Fisking Erika Christakis; or “How You Are Infringing on my Right to a Pony”

So there is some howling today because over at Time Magazine, Erika Christakis has advocated that if you really feel strongly about opposing the employer abortion/contraception mandate, well you should go to jail for your beliefs.  Myself, I don’t find that to be that outrageous given that many Christian leaders have said they are willing to go to jail for their beliefs, but what I found interesting was the sheer illogic of her argument—really, a rationalization—for her position.  Let’s fisk this sucker:

There was lots of excitable talk last week about birth control, with President Obama dialing back his initial plan for mandating contraceptive coverage to exempt employers who object to such coverage on religious grounds. In those cases, the health-insurance provider, rather than the employer, will be on the hook to pay for the services.

And that is B.S. because the provider will then pass the costs onto the customers and employers.

Tellingly, health-insurance companies seem quite happy with this compromise, knowing, as they do, that paying for contraceptives is a lot less costly than paying for pregnancies and neonatal care.

First, wow.  You heard of death panels?  Well, apparently she favors “never be born in the first place panels.”  What a joyfully misanthropic sentence, arguing that all-in-all its just cheaper if we are never born.

And as a point of fact, the insurance companies are not so thrilled about this.

Despite the support of a healthy majority of Americans of all faiths, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich inexplicably described the compromise as “even worse” than the original plan.

Well, those majorities are only obtained when people are asked questions that greatly distort reality, so again your polling is flawed.  And in any case, irrelevant.

And she goes on a bit pretending that this is purely about contraception (and not about things like the abortion pill), and talking about how out-of-control unwanted pregnancies are and then writes:

Is this really a time to try to limit contraception? What about the reckoning of the reality of human lives?

Except we are not contemplating a limit to contraception—or the abortion pill, for that matter.  No one is talking about prohibiting their use.  They are talking about whether to force a group of employers who previously didn’t provide contraception and abortion pill coverage to provide such coverage.  So we are not talking about reducing the availability of these treatments, just a failure to increase availability of them.

People who cry moral indignation about government-mandated contraception coverage appear unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy or want to reduce abortion or would like to see their tax dollars committed to a different purpose.

And there is what was implied in the last passage laid bare.  The right to contraception and the abortion pill in her mind is not merely a right to pay for it yourself, but the right to demand that other people pay for it for you.

Okay, then I have a right to a pony.  And therefore you must buy me a pony.  Now!

Sanity Prevails on the Morning After Pill (But So Does Raaaaacism!)

This is a day old, but still of interest. For a few years it seemed like RU-486, a.k.a. the Morning After Pill was going to be made over-the-counter for all women in the current administration, a position I found incomprehensible. I mean let's put aside completely whatever one feels about abortion. Love it or hate it, let's ignore that moral component and focus solely on the issue of the woman's health.

I mean let me personalize this because it is personal. Early in my marriage, my wife was pregnant. We were very happy, so much so that I had a name picked out if it was a girl within a week and pretty soon we told her family the good news. And you know, in this Filipino culture it's an even bigger deal than it is in the culture I come from. And then literally the next day she miscarried. We probably are never going to have children, except very likely by adoption.

And you see, that is what an abortion is, an artificially-induced miscarriage. And having seen what an awful experience it was—I mean wholly apart from the emotions surrounding the loss of her baby, it was a real physical trauma and the hormonal shifts were rough—I am extremely skeptical of the claim that any woman should be getting an abortion without at least a doctor's prescription. But what the FDA proposed was beyond the pale. Right now a woman over the age of sixteen (meaning seventeen or older) can obtain the drug over-the-counter, while girls who are younger than that had to obtain a prescription. The FDA recommended changing the rule to allow all girls to obtain it over the counter and to the credit of Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Health and Human services, she overruled the FDA. And one need only read from the official press release to see how morally incomprehensible the FDA's position was:

The average age of the onset of menstruation for girls in the United States is 12.4 years. However, about ten percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age. If the application were approved, the product would be available, without prescription, for all girls of reproductive age.

And asking a girl who is only eleven years old to deal with a drug like this without any guidance from a physician seems insane. Again, putting aside what you think about abortion, and I suppose what you think about girls having abortions without their parents' consent, an eleven year old girl is just not ready to handle those kind of weighty issues.

Two Thoughts on the Superbowl

First, congrats to New Orleans.  At first I thought the Colts were going to take you down, and then you rallied and came back.  Good for you.

Second, um, so you can see the two Tim Tebow ads, here.  Seriously, um, that’s it?  That’s what all of this fuss was over?  In fact, she doesn’t even talk about choosing life.  It’s “I love my son, and I almost lost him.”  Well, hey, I am really glad she loves him and that he survived, but I have a hard time even seeing the purpose of the ad, except for two possibilities.

First, maybe it is meant to funnel people to the focus on the family website.

Second, maybe the whole idea was to make the pro-abortion forces look ridiculous.  I mean I bluntly expected that the ad would at least ask people to choose life, but it doesn’t even do that.  So literally all the criticism about the ad was wrong.

Update: Wow, talk about seeing what isn’t there, dig this Associated Press article:

And a commercial by conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, perhaps the most anticipated ad of the night, hinted at a serious subject although it took a humorous tone too. Heisman winner Tim Tebow and his mother talk about her difficult pregnancy with him and how she was advised to end the pregnancy—implying an antiabortion message—but ended with Tebow tackling his mom and saying the family must be "tough."

The italicized stuff was literally not in the ad.  Go, look, see it for yourself.

But notice, this is a Brietbart link.  So, um, Brietbart, don’t you have a responsibility to fix this?  Just askin’.

(Hat tip: Hot Air and Powerline)