Yesterday was Earth Day, and while it was purportedly "too thundery" for the president to make it out to his planned photo-op in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park the day after House members approved a disasterous new energy bill, the wrath of Mother Nature wasn't sufficient to keep the administration from issuing new and haunting guidelines on the "born alive" fetuses law originally signed in 2002.
The guidlines stipulate that doctors must treat any infant "born alive" via abortion or spontaneous miscarrage. The signs of "life" include "breathing, a beating heart, a pulsating umbilical cord, or muscle movement." Physicians warn that the guidelines are too broad--muscle twitching can occur after death, and that fetuses miscarried or aborted too early in their development have little chance of survival.
It's unclear how the time, money and heartbreak involved in keeping such dubiously viable hearts pumping would satisfy either religious or humane standards, but of course this is just yet another brick in the anti-abortion wall (along with new calls to protect "microscopic Americans"). Or perhaps it's part of the anti-tax fight? "Under the new provision, it is recorded as a live birth followed by a neonatal death, and parents can claim the child as a tax deduction for that year," OB-GYN David Grimes told The Washington Post.
Yuck!
Of course, a better way of preventing abortions might be to properly educate people about contraception and family planning, and to provide ready access to it. The Democrats for Life have come up with a new plan to do just that. Called the "95-10 Initiative," the proposal offers up several policy programs designed to reduce abortion by 95 percent over the next 10 years, including improved support for adoption procedures and tax credits, federal funding for pregnancy prevention education in schools and for daycare on university campuses, the removal of pregnancy as a "pre-existing condition" for insurance companies, the requirement that contraception be a covered drug, and increased funding for domestic violence response programs, the Special Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children program, and the State Children's Health Insurance program.
Do I hear "moral values," anyone?
Not according to the new Pope. He claims that banning contraception has nothing to do with high abortion rates or child poverty. "The misery comes not from large families," says the new pontiff in a book of interviews called God and the World: Believing and Living in our Time, "but from the irresponsible and undisciplined procreation of children who have no father, and often no mother, and who, as street children, have to suffer the real distress of a spiritually distorted world."
Spiritually distorted indeed.
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Jessica Clark is a writer, editor and researcher, with more than 15 years of experience spanning commercial, educational, independent and public media production. Currently she is the Research Director for American University’s Center for Social Media. She also writes a monthly column for PBS’ MediaShift on new directions in public media. She is the author, with Tracy Van Slyke, of Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media (2010, New Press).
