Anti-choice AgitProp

I have just penned an editorial for BIOETHICS on the fall-out resulting from the Report on End-of-Life Decision-Making in Canada that I had a hand in producing. The gist of it is that I wondered whether there's much point debating this issue with anti-choice activists (you know, for hire 'anti euthanasia', 'pro-life' agitprop types). I gave two examples, in said editorial, of encounters I had in the aftermath of the release of said Report where I confronted anti-choicers with incontrovertible evidence that their arguments are flawed. They were, in fact, unable to counter the arguments I put forward, yet that did not stop them, within 24 hours, from repeating arguments they knew at that stage to be faulty. So, why pretend that you have a genuine counter-part in a public debate, when arguably the real motives of your opponents are not out in the open to begin with and when their arguments, peppered with heart wrenching abuse stories, serve their propaganda objectives only. 


I began, half tongue-in-cheek, about a week ago a competition, encouraging readers of this blog to send me mistake they found in two such newspaper pieces of agitprop. To my delight, people actually took the time to dissect these two pieces. So, trying to be a good sport here, I am reproducing some of the mistakes people have identified in said agitprop. For reference, the Report is here or here. The agitprop articles  were published in a National Post blog entry penned by Barbara Kay, as well as in a piece published by Licia Corbella in the Calgary Herald.


Here we go: Both articles (the incriminating 'evidence' was self-reportedly 'googled' by Ms Corbella, it seems) report at great length and to much fanfare incidences of non-voluntary euthanasia in jurisdictions that have decriminalized assisted dying in some form or shape. Both authors take this as evidence that a slippery slope exists, whereby people's lives are being terminated in these jurisdictions variously against their wishes or without having requested this as a result of decriminalization. Ms Corbella bitterly complains that we have missed this evidence that is so very easily available to anyone with access to google (Ms Corbella's favourite research tool, presumably right next to wikipedia and the Anti-Euthanasia Coalition's website). Well, it turns out that we have mentioned non-voluntary euthanasia cases in our Report. Was Ms Corbella too busy copy-pasting her evidence from fellow anti-choice activists websites to actually read the Report we produced?  Be that as it may, we also pointed out that non-voluntary euthanasia takes place in societies that have not decriminalized assisted dying, hence the existence of non-voluntary euthanasia in societies that have decriminalized demonstrates nothing at all. This point has been made very eloquently in this article in the Ottawa Citizen. In fact, we provided empirical evidence in our Report that following decriminalization non-voluntary euthanasia has actually decreased in some jurisdictions (not as sexy as Ms Corbella's anecdotes, I know).  Ms Corbella was called on her obvious mistake by commentators on the Calgary Herald's on-line site, but has chosen not to reply, which brings me back to my theme: These agitprop type activists are not seriously engaged in debate, and we should not pretend otherwise. 


Barbara Kay makes a similarly obvious mistake, uncritically citing Margaret Somerville, a conservative Christian activist employed at McGill University who campaigns traditionally on any topic the Catholic Church has a strong view on (among her favourites are: gay marriage, and end-of-life issues). Kay quickly declares Somerville a bio-ethicist even though Somerville doesn't seem to have any formal degree type education at all in ethics. Be that as it may, Somerville is cited in Ms Kay's commentary, claiming that a survey shows that Canadians are in favor of improving palliative care rather than decriminalizing assisted dying. Our Report is duly blamed for not having taken this survey into account in our report. Not quite, and here we have another example of misleading use of empirical evidence. The poll in question was actually published after we completed our empirical survey chapter. More than that, the poll in question is not actually at variance with the findings of the polls we cite. The poll cited in the newspaper blog was commissioned by Life Canada (an anti-choice organization). [p 3 of on-line poll] Most of the questions in this poll are, given the nature of its partisan funder, suitably leading. However, on the evidence cited in this report 57% of respondents were in favor of the decriminalization of assisted dying. Surveys commissioned by organisations less in agitprop mode than Life Canada found significantly higher percentages of Canadians in support of a more permissive regime when it comes to assisted dying. We have cited some of those in our Report. Reportedly Life Canada has since dropped the decriminalization question altogether. Ms Somerville, in fact, used one bit of the Life Canada poll that suited her anti-choice agenda, and happily ignored what the actual evidence shows. She created the misleading impression that the survey results demonstrate preferences when they highlight priorities. The question posed was basically (pretending misleadingly that a society could have only one or the other) whether respondents were in favor of improving palliative care or in favor of decriminalizing assisted dying. [p 4 of on-line poll] I strongly encourage the interested reader to both read the newspaper blog as well as the actual survey in order to evaluate the evidence for the claims I am making in this paragraph. Kay and Somerville's misleading use of the data in Life Canada's poll brings us back to me theme for this entry: What's the point of having a serious debate with activists who are clearly not seriously interested in a genuine exchange of arguments? 


Ms Kay also mistakenly claims that access to euthanasia in the  Netherlands initially required evidence of a terminal illness. The fact is that terminal illness was never a necessary condition for access to euthanasia in that country, rather the relevant criteria were autonomous choice and individual suffering. Unlike in Ms Kay's reality, the Netherlands actually decriminalized euthanasia in 2002 and not in 1984 as she claims in her National Post piece. The problem with getting her facts right also bedevils Ms Corbella's commentary/article. She excitedly waves her hands about a 1995 report indicating that some 950 people's lives were terminated in the Netherlands without their request. Euthanasia, as already mentioned, was only decriminalized in the Netherlands in 2002.  Ms Kay must be equally desperate, why else would she have chosen to also resort to a 1995 piece to comment on the reality of euthanasia in the Netherlands today? I suspect that our two campaigners both used the same journal article, happily ignoring empirical evidence that has since 1995 been published in peer reviewed international medical journals - as referenced and discussed in our Report -  simply because it suited their ideological agenda. The author of the 1995 paper has not responded to the more recent evidence as it has accumulated.  It is worth mentioning that the incidence of non-voluntary euthanasia is higher in some countries with prohibitive regimes than in the Netherlands and Belgium.  There is no evidence that legalization of voluntary euthanasia results in non-voluntary euthanasia.  Rather, if anything, it reduces non-voluntary euthanasia.


What bothers me about agitprop such as that served up by Corbella, Kay and Somerville is that they must know that their arguments are not sustainable. They're not sustainable in the sense that it should be obvious to these authors that they are misleading the public with their intellectual content.  It seems pointless then to pretend that there is a serious intellectual debate taking place here. All that can reasonably be achieved is to debunk flawed and misleading arguments when they pop up. Because, trust me, you will see the same arguments popping up again in up-coming anti-euthanasia agitprop, probably within less than 24 hours after I post this blog entry. Such is life on the anti-choice campaign trail. 


Thanks to everyone who participated in the impromptu competition. The book price goes to a Canadian entrant, Mr. A. M. He found no less than 18 false or misleading statements across the articles/comments by Kay and Corbella. Well done Sir! 

The things that are

Update: March 02, 2010. I have received further information on the issue discussed in the middle part of this blog, from Catholics for a Free Choice in the USA.

Here's an excerpt from a report they published in 1998: 'The US bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which strongly prohibit abortion in Catholic hospitals, also say that "operation, treatment, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

"It may seem that this directive permits all life-saving abortions, but that is not the case. The language closely mirrors Catholic teaching on abortion, which forbids direct abortions in all circumstances, even to save the life of the mother. The word "direct" is critical. Indirect abortions are allowed - but there are only a few cases where this applies. In a case where a woman's life was threatened by pregnancy, abortion is directly intended and therefore not permitted.

"The full meaning of the directive played out in 1998 when a pregnant woman on Medicaid in need of an emergency abortion was denied services at a merged hospital in Manchester, N.H. The 35-year-old patient, who had miscarried in the last year, rushed to Elliot Hospital when her water broke at 14 weeks. When she arrived her physician determined she needed an emergency abortion in order to prevent a life threatening uterine infection and other complications. However, because Elliott had merged with Catholic Medical Center in 1994, abortions were banned in 1997 from Elliot at the insistence of its Catholic partner.'

This week I had a look at how our collection of atheist thought, 50 Voices of Disbelief, is doing on amazon. I was delighted to see that it has received a reasonable 4.5 rating (out of 5) on amazon.com and some 11 or so reviews. Check out the comments some of the readers left behind, here. I thought the most critical review (aka 3*** out of 5) is still quite complimentary. Glad the volume is holding up nicely in terms of sales!

In other news: I have been attacked as 'puerile' by an anti-choice organization in Canada for suggesting in said volume that there are Catholic hospitals where pregnant women are sacrificed for the sake of rescuing the fetus in case there is a conflict between the two. I have not, of course, suggested that this is a standard operating procedure in every single Catholic hospital (if it were, we surely would have heard about it). The anti-choice writer wheeled out that lovely Catholic concept of the Doctrine of the Double Effect (DDE) to explain why I am puerily (I made that word up) off the mark. This Doctrine, in turn, depends on your buying into another distinction, namely that of intention-foresight.

Here's what this argument is all about: The DDE holds essentially that we should distinguish between the intended outcome of actions and outcomes that we are able to predict (or foresee) but that we do not intend. The DDE, historically, goes back to an argument advanced by St Thomas Aquinas. He used the example of permissible homicide in self-defense. Aquinas imagined a situation where someone’s intention is to fend off an attacker. However, while he succeeds in fending off the attacker the attacker dies as a result of the defender’s actions. The attacker’s death was unintentional here, and, according to Aquinas is permissible ‘because self-preservation is a legitimate aim and a person who is unjustly attacked has a greater duty to preserve his own life than he has to preserve the life of the attacker.’ The morally important claim here is that the person who is attacked permits the death of the attacker to occur but does not intend for it to happen. The implicit understanding is that the death of the attacker is something that is undesirable and if possible ought to be avoided. One assumption here is that our victim (ie the attacked person) is acting from good motives. The argument from the DDE relies on us accepting a further concept, namely that of the Intention-Foresight Distinction (IFD). This distinction upholds the view that there is a moral difference between intending a patient’s death and foreseeing that it might or will happen, but not intending it. So, in the case of the conflict that I started of with, the doctor who rescues the pregnant woman and foresees but doesn't intend the death of the fetus could be in the clear, according to this Doctrine. The idea, that there is more to the evaluation of a person’s actions than the consequences that that person’s actions produced, is based on a modus of moral theorizing that is best described as deontological. Consequentialists will maintain that both the DDE as well as the IFD are irrelevant consideration in our evaluation of the morality of actions. However, for many health care professionals, as well as in law, the IFD matters a great deal. In homicide investigations, for instance, the determination of the intention of the assailant will make a significant difference in terms of making a deciding on whether she will be prosecuted under a murder or manslaughter charge. I doubt that this is ethically defensible, but there you go. To my mind outcomes are the only thing that matters.

While it is possible to draw this distinction (it is perfectly possible to say that I foresee that A is going to happen as a result of my intending to achieve B, but that I do not intend for A to occur), I cannot see why I should be any less responsible for the foreseen consequences of my actions. What makes A an acceptable cost to incur is surely the greater benefit derived from achieving B, as opposed to anything to do with my intentions.

In any case, the other question is whether or not there is evidence that Catholic hospitals sacrifice the lives of pregnant women in order to rescue fetuses. The answer to this is unequivocally 'yes'. In Catholic Nicaragua, for instance this position is even government policy (law in this case). As I write this, a cancer stricken pregnant woman is not given access to life preserving chemotherapy in that country, because this would risk the fetus' well-being. Just check out recent amnesty international reports on this matter. There have also been bona fide reports of health care professionals working in Catholic hospitals in the USA transporting pregnant women on to secular hospitals, so they could have access to life-preserving (life of the pregnant woman that is) abortions.

While I understand where the anti-choice position is coming from on this issue, I am surprised that anyone from that political corner would deny that these sorts of things are happening in the Catholicism controlled parts of our little universe. These sorts of policy positions do not come cost neutral no matter how hard they might intend (pun intended) for them to be.

There is more in the anti-choice site's article, in particular a rant on the conscientious objection issue. It is noticeable that the defense advanced there is essentially a legal response to an ethical/political argument I made. I did not argue that conscientious objection is illegal currently, I lamented that it is not. Oh well...

Hey, on to one last thing. I worked yesterday busily with the audio/video folks at Queen's University on a virtual presentation (I just couldn't be persuaded it's worth flying/traveling for more than 30 hours in economy class to do a 30 min presentation). The topic was a bit dicy as I am not really an expert in chronic disease issues, but it's been great fun doing this. Check the video out here. I am looking forward to discussing this with the conference participants in about a fortnight!

Should Planned Parenthood Accept Racists' Donations?

In the USA pro-life groups are currently running a campaign designed to smear Planned Parenthood with the claim that the pro-choice organization accepts knowingly donations from racists, and, as a corollary that it is a racist organization. Here's what happened: a pro-life activist group called Planned Parenthood offices across the USA. Their caller pretended to be a racist wanting to earmark a donation toward assisting African American pregnant women to have an abortion. To leave Planned Parenthood staffers in no doubt about his racist agenda, the caller made clear that he's concerned that his fictional white newborn might suffer as a result of affirmative action policies and so he wants to have his donation go toward the abortion of a 'black baby' (no doubt he meant fetus, but that's neither here nor there, and pro-lifers usually miss out on nitty-gritty details such as developmental stages of embryos).

So, Planned Parenthood staffers across the US told him that they'd happily accept his donation (and earmark it according to his wishes). Nobody said: we do not accept donations from racists. Pro-life groups are trying currently hard to give the impression that individual staffers were motivated by racist motives, but a fair evaluation of the videos the group posted on youtube suggests nothing of that sort. Planned Parenthood has always taken a liberal, pro-choice stance on the abortion issue, so it could not say that it takes donations to assist women of all colors to have abortions if they so wish, whatever their reasons, unless they happen to be African American. So, Planned Parenthood then offers termination of pregnancy to African American women as well as to women of any other skin color.

Comes the racist donor along. Well, of course there can't be an issue for Planned Parenthood in terms of accepting the donation! Big deal. If you've some racist idiot who wants to give a million dollars to Planned Parenthood so that more African American women can be assisted in having a termination of pregnancy, the organization should accept the money. End of story. African American women, like any other client of the organization ask to have a termination of pregnancy out of their own free will. So the money would not suddenly go toward forcing African American women to have abortions that they do not wish to have. If anything it would assist more such women to access affordable reproductive health services.

Just as importantly, perhaps, is of course that the donation provided by the racist would free the organization to re-direct financial resources to women of other color, including white women wanting to have an abortion (probably much to the horror of the racist).

So, here's that big old lesson then one more time: It's not motives that matter, but outcomes. In this hypothetical case, everyone would be better off: the racist is happy, because he thinks he served a racist cause (little does he know that he didn't, of course); African American women, because more of them would be able to access Planned Parenthood's services; women of any other color, including white women, because more money would be available for them after the donation earmarked for black women.

Pro-life activism, intellectually impoverished as it is, seems to know no shame in terms of how it campaigns for its causes. To produce videos linking Planned Parenthood to the KKK and trying to align themselves with Martin Luther King jr's civil rights movement is breathtaking.