Great! Does This Mean That I Can Start Legislating?

I’d like to introduce you to the 25 most frightening words in the English language. Are you ready? Here we go:

“The Congress of the United States has determined that at this stage of development, an unborn child has the physical structures necessary to experience pain.”

Surely, I hear you saying, these are not the most frightening. There must be worse. “I am not a crook” could rank up there. Likewise, so could “I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation that outlaws the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes.” For that matter “wardrobe malfunction” is also kinda creepy. (In defense of Ronald Reagan, he did offer his own version of the most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I agree that they’re scary, though probably not for the same reason he thought so.)

No, friends, let me share with you why these 25 words bring an unseasonable chill into my heart. These words are from the text of a script that doctors would be required to read to women contemplating an abortion performed after 20 weeks of gestation. The script is part of a requirement from a bill that was introduced in the Senate in 2004 and again this year that would require medical doctors to alter the manner in which they treat patients who are considering abortions.

The bill, which goes by the oh-so-charming name of the “Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act”, has been introduced by Senator Sam Brownback, Republican. Of Kansas. The Land of Oohs and Oz, if I’m to believe their tourist literature. According to Senator Brownback there is “substantial evidence” that a fetus feels pain when it is aborted. How does he know this? The Distinguished Gentleman from the Sunflower State has drawn his conclusions after an extensive read of the scholarly literature on the subject. Ahhh…Science.

I don’t want to think that I’m the only one who’s creeped out by the notion of a legislative body without any mass formal training deciding what words can be said in a doctor’s office. Big Brother is no longer just watching, he’s doling out your prescriptions as well. To say nothing of the wisdom of this initiative coming out of Kansas, the state that is currently trying to get scientists to recognize that all their theories about the origin of the universe are wrong. For a state with such a collective disdain for scientific inquiry, why in the world are they resorting to it now?

Congress has decided that they know better than doctors how to treat patients. Bill Frist aside, how do they know this? Did top-quality medical training suddenly get added to the new legislators’ orientation, right after they show incoming representatives where the copy machines are and how to dial out of the building? By the most recent counts I can find, dating all the way back to Teri Schivo, only about 20 or so of the over 500 members of congress are medical professionals.

I’m going to speak plainly: abortions should be limited. Women shouldn’t be getting them. They're unhealthy and traumatic. In a perfect world there wouldn't be a need for such a procedure. Here’s my thing, though: How many women do you know want to have an abortion? How many little girls are there out there just praying for the opportunity to have a D and C someday? My guess? Not so much any. Besides, come across any perfect worlds lately?

Congress, its wealth of medical knowledge and experience aside, needs to recognize that there is not a mass plague of women out there aborting things. The myth of the woman who uses abortion as a method of birth control is wrong. These bogeywomen do not exist anywhere near the level that politicos and wailing, ranting Pro-Lifers would have you believe. The choice to have an abortion is never easy. And that’s what it is, by the way – a choice. And whatever else you feel it is about, America is about nothing more than it is about the freedom make choices, right or wrong.

Here’s a fun analogy to ponder this whole choice thing: consider cigarette smoking. Smokers are often upset that so many localities now are going smoke-free. They don’t understand why they can’t light up in the middle of a bar, restaurant, ball park, hospital. “I have the right to smoke,” they proclaim. “It may be unhealthy, but I have the right to do it.” For the record, the reason you can’t smoke in public places is because your cigarette smoke is harming those around you who did not make the choice to be unhealthy. But to the analogy part, smokers make an unhealthy (read: wrong) choice, but they feel that it is their choice to make, regardless of the harm it causes them or those around them. So how can the same not be said about abortion? Remember, children: cigarette smoke kills too.

I know many people who are against abortion for moral or, more specifically, religious reasons. To them, I offer this conundrum: If the goal of Christian life is to stray from sin, doesn’t that imply that sin must be present in order to avoid it? Are we not redeemed into grace not because we never saw sin, but because we saw it, were tempted and choose to move in the opposite direction? You may believe that abortion is sinful. You may be right, I don’t know. I’ll leave it to those better qualified than I to determine what a sinful act is. But your responsibility is not to remove the sin from the face of the planet, but rather to bring the sinners to the light.

This is not accomplished by congressional action and it most certainly isn’t accomplished by altering the manner in which a doctor may treat her patients and the words which she must use to do so.

Three Incredulous Moments

Incredulous Moment One: Daylight Savings Time has been extended by four weeks as part of the president’s energy bill. I’m going to forgo the obvious out loud wondering about the wisdom of allowing a former energy CEO to dictate national energy policy and skip right to the really nutty part: we’re doing what, now?

Daylight Savings Time was ostentatiously created as a way to lend assistance to farmers, giving them more hours of daylight during the summer months so that they could produce crops more efficiently, agriculture being the United State’s largest industry. I say ostentatiously because in reality a lot of farmers didn’t want it. It meant bad lighting in the early morning, the time when farmers traditionally need to get their produce out of the farm and into the markets. The move was really a gift to big city commercial centers, granting them lots of sun-lit hours for shoppers coming home from work to peruse and manhandle merchandise. Daylight Savings Time has only marginally worked to help farmers do much of anything.

Edward Markey, Massachusetts congressman and co-author of the measure, declared that the four-week extension of daylight savings time is "a huge victory for sunshine and puppy lovers.” Okay, I may be lying about the puppies, but the rest is true. What I want to know is where has this heretofore unknown voting bloc of disenfranchised sunshine-lovers been hiding? Why have there been no hand-wringing congressional hearings on the plight of the tan?

What we’re seeing is that Congress has taken something that never worked properly to begin with, examined all the evidence showing that it isn’t doing what it was intended to do now, and decided the best course of action was to expand it because clearly, despite all assertions to the contrary, size matters. I shouldn’t be surprised, really. This is the modus operandi of the current administration: examine evidence, declare it fatally flawed, and go against it anyway because scientists and researchers clearly don’t know what they’re doing but an administration of CEOs does.

My favorite little idiosyncrasy about this issue, however, is that it is being touted as a way of cutting down energy costs, when in actuality it will do no such thing. It won’t save fuel from people getting up later (in fact it may add to it because it will be lighter later which means people may be out and about driving their cars much later into the evening) and it won’t save lives. (Although it may endanger more children because in the western edges of all the time zones the sun may not be up until 8:00 or 8:30 meaning that kids are going to be walking to school in the dark.) It will however cost a lot of airlines upwards of $150 million each year because our clocks are now out of sync with Europe’s.


Incredulous Moment Two: Chicago’s Mayor Daley is experiencing some political woes. The son of one of the most memorable of all Midwestern political figures, Daley is under fire from several sources implicating him as being involved in a federal mail fraud scandal. Other sources are adding that he may be playing political favoritism in his office’s job appointment. Ironically, this is the exact same charge that brought down his giant of a father from the exact same political office.

That’s not what gets me, though. Richard M. Daley is nothing if not perennially implicated in one scandal or another. What’s grabbing onto my ankle in this situation is that the Cook County Republican Party has offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to Daley’s conviction. I’m all for a little incentive to bring forward the abused element that may be at risk of retaliation by the abuser, ala America’s Most-Wanted, however I just can’t get beyond the notion that man’s professional rivals are seeding the ground for evidence.

How is this not a bounty-hunt? How are the Cook County Republicans not inviting the slaughter (albeit political, not physical) of their adversary? When did this become acceptable politics as usual? The answer, of course, is a long time ago as its not as if this is the first time a political party has used unsavory means to rig The Game. Still, there’s something about those unsavory means being reported a priory in a national news magazine that seems a little off to me.


Incredulous Moment Three: Chocolate is apparently health food. I wish I was making this stuff up, but sure enough Mars Inc., the company that brings you quality junk food, is now trying to market the health benefits of chocoloate, or more specifically cocoa.

Mars Inc. has employed a massive Research and Development wing to investigate the medicinal benefits of chocolate bars. They've even got a new line of candy coming out called CocoaVia which is being touted as a heart-healthy food. Forgive my skepticism, but...well, wait...nevermind, completely pay attention to my skepticism. I'm just not ready to accept candy bars as a good.

Apparently, however, it isn't up to me to accept or deny. The Mars Inc. R&D wing is publishing findings to support their contention of candy as health food. They've even got a study under their belt to prove it. The study looks all fine and good, but the issue is raises isn't the health benefits of candy - it should be the inner skeptic that looks at all research. If a research team announces that a product is good for you, doesn't it make sense to question who is funding said research? In this case, it seems a little far-fetched to swallow the line that chocolate will make you a healthier person when the entity funding the research is a major candy producer.

What this should show once and for all is that research is only as valid as its funding source. This doesn't just extend to candy. Consider all those impressive government statistics you hear about whether or not programs or social policies actually work. Whenever we're looking at someone telling us a bold-faced statement, it should be second nature to question what the person who's making that statement has to gain from it. If you'd like to turn this logic back on me because you were that kid in high school who sat in the second to last row and liked to play the "why" game with your frustrated tenth grade english teacher, I'll lay my motivation on the table for you right now: I don't want to have another day with three frickin' inane news revelations all within two hours. 'Nuff said.