This morning, a friend of mine sent me this smoldering piece of crap from the Wall Street Journal, and I just couldn’t let it go without comment.
‘I haven’t seen ‘Sicko,’” says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She’s just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario’s provincial government about its health-care system next month.
Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he’s suing for the right to opt out of Canada’s government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.
So, to start, we’ve found someone who’s got a complaint — maybe legitimate, maybe not — against the Canadian health care system. We’ve already started off on a bad foot, by making two fatally-flawed assumptions. The first is that anyone is arguing that the Canadian health care system is perfect. To my knowledge, absolutely no one argues this. The second is that just because there are problems with another country’s system, this somehow implies that ours is necessarily better. It simply doesn’t follow.
June 28th, 2007
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Politics, Health |
15 comments
Tgirsch alerts me:
This one’s all yours. Via Nashville Is [S]Talking.
The URL is for “Help My Baby Live”, whatever that is. I can’t get the page to load. After Googling around, I found a reference to a couple of low-lifes who are demanding $50,000 in contributions or they’ll have an abortion - I assume this is the reference in question.
What to say? First, it’s very likely a scam: either there isn’t a pregnancy or they have no intention of aborting anyway. If that were true, they could be liable for false solicitation.
If they really mean it . . . well . . . why does it matter? It’s only marginally more tasteless than Pat Robertson’s Oral Roberts’s prophecy that God would kill him if his sheep didn’t cough up $8 million in record time. The people who are going to object to this baby thing are the ones who didn’t object to Robertson’s bullshit, and as usual, there’s no reason to take them seriously.
As to whether it’s a good idea to do this kind of thing, it certainly seems . . . questionable. It seems at first glance incredibly crass to essentially sell your own decision whether to carry a pregnancy to term. And when your kid eventually finds out that you had made up your mind to have an abortion unless someone paid you not to, they may voice some objections. It also just seems greedy: pregnancy and raising a child are expensive, and that’s an issue for every prospective parent, but most people can get through it without needing $50K in cash up front. However, although this (Web begging) seems a strangely cold-blooded way to approach the problem, it’s really not very different from the decisions many people make all the time.
For many people, the decision whether to carry through an unplanned pregnancy may very well hinge on financial issues - and appropriately so. What this couple are really saying (if they’re on the level) is that they can’t afford to have a child now without some financial assistance, and that their decision whether to do so or not will depend on whether their financial situation improves quickly. That’s not only not objectionable, it’s perfectly reasonable. Putting it in the form of a de facto threat to have an abortion unless someone ponies up is rather crude, but it’s equivalent to simply saying “This is how much we need, and we can’t realistically take on this burden otherwise.” - which, again, is reasonable. (In fact, you could say that it would be a better world if a lot more couples had that conversation with themselves at the appropriate time.) As to why they need $50K, that’s their business. It may just be a scam, but if it’s not they may have serious financial problems others aren’t aware of - maybe they’re in debt, maybe they know the infant will have special care needs, or whatever. Nobody has to contribute if they don’t want to, but it doesn’t seem to me unreasonable for them to ask, or impossible that they could be sincere.
As for those who simply can’t keep from judging others, especially regarding pregnancy, consider that what they’re asking help in doing is exactly what the objectors would like to force them to do unilaterally - so giving the money is a way of moving them toward the result you want, and away from the other.
The best part about this, of course, is that the people who will feel an urgency about donating are the anti-choicers, who normally prefer to simply take away people’s right to make such decisions for themselves but in this case can only pay to support the decision they hope will be made. So much of that $50K will come from people who would otherwise use it to make choices like this impossible - which is all to the good. (In fact, I’m tempted to suggest that every pro-choice woman who is ambivalent about pregnancy for financial reasons should threaten to abort unless they receive $50K in donations exclusively from people who can prove they have previously donated to an anti-choice organization. Draining the Ameritaliban and putting their money to good use for once would truly turn your bun in the oven into a little bundle of joy.) So-called “crisis pregnancy centers” run by anti-choice outfits are notorious for the meager or non-existent aid they actually provide to pregnant women, and the complete lack of support they offer after birth. Forcing them to provide aid that will really make a difference both during and after pregnancy, and refusing to allow them to dictate how it will be used, or to impose some sort of religious requirement, is a very effective way of seeing just how much money they’re willing to put where their mouths are (in fact, if this demand turns out to be a strategy expressly motivated by that consideration, I’d call it brilliant!).
So, in the end, although this situation seems somewhat cold-blooded, it’s not much different from the kinds of very practical decisions people are forced to make about pregnancy and child-rearing every day. It seems as if these potential parents could be more tactful (though again I’ve only seen others’ vituperative responses to them, so I may be judging unfairly), but I don’t know that they’re doing anything wrong. I hope this doesn’t presage a heartlessly monetary view of their relationship with their eventual child, but even there they would be well within the mainstream of lousy parenting. And finally, if this ends up taking $50K out of the whack-job anti-choice community, that would be some very sweet icing on an otherwise ordinary cake.
June 28th, 2007
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General, Politics, I do too have a life, Religion, Culture, Health, Privacy |
4 comments
David Opderbeck:
These are pictures I took of the statue of Charlemagne outside Notre Dame Cathedral in France, and of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany. You may recall that Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Romanorum by Pope Leo III in 799, marking the rise of “Christendom” — the notion of a revitalized Roman Empire united under the leadership of the Church, with the Church legitimating the state. This unhealthly [sic] synthesis of church and state often led to terrible oppression, violence and wars carried out in Jesus’ name. I think the point of view in my Charlemagne statute photo illustrates this well — the armed charger bearing the Emperor jumping out in front of the church.
The Cologne Cathedral, started in 1248, is so enormous, and so ornate, so Gothic, that it generates a tangible feeling of heaviness. It’s a beautiful building, but beautiful in a “terrible” way. At some level, the terror of that beauty can serve as a reminder, I think, of what power can do when mixed with faith. In the presence of the Cologne Cathedral, there is no doubt that this was intended as an assertion of the Church’s authority over every sphere of life. It’s interesting that the Cathedral was unfinished in the middle ages, and was only finished by Prussian romantic nationalists in the 1800’s. The Prussians knew that this masive [sic] edifice could serve as a symbol of power and pride. That Prussian pride, and the desire for power it produced, was one of the streams that fed the grisly death mills of the two world wars.
We who call ourselves “the Church” would do well today, I believe, to remember what happens when we try to assert political power in Jesus’ name.
As they say, read the whole thing.
June 28th, 2007
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Politics, Church & State, Religion |
47 comments
