until many weeks and probably months later; moreover, that life is not capable of sustaining itself even aided current medicine comparatively late in the pregnancy. Even after birth, this child has to be provided for every hour of the day. It relies on its mother for everything: from heat and shelter to food and emotional warmth.

The Bob variety of pro-lifers are a pretty trenchant lot. Abortion is never an option. Not if the mother was a child who had been raped; or if the foetus was horribly deformed and already in great suffering; not even if the mother's life was at risk. We get the same line in entrenched bullshit from Alaska Governor, Palin - which is why she was so popular with right-wing America in the 2008 election - despite being a complete ignoramus who abused her power. The more informed, pro-choice America breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Obama defeated this creationist freak show, but the war isn't over yet.

The Telegraph article Bob alludes to goes into rather more detail that the Conservatives at DV would like, so I'll summarise some of it here.

First of the headlines:

Telegraph: "Mother has healthy baby boy despite abortion warning by doctor"

Dakota Voice: "Healthy Son Despite Doctors Advice to Abort"

Wait did I miss something here? From the headlines, things look pretty clear cut - they aren't.

The Telegraph doesn't have an axe to grind like DV, and continuess with the hint all is now what it ought to be:

"A mother who was twice advised to have an abortion by doctors has gone on to have a 'perfectly' healthy son."

Note how they've cautiously placed perfectly into single quotes? Wonder why - and I wonder why Mssrs. Ellis and co. missed that? Might this have something to do with it? This from the Telegraph:

"Further tests conducted a few days later on New Year's Eve suggested the baby could also have Edwards Syndrome - the presence of an 18th chromosome - with a life expectancy of only up to four months if birth is survived."

Words like "could", "might" and "may" are the sort no prospective parent wants to hear. Rather like life, medicine isn't black and white (oh, if it only were). The worst was to come as the Telegraph reports, contradicting its own headline:

"Kai was born six weeks premature on March 5 at Scunthorpe General Hospital weighing just 2lb 6oz and immediately admitted to intensive care, but was discharged within six weeks.
One side of his heart was slightly bigger than the other which may need an operation to correct in the future, but regular tests have been showing the condition is constantly improving."

Kai Purdy pictured with his mother, Gaynor. Photo: ROSS PARRY AGENCY

So in truth, little Kai Purdy was anything but a normal healthy baby boy.

Dakota Voice effectively lied by omitting these facts and the Telegraph wasn't entirely honest either.

It appears that he does have Edwards Syndrome (aka Trisomy 18) and his heart was abnormal. The little fella is a fighter though and everyone at Abusing the News wishes him well. This is a great story of survival against the odds and one where the right choice was made.

However, consider this sobering evidence from Wikipedia (backed up from other sources):

"The survival rate of Edwards Syndrome is very low. About 95% die in utero. Of liveborn infants, only 50% live to 2 months, and only 5–10% will survive their first year of life. Major causes of death include apnea and heart abnormalities. It is impossible to predict the exact prognosis of an Edwards Syndrome child during pregnancy or the neonatal period. Because major medical interventions are routinely withheld from these children, it is difficult to determine what the survival rate or prognosis would be with aggressive medical treatment. The median life span is five to fifteen days. One percent of children born with this syndrome live to age ten, typically in cases of the less severe mosaic Edwards syndrome."

Of course, this won't rain on Pro-Life's parade. They'll just happy that Kai was born.

Had things been different, and the evidence is strongly in favour of that being the case, this child would have died before being born or very shortly afterwards.

The medical advice given to the Mr and Mrs Purdy was, statistically and rationally, entirely correct. Kai isn't a miracle (because that suggests supernatural intervention) he's just 1 in a 100. The other 99 children born with this condition will either be dead already or suffer agonising deaths during their very short lives.

They made an informed decision and it paid off.

This is the nature of choice that Conservative America, the Catholic church and all the pro-lifers around the world don't get.

Pro choice doesn't mean "abort every faulty foetus" it simply means give women the right to make a informed decision about what happens to their children. No one held a gun to Mrs Purdy's head, they just gave her the evidence and she made the decision. The right one.

Regarding the other 99 other times the Telegraph won't report will be a rather different story.