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[Some of the links may contain graphic and disturbing images and descriptions.]
Someone wants to make a movie about Kermit Gosnell and has turned to crowd-funding to finance the film. You can read the fund-raising pitch here; the campaign closes on May 12, 2014. You can read some of the backstory on the movie and see a couple of PSAs supporting it at HotAir.
I don’t know anything about the people making the movie; I don’t know anything about the movie itself; I know it will be very easy to make a very bad movie about Gosnell and his crimes. Nonetheless I have contributed to the fund-raising campaign for this movie at Indiegogo. I would like to see the Gosnell story told to a wider audience and perhaps this movie will accomplish that.
However, the aspects that will apparently be the focus of the movie - Gosnell as serial killer, the "media cover-up" - are the least interesting parts of the story. Serial killers are a dime a dozen and concerns about the media coverage are inside baseball. What I would like to understand are the other characters in this story: the women who came for abortions so late in their pregnancies and to such a horrible place; Gosnell's employees who killed alongside him; the colleagues who turned a blind eye to Gosnell's murders; the regulators who failed so miserably. I believe that telling these stories as they should be told will require a book. And, to me, the template for a book about the Gosnell story is The Perfect Storm.
The Perfect Storm is dispassionate but not cold; the facts are carefully researched; the characters are revealed through their own words and actions and by the descriptions of people around them; the communities - beliefs, norms, possibilities, limitations, culture - that shaped the characters’ decisions and actions are shown straightforwardly, without romanticizing or condescending; the technical information necessary to understand what happened is presented clearly and in sufficient detail; when the author must speculate on actions and outcomes, he makes it clear he is doing so; the author does not have a discernible ax to grind; and the book is a can’t-put-it-down read. I hope that somewhere out there is an author or journalist, perhaps one whose interest will be caught by the Gosnell movie, who can do for the rest of the Gosnell story what Sebastian Junger did for the Andrea Gail, the men who died on her, and the others whose lives were battered by the 1991 storm.
*****
Reading:
A Really Long Post About Abortion and Reasoning By Historical Analogy That is Going to Make Virtually All of My Readers Very Angry At Me - Megan McArdle on, largely, the personhood argument.
Protect and Defend by Richard North Patterson - A novel about a late-term abortion.
Abortion refusal death - This gives a brief description of the death of Savita Halappanavar, a pregnant Indian woman who died in Ireland from an infection due to an incomplete miscarriage that should have resulted in an abortion to save her life. Just as I believe legalized abortion supporters must confront Gosnell, I also believe those who would legally restrict abortion must confront Mrs. Halappanavar. (There is an interesting discussion about Mrs. Halappanavar’s death in the comments to a post at Grim’s Hall.)
Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story and 14 Theories for Why Kermit Gosnell’s Case Didn’t Get More Media Attention - Both by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic. I was unaware of either of these until I did some poking around to write this blog post. The first is a good summary of the case; the second is an interesting survey of possible explanations for the media’s disinterest. I did a Bing search for:
friedersdorf gosnell site:http://www.theatlantic.com
and he seems to have written a great deal on the topic. I have not read everything the search returned but what I have read is well worth the time and effort.
Reclusive Leftist is objecting to the Tebow Super Bowl ad from a more ideological and less slanderous point of view than the women’s organizations* I mentioned in my previous post. Although I will admit that I am not super happy about NFL cheerleaders, I don’t agree with RL’s take on this in general; “the patriarchy” is simply not a term I’m comfortable with.
However, what I find truly objectionable about RL’s post is its total disregard for facts. I gather that the Super Bowl is not a a big deal in far Left feminist circles and I don’t have a problem with that. It’s not a big deal with most of my female relatives either and I can assure you they are not far Left feminists. Nonetheless, I think if you’re going to write about a topic and especially if you’re going to draw sweeping conclusions about it, you should at least get your facts straight. Yet RL quotes approvingly the following from Jaclyn Friedman, writing for The Nation and NPR:
The ad becomes even more disturbing when we consider who it’s trying to reach. Assuming that Focus on the Family operates with the same mindset as most Super Bowl advertisers (and there’s really no evidence to suggest otherwise), it’s also safe to assume that men are one of the primary targets of this spot.
Um, no. As this article makes clear, ads targeted at women are nothing new during the Super Bowl:
So what does the increase in viewers translate to? For advertisers, the answer is more commercials geared toward a female audience.
A study by Venables Bell and Partners, an independent ad agency in San Francisco, found that, in general, women look forward more to the commercials than the game [snip]
Dove used the 2006 Super Bowl as a means to launch its highly successful "Dove Self Esteem Fund" with its "Little Girls" commercial, which discussed everyday insecurities of young girls and promoted a campaign to re-empower them. [snip]
last year Budweiser, Pedigree, Pepsi ( PEP - news - people ) and Cheetos also took a special interest in their female demographic with feel-good commercials. [snip]
... while men are more likely to discuss their favorite play after the game, women are more likely to discuss their favorite ads.
They are also more likely than men to purchase a product they see advertised during the game (and share it on Facebook with their friends), which hasn't been lost on the female-friendly advertisers planning commercials for this year's Super Bowl.
There is no reason to believe that the Tebow Super Bowl ad is targeted at men. (It took a second reading, but I did notice that Friedman covered herself by saying, “men are one of the primary targets of this spot.” I’m not always on top on the latest demographic information but based on my understanding of the makeup of our society, that would seem to leave women as the other primary target of the ad. (Sadly, my tolerance for idiocy is very low today.))
RL goes on to quote further from Friedman:
So now what we’ve got is an ad telling men that it’s wrong for women to abort their potential children, lest those children not get the chance to grow up to be famous quarterbacks who paint Scripture references into their eyeblack. In light of new research revealing that about a third of women who report partner violence also report that their partners try to pressure them into pregnancy and motherhood (as do 15 percent of women who had never reported relationship violence), this male-targeted argument is particularly chilling.
Um, no. Neither Friedman nor RL provide a link to the “new research” but given the date and the results, I assume the study being referenced is this one. First of all, based on the Abstract (I do not have access to the entire text), it is most emphatically not the case that “15 percent of women who had never reported relationship violence” report that “their partners try to pressure them into pregnancy and motherhood”. Rather 15 percent of all the women surveyed reported that.
Second, the number that leaps out at me is this: 53% of the young women “said they had experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner.” I simply refuse to believe that these young women are a representative sample. There is no way more than half the women in this country are physically assaulted by their husbands, boyfriends, lovers, or significant others. Whatever is going on with these extremely unfortunate young women, their circumstances tell us nothing about “pregnancy coercion” or “birth control sabotage” in the population as a whole.
Let’s do some math. Of the 53% who experienced violence in their relationships, 35% reported “reproductive control”; that is, either “pregnancy coercion” or “birth control sabotage”. So of the 1,278 women in the study, 677 of them (53%) experienced violence. Of these, 237 (35%) reported reproductive control. If those 237 were the only women in the survey who reported reproductive control, then 18.4% of the total sample (237/1287) would have reported reproductive control. In fact, the abstract tells us that 19% of the entire sample reported experiencing pregnancy coercion and 15% reported birth control sabotage. It appears that the women who experienced violence in their relationships were, in fact, the only women who reported reproductive control. This numerical conclusion is born out by the final sentence of the “Results” section:
In analyses stratified by partner violence exposure, associations of reproductive control with unintended pregnancy persisted only among women with a history of partner violence.
In other words, only those women with violent partners became unintentionally pregnant as a result of “reproductive control”.** To me that means incidents of reproductive control fall well outside the norm of society. Normal men do not assault their romantic or sexual partners and women whose partners do not assault them do not become unintentionally pregnant as a result of their partners’ coercion and sabotage. To believe that watching a Super Bowl ad will somehow make a perfectly normal man decide to beat his woman to keep her pregnant (and probably barefoot) requires a leap of (bad) faith far beyond what anyone who actually knows a fair number of men would be willing to make.
Given RL’s concept of The Patriarchy, her disdain for the Super Bowl is understandable. I sympathize to some extent with her concerns about the extent to which football in general and the Super Bowl in particular represent women as sexual objects. However, to use a bogus representation of an interesting but not generalizable study to argue that presenting a mother glad she carried her child to term will cause men across this country to force their wives and girlfriends to become “baby machines” is way out of line.
And, finally, I would like to point out that - as far as I know - nobody actually knows what the ad looks like anyhow.
*****
* This is the same old naming problem. I don’t consider organizations like NARAL and NOW to be truly feminist organizations. Neither do I consider them to represent the views of all - or even most - women. So what do we call them? Sally Jenkins has some wonderful suggestions in her very highly recommended piece on the Tebow ad:
The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us;
The National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time;
and my favorite:
Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep (DOLL)
** Apparently one of the questions asked of the young women was:
Has someone you were dating or going out with ever told you not to use any birth control?
If this is truly how the question was worded - with no qualifiers about “other than in the heat of the moment” - and replying “Yes” to it was considered proof of “pregnancy coercion” I believe the entire study should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. - Lord Acton
CBS has scheduled an ad from Focus on the Family to air during the Super Bowl on February 7, 2010. The ad features 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow (hereinafter “Tim”) and his mother, Pam Tebow (hereinafter “Mrs. Tebow”) who will:
share a personal story centered on the theme of "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life."
Although no one outside FotF and CBS has seen the ad, it is expected that the ad will feature Mrs. Tebow talking about her decision to carry Tim to term despite advice from doctors that the pregnancy would almost certainly result in a stillbirth and would endanger her health.
Various women’s groups have objected to the ad including NOW, NARAL, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Women’s Media Center. These organizations make a number of arguments for not showing the ad, some tiresome, some interesting.
My guess - and it’s just a guess - is that this is going to prove to be a tempest in a teapot. According to Advertising Age:
[FotF’s] Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an "anti" stance against any issue, according to a person familiar with the situation.
According to Gary Schneeberger, a Focus on the Family spokesman:
the message is likely to act ... as an offer of help, with the hope the commercial will generate awareness for the organization and its family services
Given these characterizations, I anticipate the Tebow ad is going to consist of several shots of Tim Tebow from childhood to athletic stardom, his mother saying something to the effect that she’s so glad she decided to go ahead and have him despite the worries about his health, Tim saying “Thanks, Mom”, and a voiceover reading something like, “Contact Focus on the Family for help in difficult times.”
Nonetheless, one of the arguments against running the ad caught my eye. It turned up in the letter to CBS from CPR (available as a pdf within this Salon post) and in a letter to CBS from Gloria Allred of the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund (available as a pdf within this RadarOnline post). The CPR’s letter is a sort of “concern troll” approach, worrying that CBS may be putting itself in a bad position if the ad is not accurate:
In recognition of its responsibility to operate the network in the public interest, CBS has long followed a policy requiring that all claims in advertisements be carefully and closely reviewed for accuracy.
CPR goes on to argue that the fact that abortion has been illegal in the Philippines since 1870:
raises questions about whether physicians in the Philippines would have urged a married pregnant woman to illegally terminate her pregnancy in 1987.
In other words, if Mrs. Tebow claims that her doctors in the Philippines urged her to have an abortion, she is lying.
Allred’s letter repeats this charge without any of the “concern troll” nonsense and ups the stakes considerably. You really should read the whole thing - “Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition” - but here’s the gist of it:
Will you still insist on running this anti-choice commercial if it turns out to be misleading advertising? [snip]
Was her choice to give birth an alternative chosen because it was more practical and less risky, (given the illegality of the abortion procedure) or was her choice simply a matter of faith? [snip]
I hope I never see this ad on CBS but if I do, I hope that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be watching it and evaluating it for misleading advertising as well.
If this ad airs, and fails t disclose that abortions were illegal at the time that Ms. Tebow made her “choice”, then I intend to file a formal complaint of misleading advertising with those federal commissions.
Now Mrs. Tebow is not merely lying about being advised to get an abortion, she is lying about the reason she chose not to have one: she carried the pregnancy to term because having an illegal abortion in the Philippines would have been too dangerous.
I almost don’t know what to say about this type of attack on Mrs. Tebow. The people writing these letters have no evidence that she is lying; they merely have a set of circumstances they believe suggest the conclusion they prefer to draw. I can play that game myself and find circumstances I believe suggest the conclusion they would prefer not to draw: that Mrs. Tebow is telling the truth. CPR itself says:
Every year, more than 500,000 women in the country try to terminate their pregnancies. In 2008 alone, criminal abortions resulted in the deaths of at least 1000 women and 90,000 more suffered complications.
Someone must be performing those abortions and even if all 91,000 that went badly were performed by the women themselves, someone competent must have performed at least some of the remaining 409,000. I’m reasonably sure there are doctors in the Philippines performing abortions just as there were always doctors in the United States performing abortions even when the procedure was illegal.
Furthermore, Mrs. Tebow was an American. It’s entirely possible she consulted doctors in the United States via telephone. It would have been a trivial matter for her to get on a plane and fly to the nearest country in which abortion was legal. And even if no Philippine physician was willing to directly advise abortion, it’s fairly easy to imagine one telling Mrs. Tebow that her serious illness had probably irreparably damaged her child and presented a risk to her own health and she might want to consult with doctors back in the United States about what course was the best to pursue. After all, abortion in such a case is clearly the medically correct thing to do so any doctor worth his salt would surely have attempted to make sure his patient understood that. Right?
The simple fact is that no one except the people involved 23 years ago know exactly what happened. Yet in order to stop an ad they don’t like from airing, some women’s groups have no compunction about accusing Mrs. Tebow of lying about what she was told, lying about why she made the choice she did, and - who knows - perhaps lying about ever being sick at all. When did women become fair game for this type of slander - from other women?
I simply don’t understand what is so threatening about this ad. As Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List said:
Shouldn't the ‘pro-choice’ position respect Pam Tebow's decision to choose Life? What is the worst case scenario in allowing the ad to air? Women are exposed to an example of sacrifice for the sake of an unborn child. NOW needs to explain where the harm and threat to women and children is here.
I have to agree with Dannenfelser that those criticizing the ad seem “[desperate] to keep full information from women.” If a pro-choice position is the correct position then allowing information about the other choice cannot possibly damage support for allowing women to choose abortions.
It seems to me that if pro-choice groups are so upset about the Tebow ad, the appropriate response is not censorship but rather presenting their own view of the matter. The Media Decoder blog at the New York Times points out that:
For many years, CBS had a policy against selling time to organizations expressing opinions on controversial topics in spots on any programming. [snip]
CBS, however, has changed its policy and has accepted issue ads in prime time on subjects like health care reform. The network has also run issue commercials from Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens.
A CBS spokesman has stated that:
The network follows a policy, he said, that “insures that all ads on all sides of an issue are appropriate for air.”
On Tuesday, he added that CBS “will continue to consider responsibly produced ads” from advocates on any issues for whatever commercial time was left during Super Bowl XLIV.
As the Media Decoder piece makes clear, this appears to open the door for those organizations who object to the Tebow ad to produce their own ads to air during the Super Bowl or, for that matter, during any of CBS’ primetime slots. The groups that oppose the Tebows’ message could produce an ad that features a woman who was advised as Mrs. Tebow was, followed her doctor’s advice, and is grateful to be alive to care for her other children. Or they could produce an ad featuring a man whose wife was advised as Mrs. Tebow was, did not take the advice, and died from complications of the pregnancy. The grieving husband could talk about the devastating effect his wife’s death had on their surviving children.
Or those who oppose the Tebows’ message could have gotten their message across for free by simply following the New York Times’ editorial advice:
The would-be censors are on the wrong track. Instead of trying to silence an opponent, advocates for allowing women to make their own decisions about whether to have a child should be using the Super Bowl spotlight to convey what their movement is all about: protecting the right of women like Pam Tebow to make their private reproductive choices.
Instead, those opposing the ad have put themselves in the position of looking like they’re terrified to have us hear anything that might make any woman think twice about having an abortion. The American people really aren’t stupid: it’s not going to take long for it to dawn on them that if people on the other side of the issue are so dangerous they must be censored, then maybe they’re saying something worth listening to.
Still, while I think the pro-choice groups’ arguments against the Tebow ad are dismaying and dangerous, I do admit to a great deal of sympathy for people like Gregg Doyel, a CBS.com columnist:
''If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year,'' he wrote. ''It's not a day to discuss abortion. For it, against it, I don't care what you are. On Super Sunday, I don't care what I am. Feb. 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion.''
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