Open Thread: Karen Santorum’s Book Has Become Collector’s Item

Posted: January 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: open thread, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Recently, I wrote a post about Rick and Karen Santorum’s responses to their miscarriage. After this loss, Karen wrote a book called Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum. At the time, I looked up the book and it was selling cheaply on Amazon.

Some of you may know that I’ve become a bookseller, at least temporarily. Well, I should have bought a bunch of copies of Karen’s book when I had the chance. The book was published in 1998, and until recently used copies were selling for less than a dollar. Today, the cheapest price I could find was close to $100.00 on some foreign websites. New copies of the book begin at $2,5 on Amazon and nearly $900 on E-bay. This copy at Half.com was selling for $.75 plus postage just recently and is now listed at $891.00.

I don’t know who is buying the book–maybe slumming pro-choice readers or pious anti-choicers–maybe both. Since I began selling my book collection, I’ve sold a few old and scarce books for inflated prices, but never this inflated. I’m going to have to get better at foreseeing these kinds of trends!

Zeroes Don’t Count: Politics 101

Posted: January 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | 28 Comments

Whoever wins the vote in 2012, as Dak points out women have lost. The only thing politicians are arguing about is who can barter away more of women’s fundamental rights. It’s become a given that rights for female people are an optional frill, to be indulged only if there’s really nothing else that needs doing. They’re a “pet rock.”

Among the many brilliant discoveries by Douglas Adams, perhaps the most insightful is the one showing how to make anything invisible. It’s really easy. You just surround it with the Somebody Else’s Problem field. Something as vast as the inalienable rights of half the entire country can disappear almost overnight. Men are convinced it’s women’s problem. Women are convinced it’s poor women’s problem. Or teenagers’. Or somebody else’s. Anybody else’s. It doesn’t matter. That’s all it takes for invisibility.

The only way to destroy the field is to make it their problem, which, in this particular case, means making politicians pay a price when they try to turn women into fungible incubators.

Well, the only hold we voters have over politicians is our vote. Nothing else.

They’re convinced, and with good reason, that everything else can be bought. Advertising to try to get votes depends on money. Cushy post-government jobs depend on networking. Voters can’t influence any of that. The actual vote is the only thing a voter controls.

So it’s our one and only tool, our one and only leverage. Nor is it a minor thing. As madamab notes, “The bottom line is this: Women. Win. Elections. Not only do we make up the majority of volunteers for political campaigns in general, not only do we donate in droves, but we also vote. A lot. And wherever we go en masse, is wherever the winning candidate goes.”

But if you can’t withhold your vote from a politician, you have zero leverage. You don’t count.

If something else is more important, dead wedding guests to take Ian Welsh’s example, then you have to ask yourself a couple of things.

As a matter of practical fact, have the dead innocents stopped piling up under Obama? No. The talk is prettier, but the walk is the same.

The other question is whether ignoring your own rights actually solves anybody else’s problems. Does trampling women’s human rights result in a better world? Does it end war? Stop poverty? Eradicate ignorance? Stop global warming? Transition us all to sustainable energy? Provide prosperity and military supremacy? No. No, no, no, and no. So, by putting yourself second, nobody else gets a better life and everybody loses.

Trampling women’s human rights makes no sense in any universe. Not in principle, where compromising those inalienable rights leads only to greater compromises because trampling rights is habit-forming. Not in practical politics, where the extortioners take your vote but don’t have the honesty of a common criminal and don’t even hand over whatever mess of pottage your vote was supposed to buy.

So vote for Obama if you feel you have to because the other Republicans talk like bigger sociopaths, but do it without illusions. Things will continue to get worse. Your rights will continue to vaporize. However, otherwise things might become as bad sooner.

Or they might not. Some people might make feeble cries of protest when Republicans impoverished and killed people. 2% less evil, skull with one crossbone

Or, maybe, the 2%-less-evil-Republicans (aka “Democrats”) will be the difference that saves us from the apocalypse. I can’t say that I see that last possibility myself. All I see is that voting for Obama means active participation in our own destruction. That’s worse than refusing to help. It’s worse even when the end is the same.

There is another choice. Own your vote. Refuse coercion, extortion, and hostage-taking. Vote third party or write someone in. Sure, we’ll lose this time. But if enough of us lose together, it’s the first step to not losing.

Crossposted from Acid Test

Saturday Reads: Abortion, Loss, Grief, and Privacy

Posted: January 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 92 Comments

Rick and Karen Santorum

Good Morning!

Tonight is the New Hampshire Republican debate. Will there be fireworks between Newt and Mitt or even Newt and Rick Santorum? Newt is still on the warpath. Tonight Wonk the Vote is planning a very special live blog with drinks and maybe drinking games.

I liked the suggestion I heard from Willie Geist on MSNBC yesterday morning. He said people should take a drink every time Rick Santorum says “partial birth abortion.” And then he played audio of Santorum saying it over and over. Okay, I know that’s tasteless, but it did make me laugh yesterday around 5AM. Anyway, be sure to drop by tonight for Wonk’s live blog!

Speaking of late-term abortions (or not-abortions), I’ve been thinking a lot about Rick and Karen Santorum and the story of how they reacted after Karen lost a pregnancy at 19-20 weeks in 1996. Once I started writing, it ended up being the focus of this post. I hope some other people also think it’s worth thinking and writing about and you won’t think I’m too “weird” for doing so.

There has been quite a bit of discussion around the internet about the couple’s decision to bring their dead baby (actually a second trimester fetus) home with them for their children to hold and cuddle. Karen Santorum subsequently wrote a book about the family’s experiences, Letters to Gabriel. Dakinikat wrote about this in a recent post that I can’t seem to locate at the moment. From 2005 NYT article (previously quoted by Dakinikat):

The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, “Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,” she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. “Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. “Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'” ”

Pitocin is a synthetic form of oxytocin, a hormone with important roles in childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment (love). As a drug, it is used to induce labor contractions. Therefore, many people see what happened as a late term abortion. At 19 weeks, the child when delivered is fully formed, but is still technically a fetus because it cannot live outside the womb.

In fact, hospital forms about the death read “20-week-old fetus,” according to a 2005 Washington Post story, but the couple insisted the form be changed to read “20-week-old baby.”

Of course most people would agree that the Santorums did the right thing to save Karen’s life. But since Rick Santorum was the author of the legislation that banned “partial birth abortion” (a made-up medical procedure), some have seen hypocrisy in their choice. Others have mocked them for bringing the corpse home and encouraging their children to handle it.

Alan Colmes was heavily criticized for “mocking” the Santorums on Fox News, and he later apologized to them personally. Eugene Robinson called the Santorums’ actions “weird” in an appearance on MSNBC, and the Washington Post Ombudsman felt the need to weigh in on the reader reaction. According to ABC News,

The Internet lit up with comments this week after Santorum’s meteoric rise to second-place in the Iowa caucuses, nearly tying him with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Some described Santorum’s story as “weird” or “horrifying.”

So of course now the “experts” are being consulted for their opinions on the Santorum family drama. From the ABC News story:

In the context of the times — the year was 1996 when the family buried Gabriel — their behavior was understandable, according to Dr. David Diamond, a psychologist and co-author of the 2005 book “Unsung Lullabies.”

Helen Coons, a clinical psychologist and president of Women’s Mental Health Associates in Philadelphia, said couples are not encouraged to bring a deceased fetus home.

Apparently at the time, couples were being encouraged to express their grief over miscarriages and stillborn babies.

Diamond said that 20 years ago, around the time that the Santorums suffered their loss, professionals encouraged their response.

“It was getting to be more in fashion,” he said.

“The trend was, rather than ignoring, to help people with their grieving and make it a real loss rather than something stuck in their minds and imagination for years,” he said. “Even before that, they allowed families to hold the dead infant or fetus and spend time with them — as much as they wanted.”

A corpse was not often taken home, but might be kept in the refrigerator for “a couple of days,” so the family could have access, according to Diamond.

“It was kept in the hospital, but of course you can’t do that for too many days,” Diamond said. “But there were cases were they basically allowed the family to handle and be with baby and say goodbye.”

I can certainly identify with the grief the family felt, and I could even understand having the children view the child’s body in the hospital; but I admit to feeling uncomfortable with the idea of taking the body home. I’m not sure how long they kept it either; none of the articles I’ve read are specific on that point.

Charles Lane, a columnist at the Washington Post, wrote about his own and his wife’s experience of losing a baby in the third trimester.

Nine years ago, my son Jonathan’s heart mysteriously stopped in utero — two hours prior to a scheduled c-section that would have brought him out after 33 weeks. Next came hours of induced labor so that my wife could produce a lifeless child. I cannot describe the anxiety, emotional pain, and physical horror.

And then there was the question: what about the corpse? Fortunately for us, our hospital’s nurses were trained to deal with infant death. They washed the baby, wrapped him in a blanket and put a little cotton cap on his head, just as they would have done if he had been born alive. They then recommended that we spend as much time with him as we wanted.

My wife held Jonathan for a long while. I hesitated to do so. At the urging of the nurses and my wife, I summoned the courage to cradle Jonathan’s body, long enough to get a good look at his face and to muse how much he looked like his brother — then say goodbye. I am glad that my love for him overcame my fear of the dead.

We, like the Santorums, took a photograph of the baby — lying, as if asleep, in my wife’s arms. We have a framed copy in our bedroom. It’s beautiful.

Lane says that his six-year-old son asked where the baby was, and Lane now regrets not letting his son see the body.

I think part of the squeamishness that I feel–and I’m probably not alone–is that the Santorums chose to share their experience with the public. Santorum’s general fetishizing of fetuses and his absolute anti-abortion stand–even to the point of saying a victim of rape or incest who gets pregnant or a woman whose life is in danger should not be able to have the procedure–naturally leads people to question why he agreed to doctors inducing labor to rid his wife’s body of a fetus that was endangering her.

Here is what Rick Santorum has said about abortions to save the life of the mother:

ABORTION EXCEPTIONS TO PROTECT WOMEN’S HEALTH ARE ‘PHONY’: While discussing his track record as a champion of the partial birth abortion ban in June, Santorum dismissed exceptions other senators wanted to carve out to protect the life and health of mothers, calling such exceptions “phony.” “They wanted a health exception, which of course is a phony exception which would make the ban ineffective,” he said.

So the second part of the public discussion of what I think should really be a private issue (but the Santorums are the ones who made it very public) is did Karen Santorum have an abortion or not? At Salon, writer Irin Carmon reports that an unnamed “expert” says no, it wasn’t an abortion.

Of course, without direct access to Karen Santorum’s medical files, we have to take their word for what happened, and with only sketchy details. But according to a nationally respected obstetrician-gynecologist from a Center for Cosmetic & Reconstructive Gynecology who has long been active in the reproductive health community and who provides abortion services — who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not having treated Santorum directly — by their own account, the Santorums neither induced labor nor terminated the pregnancy.

“Based on what is presented here in these couple of pages, it looks to me as if there’s confusion with some people about what the word ‘abortion’ means,” the doctor told me today. “The word ‘abortion’ probably shouldn’t even be used in this context.” (It is technically correct to say that Karen Santorum had a septic spontaneous abortion, but that’s a medical term for an involuntary event that is different from “induced abortion,” which describes a willful termination.)

After rumors spread in Pennsylvania that Karen Santorum had an abortion, the Philadelphia Inquirer spoke to the Santorums for a story that has served as the main source for the recent chatter. In the 19th week of pregnancy, the paper reported, “a radiologist told them that the fetus Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die.” They opted for a “bladder shunt” surgery that led to an intrauterine infection and a high fever. The Santorums were told that “unless the source of the infection, the fetus, was removed from Karen’s body, she would likely die.”

There is no mention in the Salon article or in the Philadelphia Inquirer article about the injection of Pitocin that is mentioned in the longer NYT piece. So did Karen have an abortion. I’d say so. Even the “expert” in the Salon story says that what happened was “a septic spontaneous abortion.” So what’s the basis for saying it wasn’t an abortion? I guess the the “expert” feels some compassion for Karen, and so do I. Unlike Karen’s husband, I can empathize with people who are experience something terrible–even if it’s something I’ve never personally experienced.

But it is important when the person is running for President of the U.S. and he promises, if elected, to do everything in his power to ban all access to not only abortion, but also birth control. From the Salon article:

Rick Santorum did tell the Inquirer that “if that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to,” under the understanding that the fetus was going to die anyway and intervening would save Karen’s life. And it is accurate to say that the direct experience of a life-threatening pregnancy and a tragic loss did not leave Rick Santorum with any empathy for women who do have to make those difficult decisions in extremely murky circumstances.

As the doctor put it, “One takes from this that pregnancies can go very, very wrong, very quickly.” Moreover, the kinds of legislative hurdles Santorum wants — or hospital administrative committees that seek to supersede the family’s decision-making — can certainly slow down the process and endanger women’s lives in the process.

Carmon writes that she feels “uncomfortable about having gone this far up Karen Santorum’s womb,” and I do too. But let’s face it: Santorum wants every woman’s womb to be invaded and her every decision about her pregnancy analyzed by strangers on committees. For that reason, I do think it’s important to talk about the choices made by Rick and Karen Santorum.

To summarize, I think grief over a miscarriage, even early in a pregnancy is normal and natural. When it happens late after the baby’s body is fully formed, it’s probably even more traumatic. In fact, according to Dr. Andres Bustillo, many women opt for cosmetic surgery as a way to cope with grief and extreme stress. Charles Lane’s story gave me a lot to think about, and after reading it, I agree that having young children view the body in the hospital could be appropriate.

However, I really think “kissing and cuddling” a corpse “for several hours is a little strange. Keep in mind that the other children were only 6, 4, and 18 months at the time. I also think frequently talking about the dead baby in public in the present tense and showing it’s photo to people is extremely weird. But that’s just me.

The people who are trying to absolve Rick Santorum of hypocrisy by claiming what happened wasn’t an abortion are mistaken. What happened is indistinguishable from the experience of many women–women who would not be able to receive the treatment Karen Santorum got if her husband achieves his political goals.

I’m sorry for the pain this public discussion is probably causing Rick and Karen Santorum and their children. But that’s the price of running for president. Think of the public discussion of the Clinton’s private lives that the media has engaged in for decades! In Santorum’s case, it will probably be over soon, because he’s not likely to get the nomination or ever become president.

Bottom line, this man wants to take away women’s constitutional rights. We’re talking about a politician whose main focus as Senator and in his campaign has been denying women privacy and control over their own bodies. Therefore, I think it’s normal for people to discuss the Santorums’ somewhat unusual, even arguably odd, behavior and to explore the question of whether Karen Santorum had an abortion or not.

I promise you some links to other news in the comments. What are you reading and blogging about today?

Thursday Reads: Mostly Mitt

Posted: January 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Good Morning!!

A few months ago, there was quite a bit of talk about a BBC story on Alessio Rastani, a self-described “independent trader,” who indicated he couldn’t care less what the European financial crisis did to people’s lives. For him it was all about making money and another recession would enable him to make plenty. Andrew Leonard of Salon tied the story together with and article in Der Spiegel on a Swiss study of traders. The results showed that these people

behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”

Particularly shocking for [Thomas] Noll [researcher] was the fact that the bankers weren’t aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, “it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents,” Noll explained. “And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.”

Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor had the same car, “and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves.”

The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.

Yesterday, Dakinikat sent me a Bloomberg article by William D. Cohan about a British academic’s “theory” on the causes of the financial crisis: Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

Of course this isn’t a scientific study, but it certainly makes intuitive sense. Boddy blames changes in corporate culture for the problem.

Until the last third of the 20th century, he writes, companies were mostly stable and slow to change. Lifetime employment was a reasonable expectation and people rose through the ranks.

This stable environment meant corporate psychopaths “would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.”

For Wall Street — a rapidly changing and highly dynamic corporate environment if there ever was one, especially when the firms transformed themselves from private partnerships into public companies with quarterly reporting requirements — the trouble started when these charmers made their way to corner offices of important financial institutions.

There they supposedly changed many of the moral and ethical values that previously had guided businesspeople. This theory seems somewhat flawed, since it doesn’t explain how these men differed from the 19th century robber barons. But I haven’t read Roddy’s original articles. Perhaps he explains this inconsistency in his argument. I would argue that these kinds of people have always been involved in business and probably in politics too.

Case in point: Mitt Romney. I urge you to read the new article about Romney in Vanity Fair: The Meaning of Mitt: The Dark Side of Mitt Romney. The article is based on a new book about Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, The Real Romney. There’s no way I can briefly summarize the piece or excerpt all the important parts. The article focuses on Romney’s attitudes toward family, his deep involvement with his Mormon religion, and his business career. If you read it, you’ll recognize characteristic signs of the psychopath–coldness, calculation, lack of empathy for others, self-involvement. The only thing missing is the charisma that these people often have.

There are multiple examples of Romney’s insensitivity toward women and women’s autonomy in the article, and his career as a corporate raider and junk bond pusher are described in detail. I’ll give you just one shocking example of Romney’s attitude toward women’s rights in his role as “spiritual leader.”

Peggie Hayes had joined the church as a teenager along with her mother and siblings. They’d had a difficult life. Mormonism offered the serenity and stability her mother craved. “It was,” Hayes said, “the answer to everything.” Her family, though poorer than many of the well-off members, felt accepted within the faith. Everyone was so nice. The church provided emotional and, at times, financial support. As a teenager, Hayes babysat for Mitt and Ann Romney and other couples in the ward. Then Hayes’s mother abruptly moved the family to Salt Lake City for Hayes’s senior year of high school. Restless and unhappy, Hayes moved to Los Angeles once she turned 18. She got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced shortly after. But she remained part of the church.

By 1983, Hayes was 23 and back in the Boston area, raising a 3-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she said. “And I wanted to.” By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader. But it didn’t feel so formal at first. She earned some money while she was pregnant organizing the Romneys’ basement. The Romneys also arranged for her to do odd jobs for other church members, who knew she needed the cash. “Mitt was really good to us. He did a lot for us,” Hayes said. Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where “a successful marriage is unlikely.”

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son or give up your God.”

Not long after, Hayes gave birth to a son. She named him Dane. At nine months old, Dane needed serious, and risky, surgery. The bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain, and would need to be separated. Hayes was scared. She sought emotional and spiritual support from the church once again. Looking past their uncomfortable conversation before Dane’s birth, she called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to confer a blessing on her baby. Hayes was expecting him. Instead, two people she didn’t know showed up. She was crushed. “I needed him,” she said. “It was very significant that he didn’t come.” Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon Church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a 27-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. “There’s my baby,” she said.

The information the authors provide about Romney’s career at Bain Capital is just as revealing of Mitt’s insensitivity and lack of empathy. Here’s just a brief quote about Romney’s attitudes toward capitalism.

Romney described himself as driven by a core economic credo, that capitalism is a form of “creative destruction.” This theory, espoused in the 1940s by the economist Joseph Schumpeter and later touted by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, holds that business must exist in a state of ceaseless revolution. A thriving economy changes from within, Schumpeter wrote in his landmark book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” But as even the theory’s proponents acknowledged, such destruction could bankrupt companies, upending lives and communities, and raise questions about society’s role in softening some of the harsher consequences.

Romney, for his part, contrasted the capitalistic benefits of creative destruction with what happened in controlled economies, in which jobs might be protected but productivity and competitiveness falters. Far better, Romney wrote in his book No Apology, “for governments to stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in a free economy.” He acknowledged that it is “unquestionably stressful—on workers, managers, owners, bankers, suppliers, customers, and the communities that surround the affected businesses.” But it was necessary to rebuild a moribund company and economy. It was a point of view he would stick with in years ahead. Indeed, he wrote a 2008 op-ed piece for The New York Times opposing a federal bailout for automakers that the newspaper headlined, let detroit go bankrupt. His advice went unheeded, and his prediction that “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if it got a bailout has not come true.

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Anyone who still sees Romney as the “reasonable” Republican candidate needs to read this article. I knew that Romney had been involved in Mormon Church leadership, but I had no idea how deeply he was involved and how committed to his religion he is. And yet, he’s probably going to be the Republican nominee, facing a weak, unpopular Obama. We’ve heard about a meeting of Conservatives to discuss possible alternatives, but Politico reports that GOP elites are saying Romney probably can’t be stopped.

We’ll see. There’s nothing more dangerous than a Newt scorned, and South Carolina looks to be unfriendly to Mitt. But the next challenge for Romney is New Hampshire, where he leads by double digits. Can Santorum and Gingrich knock him down a peg? Only time will tell.

So….. What are you reading and blogging about today? Please share.

Whatever the outcomes in 2012, Women will lose

Posted: January 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because, Women's Rights | 27 Comments

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the liberties and interests of 51% of the population will not be advanced in 2012.  At this point, the most we can hope for is for the election of Elizabeth Warren and other women and men who represent the view that women are adults and not property of the state or the men in their orbit. Plus, we should elect the ones that have shown their views are more than lipservice.  What is the price and cost of less horrible?

The rise of Radical Religionist Rick Santorum in Iowa  is just the latest affront to any one that believes that women should be the ones making decisions about their lives. Santorum believes that States should be able to outlaw birth control. He undoubtedly will not make it to the Presidential spot.  However, will Romney be desperate enough to consider him VP material?  How about the neoconfederate Ron Paul or Rick Perry?  Santorum is just the latest in a series of risers that show how bad the Republican party has become.  The problem is that this allows the alternative party to be elected by being less horrible.  Santorum is clearly horrible for women and any one that believes in a modern, secular America.

Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News yesterday, saying, “The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”

…

Santorum has long opposed the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling “that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception” and has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president. As he told CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart in October, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

If this isn’t radical enough, consider the Santorum’s response to a 1996 pregnancy that showed that his wife was carrying a fetus with a “fatal defect“.  Miscarriages are extremely common. About 1/3 of conceptions end this way. It is a tough experience and an emotional one for many people, but it is nature’s way of dealing with severe fetal/zygote issues.  The Santorums have every right to incubate a nonviable fetus–if that’s their choice–although it’s difficult to justify the cost of such a folly to the health care system and insurance companies.  Their experience is in a book that provides some insight into a family dynamic that is beyond creepy.   Santorum and his wife brought the “corpse” home. They slept with it and made their children hold it and sing to it.  This article by Tommy Christopher is creepy also.  He calls the miscarried 20 week old fetus a newborn son and acts like their response is within some range of normal.  Remember, this wasn’t a surprise outcome. They had plenty of time to deal with this. Be forewarned, this is ghoulish.

The incident they’re referring to is the 1996 birth of a premature baby boy to Rick and Karen Santorum. The child only lived for two hours, and the Santorums dealt with the tragedy in an unusual way:

The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, ”Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,” she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”

It’s a story that I have heard mocked by many liberals (and mistold, by others, as having followed a miscarriage), and I agree with Lowry that the intensely personal arena of human grief ought not be cheapened into political fodder. Within reasonable limits, I don’t think anyone should be judged for things they say or do in the face of extreme grief.

The fact that Karen Santorum publicized the event means that, to some extent, it is an appropriate subject for public discussion, but then it should be handled in a delicate, respectful manner. While I think Lowry was taking a cheap shot of his own when he accused Colmes of “mocking” the Santorums (and with his deployment of the coded phrase “Manhattan liberals”), neither was Colmes’ characterization that they “played with” the dead child fair or particularly sensitive. He probably shouldn’t have brought it up at all, but his critique, while cold and lacking in relevance, fell well short of mockery.

UPDATE: Colmes has tweeted that he called Santorum and his wife and apologized for the comment, an apology which was accepted.

Mockery?  I’m not getting this characterization at all. They did take it home and they did “play with it”.  The Santorums were clearly told the eventual outcome of this pregnancy early on.  This wasn’t exactly a surprise.  This was a long drawn-out miscarriage.   This was not the birth of a premature baby boy.  As to the idea of playing with it, exactly how would you characterize carrying a corpse to your house, sleeping with it in a bed, singing to it, and making your children hold it?  Would it be insensitive of me to suggest that I consider what they did to their children to be a health hazard in so many ways that if I were there neighbor I would have called Child Protective Services on them?

It’s easy to pick on the Republicans here.  Keli Goff shows exactly how far each of the republican presidential wannabes have gone to turn women back into property.  (H/T to minx).  Ron Paul wants to give every body rights–including heroin addicts--just as long as they are not women, GLBT, or not white.  Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann are just as bad and Romney’s been more than willing to sell out all of his old positions to further his political career.

Nearly forty years after Roe v. Wade, the current incarnation of the Republican Party seems determined to set the health of American women back by more than a century, with targeting abortion no longer enough. Birth control rights are increasingly in the line of fire. Perhaps even worse, the current crop of presidential candidates seem determined to treat the health, safety and rights of American women much like those cultures they often discuss with such scorn and superiority. Sharia Law has become the dirtiest of dirty words in the culture wars, particularly in America’s post 9/11 political landscape. Yet I’m at a loss to see any real difference between the manner in which Sharia Law penalizes women who are raped and Perry and his Personhood cohorts’ efforts to penalize American rape survivors with a nonconsensual pregnancy.

Taylor Marsh reminds us that our current President has done little to support women (h/t to Wonk).  This is no surprise to any of us that actually investigated his record, his words, and the kinds of people with whom he associated prior to supporting a candidate. The most Obama has done is sign laws passed to him by a democratic congress and a few suggested by his cabinet.  He’s been indifferent-to-hostile to anything that might actively return women to autonomous adult status.

Is it enough that the 111th Congress passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Pres. Obama signed? Women of all political persuasions need to expect all 21st century politicians to support economic equality. We should also demand that when it’s found out we aren’t being treated equally we have recourse, which is what Ledbetter is all about. Would any other Democratic president not have signed the Ledbetter Act? To laud something so simple as financial equality for the same job done reveals women are expecting way too little from politicians that depend on our support to politically survive.

Obama’s constant chant on reforming entitlements, including changing COLA on Social Security, would hit women the hardest, because in older age we are more likely to depend on it, a subject I’ve written on before (here, here).

Research from IWPR has shown the current Social Security program is a mainstay for women, and these findings have been supported by research from other organizations. Adult women are 51 percent (27 million) of all beneficiaries, including retirees, the disabled, and the survivors of deceased workers (52.5 million). Women are more likely to rely on Social Security because they have fewer alternative sources of income, often outlive their husbands, and are more likely to be left to rear children when their husbands die or become permanently disabled. Moreover, due to the recession many women have lost home equity and savings to failing markets. Older women—and older low income populations in general—have become more economically vulnerable and dependent on Social Security benefits. – IWPR

On “reforming” entitlements, Pres. Obama comes down the same place as Republicans, though he’s the moderate conservative, so we can expect entitlement “reform” to happen regardless of who is in the White House. In his last political term, why wouldn’t Mr. Obama join with Republicans? If the Senate goes GOP, he’ll even have an excuse. Meanwhile, there’s no one suggesting that the limit on income taxed for Social Security be raised for the wealthy, with Democrats caving again and again on a millionaire surtax, so the progressive argument is not only weakly offered, but also never fought strategically.

Clearly, women will be worse off under any Republican.  The “less horrible” meme has driven the gender voting gap for quite a few elections now.   Is this a good enough excuse for any of us to continue to vote for a party that marginalizes our interests and chips away at our rights while talking a good game?  Every time Obama is off script it’s pretty clear that he believes that men in orbit around women should have some kind of veto on the kinds of decisions that define a person’s autonomy.  This was apparent from the Plan B decision and the decision to cave to extremist interests during the health plan debate.  Exactly how far off is this from Santorum’s view of wife as incubator to an ongoing miscarriage?  Yes.  It’s less bad but still BAD.

However, you and I have both seen the polls recently.  Clearly, Obama has to fish or cut bait with many of his potential supporters, including women.  It’s hardly a surprise that there was one woman-friendly policy stuck into all those executive orders and signing opportunities recently dealt with the realm of foreign policy.  Secretary Hillary Clinton has put the rights of women and children in a front and center position of State House policy and action.  I think we know where this idea originated.

President Obama this week released a groundbreaking new plan and issued an executive order to increase U.S. support for strengthening the participation of women around the world in ending conflict and securing peace.

The first-ever U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (PDF) and the accompanying executive order are a “fundamental change in how the U.S. will approach its diplomatic, military, and development-based support to women in areas of conflict,” according to the White House.

The plan identifies objectives that will guide participating U.S. agencies seeking to increase women’s participation in their handling of international aid, development, and security work. Among the goals are ensuring that the U.S. is “promoting and strengthening women’s rights and effective leadership and substantive participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, peacebuilding, transitional processes, and decision-making institutions in conflict-affected environments. “

To ensure accountability for meeting the goals in the plan, Obama also signed an executive order that assigns implementation officers and calls for participating agencies to submit action plans to the National Security Advisor.

Yes. Signing it is less bad than not signing it.  However, did you know about this?  Where’s the active advocacy?  The forceful announcement?

These policy changes seem few and far between. Right now, the HHS Department is considering regulations that would restrict women’s access to private insurance plans that contain birth control coverage and coverage of abortion services. This battle against religious extremism and its need to inflict narrow religious viewpoints into areas of women’s health calls for strong, aggressive and outspoken leadership.  Even if Rick Santorum proves the flavor–excuse me for using that word combined with his name–of the month, the creep of his mindset into law continues.

What we’ve been getting from this administration are a few safe marginal policies and actions that even a blue dog democrat could support. Then there is the larger creeping of the impact of the combined and exponential sell outs.   There is a fear that Obama will once again cave into the demands of the US Catholic Bishops and remove access to reproductive health from private insurance plans. The bishops are hiding behind “religious liberty” in the same way that slaveowners once held up the bible to justify owning other human beings.  Consider this characterization of a recent meeting between the bishops and the President.

Nevertheless, the bishops remain a forceful political lobby, powerful enough to nearly derail the president’s health care overhaul two years ago over their concerns about financing for abortion. Last week, the White House, cognizant of the bishops’ increasing ire, invited Archbishop Dolan to a private meeting with President Obama, their second. Archbishop Dolan said they talked about the religious liberty issue, among others.

“I found the president of the United States to be very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community,” Archbishop Dolan said in the news conference. “I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.”

We’ve seen exactly how negotiable the rights of women have become since the Republicans have relegated women to property and biblical stereotypes. This should be a concern for all of us.  Is there any way for us to support a party or a president that decides to marginalize the concerns of over half the population and considers our issues and autonomy to be bargaining chips for bigger agendas?  How do we parlay their need for our votes into something more than lip service?  Do we vote for the Elizabeth Warrens and skip the rest?   We’ve been taken for granted for some time now.  It’s time to develop a strategy that gets results because this time they’re going to need really need us.

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