BUSH'S APPOINTEE AS HEAD OF FAMILY PLANNING CALLED BIRTH CONTROL "CULTURE OF DEATH"
THINK PROGRESS - President Bush appointed Susan Orr to oversee federal family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. A look at Orr's record shows that her strongest qualifications appear to be her right-wing credentials and endorsement of the Bush administration's failed abstinence-only policies. Before joining HHS, Orr served as senior director for marriage and family care at the conservative Family Research Council and was an adjunct professor at Pat Robertson's Regent University. Some highlights:
– In a 2001, Orr embraced a Bush administration proposal to "stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees" to cover a broad range of birth control. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," said Orr.
– At the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, Orr cheered Bush's endorsement of Reagan's "Mexico City Policy," which required NGOs receiving federal funds to "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." Orr said that it was proof Bush was pro-life "in his heart."
– In a 2000 Weekly Standard article, Orr railed against requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives. "It's not about choice," said Orr. "It's not about health care. It's about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death."
2 Comments:
I don't agree with Ms. Orr's positions, but they're not quite the lunatic ravings that this summary portrays.
Many Catholics and some fundamentalists claim that oral contraceptives are essentially abortifacients. Wikipedia says "These [religious] objections [to hormonal contraceptives] are furthered by the suggested, yet unproven post-fertilisation mode of action of preventing the implantation of a blastocyst." but the article doesn't cite a reference for the statement.
The anti-abortion argument is rarely addressed directly. First, it assumes that willfully ending human life is morally objectionable (it further obscures the issue that many "pro-life" politicians behave as if the principle does not apply after birth). Second, if a blastocyst/embryo/fetus is not human life, then by what criteria is a life human? Animals have nervous systems, but are not human life. Newborns have no capacities not posessed by animals (other than the capacity to become mature human adults), and yet are generally considered human life. Social convention has a bad record on distinguishing human from non-human life (e.g., racism). The pro-choice argument has not advanced reasonable criteria that make abortion morally neutral. The pro-choice argument from privacy is strong, but rarely articulated well.
Conversely, the anti-contraceptive arguments I've usually encountered have been awful: most embrace bad science and do not address important distinctions, such as between the (possibly) abortifacient properties of hormonal contraceptives and condoms. The valid (in a logical sense) arguments advanced by the Catholic church are essentially based on revelation, i.e., they are outside of the scientific realm, and as such are inappropriate as a basis for secular public policy.
I cannot believe that anyone would be such a maleficent fool as to actually argue in favor of returning women (and humanity) to the medieval degradations of being inable to choose whether or not to conceive another human life--if you believe genuinely that human life is truly sacred, you cannot in good conscience for one moment back up the idea that women should be forced back into the position of walking incubators and mass cattle-breeders. You certainly can have no knowledge of the appalling state that most of humanity lived in for millenia because of that very inability to have reproductive choice. I for one do not believe that ANY stronger argument is required above that of a person's body being their own property, and thus up to themselves alone to decide to what uses it will be put, reproductive or no--it is staggering to find in the 21st century victims of sectarian mysticist brainwashing actually possessing enough public power to possibly return us to such a wretched state of affairs.
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