Carole Joffe: The Legacy of George Tiller

Today's blog post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Beacon Press, forthcoming January 2010) and Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to provide Abortion before and after Roe v Wade (Beacon Press, 1996) and professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.

"It comes down to who is the patient. Is the woman the patient, or is the fetus the patient? One or other is the patient. I've never heard a fetus talk to me. I've heard thousands and thousands of women share their pain, their desperation, and their hopelessness." These words were spoken to me some twenty years ago by Dr. George Tiller, as I was researching a book on abortion providers' experiences before and after Roe v Wade. Tiller, who was brutally assassinated in his church on May 31, was one of the most compassionate-- and feminist-- individuals I have ever encountered. "Trust women" was his well-known motto, prominently displayed at his clinic in Wichita, Kansas.

He was asked repeatedly by friends how he could continue his work in the face of the unending violence and legal harassment that he endured in the years leading up to his murder: his home and office were frequently blockaded (I recall hearing that he and his wife had to be helicoptered out of their house to attend a child's wedding, as antiabortion fanatics were surrounding his home); he was shot in both arms in 1993; and he was subjected to numerous lawsuits brought by a grandstanding anti-abortion Attorney General in Kansas and by Operation Rescue operatives, all of which he ultimately won, but which took a huge toll, financially and emotionally. His answer was always the same: "Where else can these women go?"

Tiller's answer was not a rhetorical one. He was one of the very few physicians in the United States who provided abortion care well into the third trimester of pregnancy. It is this fact that made him so reviled in antiabortion circles, and unquestionably the most controversial abortion provider in the country. Operation Rescue relocated their offices to Wichita a few years ago, with the specific intent of closing him down. Each day, the women who came to him from all over the U.S., and from abroad as well, had to go through a gauntlet of protestors holding grotesque posters and screaming about "Tiller the baby killer."

It is hardly surprising that antiabortion zealots would find Dr. Tiller such a convenient target, focusing on his late term procedures. What has been more surprising, and disappointing, to me has been the inadequate coverage of Tiller's work in most of the mainstream media in the days since his murder. I myself have spoken to a fair number of reporters, have read numerous stories from papers across the country, and consumed a great deal of television and radio reporting on this event. I have been struck that although all reporters mention that he offered late term abortions, as a way of explaining his notoriety in antiabortion circles, remarkably few of these print or radio and television journalists explained why Tiller did this, and who actually were the recipients of these procedures. The fact that so many of those reporting on Tiller were so oblivious of the circumstances of his patients is in itself a powerful indication of the marginality of both abortion providers and patients in American culture.

Mark Hyman: Little League at Seventy

Today's post is from Mark Hyman, author of Until It Hurts: America's Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids. Hyman is a sports writer for BusinessWeek and numerous other publications.

Little League Baseball is marking its 70^th anniversary this year with a spring- and summer-long series of celebrations, parties and assorted other nods to the past. One occurred last week.

The press release posted on the Little League Baseball Web site read: "In the lobby of the Peter J. McGovern Little League Museum, Little League International continued its year-long celebration of the program's 70th anniversary with Thomas 'Tuck' Frazier, a player during Little League's first season in 1939, selecting the first winning names in the annual Little League Baseball World Series ticket lottery."

Congratulations to the winners, Michelle Rhodes of Jersey Shore, Pa., and Mark Mangan from Larksville, Pa., each of whom will receive four tickets to the Little League Baseball World Series World Championship Game in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in August, as well as World Series caps, T-shirts, trading pins, souvenir programs and gratis admission to the Little League Baseball museum.

What interested me most was the reference to Tuck Frazier, one of the first Little Leaguers. In my reporting for Until It Hurts: America's Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids, I spent a couple of hours quizzing, but mostly listening to, two other original Little Leaguers. Neither interview made it into the book, unfortunately. But meeting the Little League pioneers remains one of the highlights of the project.

Here, There, and Everywhere: Preventing Lead Poisoning Requires Strong Regulation

Today's post is from Lydia Denworth, author of Toxic Truth: A Scientist, a Doctor, and the Battle over Lead. Denworth is a former Newsweek reporter and People bureau chief. Her writing on science, education, and other social issues has appeared in the New York Times, Redbook, Health, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three sons.

Back in August of 2007, I was trying to work on vacation. I was squirreled away in a back bedroom surrounded by files and books when I got a Google alert. Millions of toys were being recalled because of dangerously high levels of leads.

It was a bittersweet moment. When I started work on a book about the battle over lead, I heard a lot about how lead was a problem of the past. That, of course, was part of the point: the book was about what it took to be able to say exactly that. But I often said that lead has a way of coming back to haunt us.

Looking at the email, I wanted to throw open the screen door and shout: I told you so! At the same time, who wants to be right about such a thing? If only it were a problem of the past. For one thing, I wouldn't have to now run to the toy bin and extract every Thomas the Tank Engine.

Furthermore, I was literally surrounded by the history of the battle over lead. Within arm's reach was a book that mentioned the first federal pamphlet warning parents about the dangers of lead in toys--in the 1930s. Another book described a study that found that 25% of Mattel toys had dangerously high levels of lead--in 1957.

Have we learned nothing? I thought bitterly.

Health Care: The Change We Need

Today's post is from Patricia Harman, author of The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons. In the interest of privacy, the names and some identifying details of the women she discusses in this post have been changed.

Willa Burr, a forty-eight-year-old West Virginian, was a housekeeper and a darn fine one. She made good money too; a little over $14.00 an hour on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays for two doctors' families and a single middle-aged teacher. The rest of the week, she stayed home with her three-year-old granddaughter.

Darrell, her husband, had retired early, when the shirt factory at the edge of town closed. He worked on an addition to their house on Taylor Mountain, a little at a time, when they could afford lumber. He had diabetes and took the medication he got at the free clinic. When the snow was too bad, he drove Willa down the steep mountain, in his four-wheel-drive truck, into the suburbs for her cleaning jobs.

Life was pretty good on their two acres, what with Willa's pay and Darrell's Social Security, until Willa's knees gave out. First Mrs. Haddock let her go. That's the urologist's wife. She said Willa was missing too much work, but there was only that once when Willa and Dave had to go to South Carolina for two weeks to help their son, and the other time when Willa had the flu.

The real reason Mrs. Haddock fired Willa was she couldn't get down on knees on the tile floors anymore, and the dusting was deteriorating too. Then Dr. Kepler said he didn't need her either. That left Miss Robinson, the second grade teacher, and when Willa noticed her hands were shaking and walking was difficult, she gave up cleaning altogether and just stayed home. Maybe she'd been working too hard, was what Darrell said.

After that things went downhill. Willa's daughter, Tina, a secretary in an accountant's office, took her mom down to the low-income clinic, staffed by students, residents, and faculty from a nearby medical school, but they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, even though the Burr's couldn't afford it, Willa and Darrell made an appointment at the Patterson Family Health Center to see a young Doc who wore a gold cross around his neck and a cashmere sweater. He wasn't much help.

The medical bill, from the clinic was $565, counting lab work. The doctor with the gold cross said he was pretty sure Willa had Parkinson's disease and wanted to order more tests, maybe a CAT scan of her brain, but Willa refused. She didn't have the money. And she couldn't pay for a trial of medication either.

World AIDS Day Link Roundup

Kai Wright at The Root: Can Obama help black America survive this plague?

Susan Blumenthal, MD, at Huffington Post: Aidsism in America

Jennifer Huget at Washington Post: How to Mark World AIDS Day? How About Getting Screened?

NPR: AIDS Epidemic Grows Among Children

Do You Know Your Genes?

Today's post is from Clare Dunsford, author of Spelling Love with an X: A Mother, A Son, and the Gene that Binds Them. Dunsford is an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College and has been a contributing writer for Boston College Magazine. She was previously an adjunct lecturer in English at Boston College and Harvard University.

Maybe you have heard of the HGP, the Human Genome Project. But have you heard about the PGP-10? This daring group of ten genetic pioneers has agreed to post their personal genomes on the Web in an effort to create a database of information that may lead to faster cures for genetic diseases. Very few of us have anything but the vaguest and most anecdotal information about the genes we carry: "I've got Aunt Hilda's hips and Uncle Frank's short temper." Certainly my family and I were not aware of our own genetic inheritance before my son's diagnosis with fragile X syndrome in 1993; the FMR1 gene wasn't even discovered until two years before. Fragile X is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common known cause of autism.

When I sat in front of a genetic counselor a couple of years after the initial diagnosis, I saw my family arrayed before me like a poorly designed Tinkertoy—a bunch of squares and circles connected by lines. The genetic counselor informed me that every person carries six to eight genes that are problematic. I just happened to know the name of one of mine. FMR1 this little creature is called. When a section of nucleotides called CGG repeats too many times, a vital protein is not produced, leading to cognitive disability, emotional difficulties and attention deficit.

In the fifteen years since my family learned of fragile X, the full human genome has been sequenced, much more quickly than anyone predicted, and genetic tests have been developed for over 1500 conditions. Some day (if you don't already) you will know the name of one of your own genes, one of the half dozen that carry the potential to make you ill or change your personality or cause you to bear a child who will never be independent.

Raped in the Military? You May Have to Pay for Your Own Forensic Exam Kit

Today's post is from Penny Coleman, author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War. Coleman writes frequently on Veterans' issues for Alternet, where this story originally appeared.

Sarah Palin's decision not to pay for rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla was an issue in the campaign for the White House. But allow me to introduce the large pink elephant that has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room:

At the Winter Soldier Investigation* in March, Spec. Patricia McCann, who served in Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard from 2003-4, read a memo issued to all MEDCOM commanders clarifying that "SAD kits"-- which are forensic rape kits--"are not included in TRICARE coverage."

TRICARE, the United States Department of Defense Military Health System that covers active duty members, will only pay for rape kits if the victim is seen in a military or a VA facility.

But the Pentagon acknowledges that 80 percent of military rapes are never reported. And that 80 percent who go off-base to protect their anonymity (and/or their careers) are on their own. If a soldier is on leave, or is five-hours from the nearest VA, or if a soldier is simply delivered to the nearest hospital by the local ambulance driver, their rape kits are not covered under TRICARE. Neither are other forensic exams that might be used in domestic violence situations.

Front-line treatment shouldn't be conditional on where a rape occurs or where the nearest treatment is available. This is not only a parity issue, but a further obstacle to treatment and justice.

Averting Their Eyes from an Assault on Women’s Health

Today's blog post is from Carole Joffe, author of Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to provide Abortion before and after Roe v Wade (Beacon Press, 1996) and a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.  She is currently at work on a book about contemporary abortion provision.

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent a pregnant woman from averting her eyes from the ultrasound images required to be provided to and reviewed with her." This is the "good news" of an egregious law recently passed in Oklahoma making ultrasounds mandatory for abortion patients. But though I read the law carefully (available here in its entirety), I couldn't find anything allowing women to also cover their ears during the ultrasound. This is unfortunate, because the law requires that those performing the ultrasound "provide a simultaneous explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting," and also "provide a medical description of the ultrasound images, which shall include the dimensions of the embryo or fetus, the presence of cardiac activity, if present and viewable, and the presence of external members and internal organs, if present and viewable." Even those women who are aborting a pregnancy caused by rape or incest are compelled to undergo such mandated ultrasounds.

Ultrasounds have become one of the key weapons of anti-abortion legislators. A number of states require abortion providers to make ultrasounds available; a handful of others make viewing mandatory, but Oklahoma is the first state, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, that requires a woman to hear the description of an ultrasound image.

The Oklahoma law has the added perverse feature of preventing a woman from suing her doctor if he or she intentionally withholds other information about the fetus, such as an anomaly. So, women are forced to hear something they may not choose to hear, but are not entitled to information that would be presumably of critical importance to them. Such is the state of public policy when it is in the hands of anti-abortion fanatics.

In The Exam Room: Unexpected Pregnancies and Hard Choices

Today's post is from Patricia Harman, author of The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons. In the interest of privacy, the names and some identifying details of the women she discusses in this post have been changed.

I am standing in the exam room, in the Women's Health Center, listening to the rapid heartbeat of a four-month-old fetus on a Doppler. The patient, Carey McDonald, 17, a slim blond cheerleader, is alone today. Sometimes her mother, a single waitress, comes with her. The father of the baby, a star football player on the hometown team, denies paternity. "But it's his!" Carey told me. "It is! He's the only boy I've ever been with and even that was only two times." Carey and her mom will raise this baby together.

I don't ask the young woman if she thought of using a condom. I don't ask her if she had access to a birth control clinic. I don't ask if her mother ever talked to her about sex or if she had sex education classes at school. It's too late for that now.

Natalie Lopez is a 29-year-old travel agent. She's seven weeks pregnant and accompanied, at this first exam, by her lover of three years. "I can't take birth control pills because of the other medications I'm on, but we used protection every time." Her eyes water over and she hands me a folded white paper on which are printed the names of two antidepressants and a mood stabilizer. "We want to be parents. I've always wanted a baby. But I can't have this one. The medications I'm on are toxic and there's a high chance the child will be born with a congenital defect."

If Natalie had come to me sooner, to get a more effective method of birth control, this might not have happened. But Natalie doesn't have health insurance. There are over 17 million women in the United States that don't have health insurance.

A Mother’s Perspective on Palin, Disability Issues, and Reproductive Rights

Today's post is from Penny Wolfson, whose National Magazine Award-winning essay "Moonrise" appears in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. The essay was the basis for Wolfson's memoir, Moonrise: One Family, Genetic Identity, and Muscular Dystrophy. Wolfson is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

My son Ansel always hated the notion, growing up, that he should hang around with other "disabled' kids. If I tried to hook him up with the other physically challenged boy in his school, or wanted to send him to muscular dystrophy camp, he resisted.  "Mom," he'd complain," Just because I use a wheelchair doesn't mean I have anything in common with other people in wheelchairs."  He thought that, even though muscular dystrophy was a genetic illness he had, it was only a very small part of who he was. And I had to rather reluctantly agree.

I'm reminded of that now in the weeks since the Palin nomination--weeks when apparently even so-called liberal women with "special" children have to remind themselves of their political affiliation because of what I see as their weird identification with Ms. Palin, and Trig, her now-famous Down's syndrome son, displayed like a new brooch at the Republican convention and the Vice Presidential debate. 

Well, even though I do have a couple of things in common with Ms. Palin—I am a working woman; I do have a disabled  child—I cannot for a moment ally myself or identify with her; in fact I abhor everything she stands for. She does not represent my interests, she will, I believe make it harder and more costly than ever to care for a child with a disability, and she would like to forbid other couples from making their own complex personal choices about having a child with special needs.

Link Roundup: Welcome to New Readers, Rev. Forrest Church, Divorce as a Health Care Strategy

In the run-up to tonight's Vice Presidential debate, which will be hosted by Gwen Ifill, we're seeing an slight uptick in traffic from conservative blogs linking to her cousin Sherrilyn Ifill's post on The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama. For those of you who clicked through to read the entire post, then stuck around to see what else we talk about here, welcome.

Or you might have come here from Galleycat, where Ron Hogan said something nice about us again this week. We're happy to see you, too!

Good Reading Elsewhere:

"After two or three poignant farewell sermons, I'm almost embarrassed this morning to be seen in public upright." Rev. Forrest Church was featured in a moving story about last weekend's sermon at the Unitarian Church of All Souls. Rev. Church posted on Beacon Broadside in July about his book Love & Death.

Sara Robinson does some myth debunking regarding the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime crisis. (Link via Susan Campbell's Fear, Itself blog at the Hartford Courant).

"Neither of us wanted a divorce. We thought we'd be soulmates, forever and forever. But we couldn't afford to go to doctor any more and couldn't afford medication." Long-married couples divorce in order to get necessary health care. 

"Polar bears, Priuses and Ph.D.s aren't going to do it alone." Green-collar dynamo Van Jones in Time on how green jobs can save the economy and the earth.

Recent Beacon Broadside Posts:

Weathering the Storm: Keeping Some Control in a Financial Crisis by Nan Mooney

Books Still Burn Here by Christopher Finan

The Unetane Tokef: A Jewish Model for Collective Responsibility by Danya Ruttenberg

From the Director: Remembering Robert Giroux by Helene Atwan 

Contraception Foes With Friends in High Places

Today's post is from Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Joyce received her B.A. from Hampshire College and her M.A. in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University. Her freelance writing has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, Newsweek, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications, and she is former managing editor of The Revealer, a daily review of religion and the media.

Next Thursday, September 25^th, is the cut-off date for public comments on the Department of Health and Human Services' proposed regulations concerning the expansion of the so-called "conscience clause" of the 2004 Weldon Amendment, which would ban federal funds from medical establishments that "discriminate" against health care providers or institutions by requiring them to participate in or provide referrals for abortion services – very broadly defined.  In an early draft of the regulations leaked in July, the HHS proposed that abortion, under its definition, included any procedure, action or drug "that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation." This follows an extremist antiabortion belief that some forms of contraception function as abortion by hypothetically preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg. By defining abortion to include any contraceptive that could prevent pregnancy by preventing implantation rather than fertilization – though it's virtually unknowable whether a particular contraceptive is functioning this way – the HHS broke with the American Medical Association's longstanding definition of pregnancy. Instead, the administration chose to side with a growing anticontraception religious movement, which only numbers in the tens of thousands but has an outsized influence in spreading its ideology through the growing support of churches and religious bodies.

Sarah Palin: No Friend to Children and Adults with Disabilities

Today's post is from Jane Bernstein, the author of five books, most recently Rachel in the World, a memoir of raising her developmentally disabled daughter. Her essay "Rachel at Work: Enclosed, a Mother's Report" was included in I Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, edited by Suzanne Kamata. Bernstein is a professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

As the mother of a young adult with mental retardation, nothing should make me happier than a candidate for vice president vowing that my daughter would at last have a "friend and advocate in the White House." Instead, I find myself more concerned than ever about the fate of children and adults with disabilities.

As most of us know by now, Sarah Palin's fifth child has Down Syndrome. When Palin learned through genetic testing that her unborn baby would likely "face special challenges," she confessed that she "initially felt sad" but now that he was four months old felt "truly blessed."

Of course she loves her infant son. He's an adorable little boy. It's hard to find parents who don't love their newborns –- even when we learn that our babies have disabilities. While for most of us, the grief we feel after hearing that our babies are less than perfect doesn't abate as quickly as it did for Palin, it hardly matters, because when our tears dry, as eventually they do, what's left is love and commitment.

Michael Phelps Just Said “No” to ADHD Drugs

Today's post is from Chris Mercogliano, author of In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness. He has been a teacher at the Albany Free School since 1973 and co-director since 1985. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, and he is also the author of Making It Up As We Go Along, and Teaching the Restless: One School's Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed.

Michael Phelps didn't need drugs to 'fly into Olympic history. And at the tender age of 11 he decided he didn't need them to negotiate his way through school.

Growing up in what by several accounts was an authoritarian household—his father was a state trooper and in an interview in the New York Times his mother describes herself as "stern"—Michael was diagnosed ADHD at age 9. His parents' on- again, off-again relationship had finally ended in divorce two years earlier, and his teachers had been complaining since kindergarten that he was restless, talkative, and easily distracted in class. These, of course, are all classic "symptoms" of a supposedly genetic neurochemical imbalance in the brain, and so a pediatrician suggested to Michael's mom that she put him on Ritalin.

According to Mrs. Phelps, Ritalin marginally improved her son's school performance and dulled him into peacefully doing the minimum on his nightly homework assignments. But he felt stigmatized by having to go to the nurse's office at lunchtime to swallow a pill every day, and after two years Michael pleaded to be taken off the drug. "I don't want to do this anymore, Mom. My buddies don't do it. I can do this on my own." Fortunately for Michael, his mother believed in him deeply and so she listened.

Transsexuals Are Not “Human Monsters”

Today's post is from Matt Kailey, the author of Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide the Transsexual Experience (Beacon Press, 2005), the editor of Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices (Johnson Books, 2007), and the managing editor of Out Front Colorado, Colorado's oldest and largest GLBT publication.

The online teaser was intriguing: '"Human monsters" a reality.' Having lived through the first few years of the 21st century, I wholeheartedly agreed. But when I clicked on the link, I discovered that it led not to a story about current political figures, but to a CNN article about an '80s Olympic athlete who was unknowingly given steroids by her coaches in order to enhance her performance.

East German shot putter Heidi Krieger thought she was taking vitamins, but later discovered, as her body began to masculinize, that she was being given the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol, a drug that, according to the article, "changed a woman into a man." As Krieger continued on the steroids, she noted changes not only in her physical appearance, but also in her feelings.

"I felt much more attracted to women and just felt like a man. But I knew I was not (a) lesbian," Krieger told CNN.

Good thinking, because lesbians don't feel like men. But I digress.

In 1997, Krieger had a "sex-change operation" and became Andreas Krieger. Details of this particular "operation" were not made public, and I would like to know more, because I find it fascinating that there is one magical "sex-change operation" that will do the trick. But I digress. Krieger is now married and runs an army surplus store. He says he does not want to be seen as a victim, but he presents himself as quite unhappy with his situation and with the circumstances surrounding his "sex-change operation."

Redefining the Pill: Bush Administration Calls Contraception “Abortion”

Today's blog post is from Carole Joffe, author of Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to provide Abortion before and after Roe v Wade (Beacon Press, 1996) and a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.  She is currently at work on a book about contemporary abortion provision.

Fans of Jewish folklore are familiar with tales from the town of Chelm, the legendary center of foolishness. Chelm's citizens unfailingly choose actions guaranteed to achieve the opposite of what was desired. The children need more milk? Buy a billy goat! The synagogue needs a new roof? Build a new floor! There has been much about the eight long years of the George W. Bush presidency that has made one think s/he was living in Chelm (remember how we were told the U.S. invasion of Iraq would be greeted by Iraqis bearing flowers and sweets?). Now, in the waning days of this presidency comes a move that would no doubt earn special respect from the people of Chelm because of its tortured logic. Draft regulations now circulating in the Department of Health and Human Services would redefine many forms of contraception (including most birth control pills) as "abortions."

So an administration that has done everything in its power to oppose abortion–making sure its appointments to the Supreme Court and other key positions are reliably anti-abortion, signing a bill banning a rarely used but sometimes medically necessary abortion procedure and so on–now goes after the main thing that can prevent unwanted pregnancies? In true Chelm-like fashion, this Administration is proposing a policy that virtually assures there will be more abortions.

Link Roundup

I was on a semi-vacation last week, so this week's link roundup is a bit larger than normal. Enjoy!

Howard Zinn is adding to his People's History of the United States with a new graphic novel, A People's History of the American Empire. Read about it at Tom Dispatch, and check out this Viggo Mortensen-narrated clip featuring Mike Konopacki's artwork and Zinn's words. 

Fantastic review of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith at Beliefnet. And don't miss Patel's excellent post on pluralism vs. diversity over at OnFaith.

...[I]t’s not about whether diversity is good or bad. Diversity is a fact, and in America it's not going away. The question is how to best engage the fact of diversity in a way that builds social capital and increases civic engagement. And when the pluralists don't engage diversity by building positive social bonds, then we leave a vacuum that is often filled by extremists or bigots.

In light of the recent Obama/Wright controversy (read Chris Bracey's take at BlackProf), Terri Gross talked with James Cone, author of Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998, about Black Liberation Theology. Also listen to the other interview from that show, with Rev. Dwight Hopkins, for a better understanding of the context Rev. Wright's comments were ripped from.

Kai Wright is in the American Prospect on starting over in AIDS research and in the Dallas Morning News about the danger of the high rate of teen STDs.

Penny Coleman attended the Winter Soldiers' conference, and her thoughtful analysis is appearing on Alternet. Be sure to check out her article about Stop/Loss: "Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow urges Jews and others to observe a green Passover.

Kevin Jennings, author of Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, is a hockey fan. And he doesn't appreciate the homophobic atmosphere at Rangers games.

 

On Human Guinea Pigs

by Carl Elliott

In his 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, Maurice Pappworth tells the story of a poor student who had volunteered for a number of medical experiments in exchange for cash. As the student was undergoing a highly complex cardiac catheterization, he went into profound shock and his heart stopped. Only after several minutes was the researcher able to resuscitate him. Pappworth wrote, "The experimenter then continued with the experiment as though nothing had happened." Then the researcher turned to all those present and said, "He must be a fool to repeatedly come back to us."

I have heard that thought expressed many times, although not quite so bluntly. Why does anybody take untested drugs for money, much less earn their living by doing it? Clinical research is regulated far more strictly now than it was in 1967, but it still rests on the willingness of thousands of human subjects to test the safety of new drugs. Many of these subjects are guinea pig pros, who spend a good part of each year in private, for-profit research units, submitting themselves to invasive medical procedures in exchange for cash. Nobody today calls them fools, of course. But many observers assume that guinea pig pros must have something wrong with them -- that they are psychologically disturbed, or that they like to live on the wild side, or as the current jargon has it, they enjoy "engaging in risk-seeking behavior." Nobody seems to consider the more obvious explanation: that they are desperate for the money.

The Psychological Trauma of War

by Margot Adler

It's not something you read in a newspaper or hear on an ordinary news show; it's only on the comedy shows like Real Time with Bill Maher where you hear it whispered: the idea that John McCain has PTSD, and that it would be scary to have his finger on the button. Whether or not this is the same kind of slur we hear from those who say Barak Obama was schooled in a madrassa, it seems perfectly reasonable to wonder if anyone who spent five years in a tiger cage might have some remnants of PTSD - even decades later.

So when I heard it on Bill Maher the other night, it reminded me that we are living in a society where thousands of young men and women, our very future, are returning home every day scarred from battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those scars are painfully visible; many others are not. Few people are really looking deeply at what this means for families and relationships, even what it means for our daily lives as Americans. Only one person that I know of in the mainstream media has delved deeply and movingly into this issue. For more than a year, in a series of searing pieces, Daniel Zwerdling at NPR has chronicled the plight of military personnel to get the mental health care they need. In many cases, veterans with PTSD have been kicked out of the military for bad behavior and are unable to access mental health services.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book called Heretic's Heart about my own life during the 1960's. Several chapters of that book were letters between me, as a twenty-year-old University of California - Berkeley student and activist, and Marc Anderson, a soldier fighting in Vietnam whom I met through the mail after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper that could only be described as a cry from the abyss.

Drug-Free School Zone

By Chris Mercogliano

I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority culture, and then dose them with the corresponding biopsychiatric drugs.

As Levine reminds us with his deft bit of historical research, America has a long tradition of marginalizing anyone who deviates from established norms—which currently are narrowing at an alarming rate. Or as French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, the control of its citizens has always been a primary aim of the state, and what we are witnessing in modern times is the evolution of increasingly subtle ways in which to do so. Today, instead of relying on brute force as was the case in the days of pharaohs and emperors, social institutions like schools, the military, and the mass media subliminally enforce a conformity so pervasive that overt forms of control are no longer necessary. All who resist and refuse to take their places in the social and economic machine, according to Foucault in Madness and Civilization, are labeled with some form of abnormality, and then, as I argue in my book, Teaching the Restless, about the ongoing ADHD hoax, they are medicated with powerful psychotropic drugs that extend society’s control all the way down to the biochemical level.

This business of labeling and drugging kids who won’t sit still, can’t keep up, or don’t fit in became a deep concern of mine in my role as a teacher at the Free School, a noncoercive, democratic, inner-city school for sixty-five students ages two through fourteen in Albany, NY. In the early 1990s there was a sudden spike in the number of students who came to us having been labeled in their previous schools, and so, curious as to why, I embarked on an exhaustive review of the already considerable ADHD literature.