Tag Archive for: ideology

Recovering a more perfect union: A rebuke of the 1619 Project

/in , , , , , , /by

A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.

One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.

As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.

Twisted narrative

This sorry state of affairs is documented in excruciating detail in Timothy S. Goeglein’s enlightening, depressing, and, ultimately, hopeful new book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.

The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:

Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”

We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.

Our predicament is exemplified by the absurd, anti-historical 1619 Project of the New York Times, an initiative repudiated by many respected, liberal historians. It is being taught in roughly 4,500 schools nationwide.

In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.

Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.

On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”

So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.

We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.

Dearth of patriotism

Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.

It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.

I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.

Major culprit

What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.

Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian “refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”

“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.

Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”

“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”

Pushback

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.

Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.

Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.

It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.

Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.

Goeglein concludes:

[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.

Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.

This article has been republished from The American Spectator with permission.

AUTHOR

G. Tracy Mehan III

G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth

/in , , , , , , , /by

Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.

Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.

The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.

Sound and fury

Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,

The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.

Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.

Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:

  • First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
  • Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
  • Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.

Thin ice

While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.

For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.

The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.

But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.

If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.

We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”

Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.

It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.

In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

RELATED VIDEO: Lib Gets OWNED When GOP Rep. Uses Her Own Testimony Against Her In Real-Time

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Turnaway Study: A Lesson in Politically Incentivised and Twisted Science

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Pro-choice ideology has been allowed to infect research on mental health outcomes for women who have had abortions.

Given decades of legal and quasi-legal abortions in developed countries involving millions of women, there should be many studies with various findings on the impact of what was, until “shout your abortion” politics came along, generally regarded as a complex decision for a woman. And yet the Anglo-American lay reader is likely to find only one.

It’s called the Turnaway Study, conducted at the University of San Francisco California in 2008-2010. Mainstream media outlets have been broadcasting its results for nearly a decade, and research articles generated from the same core sample of women have been published in droves.

The study has been touted by academics, professional organisations, and journalists alike as the abortion study to end all studies, offering definitive answers to hotly debated questions on how abortion benefits contemporary women psychologically, relationally, physically and in terms of life satisfaction — among a host of other quality of life indicators.

Not quite, according to Priscilla Coleman, retired Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Coleman has been studying the psychology of abortion decision-making and mental health outcomes associated with abortion for nearly 30 years. Last month she published “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings” in the top-ranked psychology journal, Frontiers in Psychology.

Focusing on Turnaway’s mental health findings, Coleman pulls back the curtain, revealing the details of this large-scale effort to use science to manufacture a false narrative about abortion being preferable to delivering an unintended pregnancy, and as essential for preserving the well-being of women.

The publication of her article is timely given the overturn of Roe v Wade and likely use of Turnaway findings in the raging battles at state level.

More than 50 peer-reviewed spinoffs can’t be wrong?

In the Frontiers in Psychology article, Coleman quotes a January 2022 Kaiser Health News interview with the study’s principal investigator, Diana Greene Foster.

“Data from the Turnaway Study has resulted in the publication of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies, and the answer to nearly all the questions asked, said Foster, is that the women who got abortions fared better in respect to economics and health, including their mental health, compared with those who did not have abortions.”

Better mental health? According to Coleman, these results dramatically contradict a wealth of data from large, methodologically sophisticated studies demonstrating that abortion is associated with a statistically significant increased risk for mental health problems including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. She wanted to understand why.

Motivation and funding

Coleman began by examining the investigators’ incentive for embarking on the study. She soon discovered that the funding came from Warren Buffett, who provided a minimum of $88,000,000 to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), funds directly supporting researchers who had expressed abortion-rights political views.

A research unit called Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) within UCSF’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health housed Turnaway. Research conducted within the centre was aimed at debunking common justifications for abortion restrictions, including increased risks for serious, long-lasting mental health challenges.

Critical analysis of the study’s Operating Procedures Manual and publications led Coleman to identify numerous methodological shortcomings. For a start, the study investigators never describe the plan for sampling women, the precise size of the population, or the manner for selecting sites within the various cities.

The Turnaway women

Participants from three different groups were recruited for Turnaway: (1) women whose pregnancies were past clinic gestational limits for performing abortions and were not permitted a wanted abortion (“Turnaway Group”); (2) women whose pregnancies were close to the clinic gestational limit and had an abortion; and finally, (3) women who had an abortion in the first trimester.

The women were recruited over three years in 21 states at 29 abortion clinics with different gestational age limits. The clinics performed over 2000 abortions a year on average. Coleman calculates that the potential pool of women could have been as high as 162,000. However, only 7,486 women were screened for the study, and of those only 3,045 were approached to participate in it. Ultimately the number of those participating was 1,199. Why only 41% of those screened were asked to participate was not explained by the study authors, says Coleman.

“This is potentially very problematic, because those not screened in or not approached could have been systematically different from those who were screened in or approached relative to background characteristics, situational factors and/or how they presented before, during, or immediately after the abortion experience.”

Further, although “1000” is the number of participants usually cited by the authors, the actual number of women who completed the initial interview (“baseline measures”) was 877. And the total percentage of women who completed the 5-year study was 516 — a mere 16.9% of those approached.

If Coleman’s figure of 162,000 women for the potential population for the study is used, the 516 who actually completed it would amount to a miniscule 0.32% of them. Even at 10% of her population estimate, the final sample of 516 participants would be 3.18% of the total abortions performed at the 29 clinics over three years. As Coleman observes:

“The Turnaway Study researchers attempted to make generalized claims about women seeking abortion when the study itself likely did not even consider over 95% of women receiving abortions at the facilities included in the study. Given the extremely small percentage of women from the population represented in the sample, generalizations are precluded.”

Among the other methodological problems of Turnaway highlighted in Coleman’s article are the following:

  1. Those who underwent abortions near gestational limits included patients whose pregnancies ranged from 10 to 27 weeks gestation, even though women’s reasons for aborting and their psychological responses vary greatly at different times across pregnancy. For this reason, they should not have been grouped together.
  2. Many of the complex outcomes are measured far too simplistically, with anxiety and depression scales containing only six items and self-esteem and life satisfaction only 2 items. Capturing all the components of complex internal states is impossible with so few items and goes against established protocol for reliable and valid assessments.
  3. In many of the analyses, the authors failed to control for abortions that took place before or after the target abortion. This is problematic because previous studies have shown more than one abortion increases a woman’s risk for mental health problems beyond that incurred from a single abortion.

The studies you never hear about — except to dismiss them

Yet, there are well-designed studies coming to different conclusions from those of the Turnaway authors, and Coleman provides the reader with an up-to-date synopsis of some of the strongest of them. She notes:

“The science linking abortion to elevated risk for mental health challenges is published in prominent journals, with dozens of large, prospective studies incorporating comparison groups and additional sophisticated control techniques, enhancing confidence in the published findings. This extensive literature has shown that abortion increases risk for mental health problems including substance abuse, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide.”

She summarises the results of systematic reviews of literature, including her own, demonstrating this effect and provides overviews of some of the most sophisticated empirical studies published in recent years. There is a table (reproduced at the end of this article) in the Frontiers article highlighting key findings from several large-scale studies, all of which revealed increased risks of psychological problems associated with abortion, in contrast to Turnaway.

And yet professional groups such as the American Psychological Association (in 2008), the Royal College of Psychiatrists (in 2011) and the American Academies of Sciences (in 2018) have published reviews of the literature on abortion and mental health that dismiss findings like Coleman’s and support the “no negative effect” line.

In the last part of her article, Coleman examines these reviews and details a litany of methodological problems with them that include, among others: missing or elusive selection criteria that resulted in selective reporting of studies, shifting standards of evaluation based on study results, failure to conduct a quantitative synthesis or meta-analysis, sweeping conclusions based on very few or a single study, and factual errors. She comes out fighting:

“Journals opening their doors to allow virtually uncontested publication of some of the poorest work in the field, media outlets seizing the information that they believe the public desires, and abortion providers and their advocates using the data in attempts to remove and prevent installation of abortion restrictions: this is the status of mainstream science on the psychology of abortion in our world in 2022.”

Coleman concludes:

“[W]ith widespread dissemination of misinformation generated from studies like the Turnaway Study, hundreds of thousands of women considering an abortion are likely unaware of the expansive literature demonstrating abortion is a significant risk factor for post-abortion psychological distress and mental health detriments.

The science revealing the potential for serious, debilitating mental health consequences underscores the necessity of providing women with up-to-date information on the risks from the most rigorous scientific studies.”

Study Results
Gong, X., Hao, J., Tao, F., Zhang, J., Wang, H., & Xu, R. (2013). Pregnancy loss and anxiety and depression during subsequent pregnancies: Data from the C-ABC study. European Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology, 166(1), 30–36. Large Chinese study (over 20,000 women), 7683 of whom had an abortion. Abortion was related to increased risk of depression (OR: 1.381) and anxiety (OR: 1.211) in the first trimester of a later pregnancy after controlling for age, education, pre-pregnancy MBI, income, and residence. The comparison group was women experiencing a first pregnancy.
Gissler, M., Karalis, E., & Ulander, V.M. (2015). Decreased suicide rate after induced abortion, after the Current Care Guidelines in Finland 1987-2012. Scand J Public Health, 43(1), 99-101. Examined suicide post-abortion between 1987 and 2012 in Finland. A 2-fold increased risk of suicide was observed even after new guidelines required post-abortion follow-up sessions at 2-3 weeks to monitor women’s mental health.
Jacob, L., Gerhard, C., Kostev, K., & Kalder, M. (2019). Association between induced abortion, spontaneous abortion, and infertility respectively and the risk of psychiatric disorders in 57,770 women followed in gynecological practices in Germany. Journal of Affective Disorders, 251, 107–113. Case-control study from the Disease Analyzer Database (IQVIA). Induced abortion was positively associated with the elevated risk of psychiatric disorders (ORs ranging from 1.75 to 2.01).
Jacob, L., Kostev, K., Gerhard, C., & Kalder, M. (2019). Relationship between induced abortion and the incidence of depression, anxiety disorder, adjustment disorder, and somatoform disorder in Germany. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 114, 75–79. Examined women with a first abortion in 281 gynecological practices in Germany. Included 17581 women with an abortion experience and 17581 matched controls who had a live birth. Induced abortion predicted depression (HR=1.34), adjustment disorder (HR=1.45), and somatoform disorder (HR=1.56) across the 10-year study period.
Lega, I., Maraschini, A., D’Aloja, P., Andreozzi, S., Spettoli, D., Giangreco, M., Vichi, M., Loghi, M., Donati, S., & Regional Maternal Mortality Working Group (2020). Maternal suicide in Italy. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 23(2), 199–206. Data were gathered from 10 regions in Italy. The suicide rate was 1.18 per 100,000 among women who gave birth (n = 2,876,193) and 2.77 among women who aborted (n = 650,549), a statistically significant difference.
Luo, M., Jiang, X., Wang, Y., Wang, Z., Shen, Q., Li, R., & Cai, Y. (2018). Association between induced abortion and suicidal ideation among unmarried female migrant workers in three metropolitan cities in China: A cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 625. Examined 5115 unmarried females from Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. Abortion was associated with nearly double the odds of suicidal ideation (OR = 1.89) after adjustment for numerous controls (age, education, years in the working place, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, daily internet use, attitude towards premarital pregnancy, multiple induced abortion, self-esteem, loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders.) The association was stronger in those aged > 25 (OR = 3.37), among women with > 5 years in the work force (OR = 2.98), in the non-anxiety group (OR = 2.28, and in the non-depression group (OR = 2.94).
McCarthy, F. P., Moss-Morris, R., Khashan, A. S., North, R. A., Baker, P. N., Dekker, G., Poston, L., McCowan, L., Walker, J. J., Kenny, L. C., & O’Donoghue, K. (2015). Previous pregnancy loss has an adverse impact on distress and behaviour in subsequent pregnancy. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 122(13), 1757–1764. Women with one prior abortion had elevated stress (adjusted mean difference=0.65) and depression (aOR= 1.25) at 15 weeks of gestation. Women with two prior abortions had increased perceived stress (adjusted mean difference=1.43) and depression (aOR=1.67).
Sullins D. P. (2016). Abortion, substance abuse and mental health in early adulthood: Thirteen-year longitudinal evidence from the United States. SAGE Open Medicine, 4, In a US sample, after extensive control for other pregnancy outcomes and sociodemographic variables, abortion was associated with increased overall risk of mental health disorders (OR:1.45). A Population Attributable Risk analysis showed 8.7% of the prevalence of mental disorders was attributable to abortion.
Wie, J. H., Nam, S. K., Ko, H. S., Shin, J. C., Park, I. Y., & Lee, Y. (2019). The association between abortion experience and postmenopausal suicidal ideation and mental health: Results from the 5th Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES V). Taiwanese Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 58(1), 153–158. After adjusting for several demographic controls, women who had three abortions experienced elevated risk for suicidal ideation (OR: 1.510). This level of risk was significant even after controlling for depression (OR: 1.391). Risk of depressive mood in daily life was likewise elevated with more abortions even after controlling for depression (OR: 1.657).

AUTHOR

Carolyn Moynihan

Carolyn Moynihan is the former deputy editor of MercatorNet More by Carolyn Moynihan.

RELATED ARTICLE: Dobbs, seen from an outpost of America’s informal empire

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

$30K a year, and my kid can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Parents must hold their local school systems accountable for what is taught to their children.

Everything has a price.

Like every American family, our family runs a constant cost/benefit analysis on our lives. There are the small decisions: is it worth the time to drive to Target for the cheaper diapers? Or should I just get the pricier ones at the grocery store? And there are the bigger ones: like, should I live in the suburbs and pay lower taxes but more for car expenses and gas? Or flip that decision?

For our family, one of the toughest decisions was where to send our kids to school. We could send them across the street to the poorly performing public school for free. They’d meet a wide variety of kids and learn some valuable self-advocacy skills, but they would not be academically challenged. For $30k, I could send them to the nearby private school, where they’d benefit from engaged teachers, kids, and families. We’d have to drop the music lessons and fancy trips, but hey — I don’t like Disneyland anyway.

So, with some scholarships, sacrifices, and family assistance, we made the choice to send our kids to a fancy private school. The benefits have been great: warm, caring, patient teachers; outstanding academics; beautiful buildings; even a pretty good lunch. But there’s been a hidden cost, beyond the incredibly painful tuition bills: my kids can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl.

This seems shocking, I know. How can a concept so obvious, so instinctual that nearly every 2-year-old on the planet can master it, be an idea that my very expensively-educated children don’t understand?

Simple-minded educators

Because some teachers don’t understand it. Because some administrators don’t understand it. And this is where I have to remind myself of something true: half the world is dumber than average.

I know this sounds incredibly snobby. I know this sounds judgmental and awful, but this is true. And this fact helps me take a breath, find some compassion, and slow down.

These teachers are good people. They are kind. They like kids, and want the best for children. They believe that education can make the world a better place. And additionally, they were hired for their people skills: they are empathetic, good communicators, patient, and open-minded. Those are exactly the skills my tuition dollars are paying for.

But these teachers are not well-trained critical thinkers. They were not hired for their ability to analyse complex research studies, nor to follow the various paths of different complex scenarios. They are not philosophers, ethicists, or religious scholars. They are not lawyers or developmental psychologists. They are not endocrinologists or pediatricians. They are experts at connecting to kids and explaining the types of K-12 content that kids should learn. Thank god for teachers and their talents and skills. Our society needs them. But they are not the experts here. They are just trying to do their jobs.

So when faced with the concept of “gender identity” — the idea that “people have an innate feeling of being female or male,” the typical teacher will say “Sure — that makes sense. I’m female, I know it. That’s not a controversial idea.”

When faced with the diagnostic definition of “gender dysphoria”, the idea that “some people have great distress with their biological sex, and wish they were the opposite sex,” these teachers say, “Sure — I know about Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner. That’s a real thing.”

When faced with the fact of “Disorders of Sexual Development” (formerly known as Intersex conditions), the scientifically observed and natural phenomena of various biological sexual characteristics and markers, teachers say, “Yep — I learned about that once.”

And when urged to consider the negative impacts of the difficulty of being an outlier, and the impacts of social isolation and/or ostracism, the teachers say, “Not on my watch. My cousin was gay and poorly treated. I won’t let any of my kids be bullied or left out.”

So when teachers combine all these ideas and impressions and blend them into their natural “be nice” personalities and “open-minded” natures, they are primed to become believers and advocates of transgender ideology. If Johnny likes skirts and thinks he’s really a girl inside, who are we to judge? We really can’t blame the teachers. They were born this way.

So our society has laid yet another burden of expectation on teachers. They must educate kids, they must socialise kids, they must address and resolve the emotional and behavioural dysfunctions of these kids. And now they must be responsible for nurturing, protecting, and advocating for the “internal feeling of being female or male” for a kid, otherwise they’ll be held responsible for the kid’s ostracism.

This is nuts. These teachers don’t stand a chance.

To the top

So we can’t fight the teachers. We’ve got to get the administrators and school boards to stop, listen, and think. These people were hired to be critical thinkers, to balance different opinions, to consider the different consequences of different choices. They still aren’t likely to read the studies or think through the ethical or philosophical consequences of different complex scenarios, but they are primed to consider one thing above all: legal threats.

Right now, principals and school boards are hiding behind the guidelines that WPATH (an activist-led organisation), the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals have created. These organisations have good intentions, but they are also human and flawed (and remember — half their members are below average). Even the ACLU seems to have lost its mind on this topic.

I suggest American parents adopt the “Maya Forstater Approach.” This strategy, based on the case in England, relies on fundamental and constitutional American legal rights: free speech and free religion. I don’t care if you haven’t been to church ever. This is what you say to your school board:

“For scientific, religious, and social reasons, I do not believe that you can change your sex, and I do not want my children to be taught “gender identity”, the belief that you have a gendered soul, and that your gender soul feelings trump your biology. How is your school protecting my family’s religious beliefs and our right to be free from compelled speech?”

Ask your school’s principal this question every Fall. Send it as a statement to your kids’ teachers every fall. Tell them to inform you of any lesson on gender identity before it happens so that your children can have a substitute lesson. Ask them what their policy on requesting pronouns is, so that your child does not feel compelled to use certain speech. Ask them how they balance different opinions on this topic in the community.

I can guarantee you they do not see this as a religious issue, but as a social justice issue. Say the magic words “freedom of religion/freedom from religion” and “freedom of speech” and see if that works. We’ve got a long history of protecting underdogs in this country, and right now the culture glorifies the status of victim. Use this knowledge wisely.

And here’s the thing: this is going to cost you. Be ready. Do the cost/benefit analysis. Whether your kids are getting a free public education or an expensive private one, when you ruffle the feathers of the principal, the winds blow. Then again, if you remain silent, your kid may not understand that sex never changes. Be prepared. Everything has a cost.

This article has been republished from Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).

BY

Anonymous author

In exceptional circumstances, MercatorNet allows contributors to publish articles anonymously. Sometimes the author’s privacy or safety might be at risk. More by Anonymous author.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Without Logos, the West is lost”

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Ideology, hidden obstacle to reason

/in , , , /by

I was recently surprised to note that a prominent British libertarian had sent out a bulk email suggesting that leaving the EU would not be much of a boon to the UK since such would not necessarily provide more “liberty” for Brits. Thus, he contends that UK “leaders” have the same totalitarian mindset as the EU “leaders” and the Brexit (exit of the UK from the EU) would not help matters. He mentioned that the UK government has at times exceeded even the legal limitations on power provided by the authoritarian EU and that offended Brits may occasionally benefit from European Court decisions that overturn excesses of UK authorities and judges. Since the European Court is an essential component of the EU, leaving the EU would therefore supposedly remove this supposed benefit.

This email did not contain the words Muslim or Islam. Yet the Islamization of the UK is one of the main concerns of those who support the Brexit.

I had tried to show my UK reader list how simply rolling over and playing dead, ie, not voting in the upcoming referendum or voting YES to stay in the EU was not an option, for one thing because it sends a signal to the EU top rank that the people of Europe have finally given up and are willing to acquiesce to total tyranny.

An article in The Atlantic reveals one very important reason why EU membership is a bad deal for the UK and all other industrial members, to whit:

“EU countries are legally barred from limiting immigration from other member states, a decision that has had a great effect on migration patterns on the continent.”

Now it is certainly true that the usurpers who have seized the internal UK reins of power (essentially Parliament and Downing Street) by deceit are, like the EU bureaucrats, also inclined to flood the UK with still more Muslims, a rapidly growing group that receives an inordinately high percentage of social assistance or welfare (as reported here and here) and which in polls is found to favor sharia law and jihad.

In 2014, Daniel Greenfield, discussing a recent poll in London, wrote:

“There are about 1 million Muslim settlers in London where they make up 12 percent of the population. These figures suggest that the vast majority of them, perhaps as high as 80 percent, support ISIS.”

A NO vote on the referendum would be a signal to the Brussels oligarchs that the people are no longer the lemmings they once were and will not take rampant Islamisation lying down.

It should not surprise anyone that libertarians tend to be more liberal on the issue of immigration. Their ideology teaches essentially that all humans must have the maximum freedom possible and is refractory to considerations of reality. The freedom to cross someone else’s border and gain access to another country’s welfare rolls could be seen as the ultimate in libertarian policy. US libertarians counter the fears of ordinary mortals by contending that welfare would be forbidden in a libertarian society, but their immigration positions ignore the fact that welfare is part of the current US reality, over which libertarians have little or no control, and the current socialist context is the one in which they propose to implement their immigration positions. Like their British counterparts, they therefore generally see even illegal immigration as either a non-threat or a boon. They believe that they could soon operate in a perfect world with no impediments whatsoever to individual freedom.

The trouble with this thinking — in case you are one of the few who need this pointed out to you — is that there really are two kinds of freedom, or liberty (liberté) as the French revolutionaries, ideological second cousins to today’s libertarians, called it.

ONE kind is individual freedom.

The SECOND is more subtle and easier to overlook, and that is, national sovereignty, ie, the freedom of a nation to chart and navigate its own course without interference from other nations or entities.

Today’s libertarians almost never talk about the second kind of liberty because to them, national sovereignty is an obstacle to individual liberty at all costs, which is the non-negotiable centerpiece of their creed. And non-negotiable here means reality be damned.

Ironically, however, this neglect of national sovereignty actually severely curbs individual liberty as well, at least in the real world down here beneath the rarefied stratosphere in which libertarianism thrives.

For example, if 80% of an indigenous population desires freedom of choice in its national lawmaking, then a rigid libertarian policy of legal residency for all and sundry may well lead to veritable inundation of this indigenous population with hordes of people who tolerate and even welcome totalitarianism. After all, to them, totalitarianism is their free choice. Once these hordes reach a critical percentage of the population, the tipping point will be passed and that one-time majority will now be subjected to the will of the newly arrived hordes. And here’s the real kicker: the libertarians who persuaded their unsuspecting countrymen to accept these hordes will now also be enslaved along with the rest. So much for liberté.

Worst of all, the above is not by any means just a hypothetical example. There is a projection that the UK will become a Muslim state by 2050, and while this has been poo-pooed by the Establishment media, The Commentator writes:

“This projection is based on reasonably good data. Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population of the UK grew at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, making Muslims 4 percent of the population in 2008. Extrapolating from those figures would mean that the Muslim population in 2020 would be 8 percent, 15 percent in 2030, 28 percent in 2040 and finally, in 2050, the Muslim population of the UK would exceed 50 percent of the total population.”

Thus the rigid and doctrinaire libertarianism with liberty as its Grail, is from the outset on a course of ineluctable self-destruction.

History presents us with a parade of ideologies, all of which have failed one after the other. Yet some flaw in the character of Homo sapiens leads us invariably to put aside our perception of reality, our built-in logic and reason, and even our sense of self-preservation in favor of untested ideologies propped up by high-sounding rhetoric. Somehow, our species never seems to notice that, precisely because ideologies supersede and subtly supplant reason and the perception of reality, all ideologies will eventually fail, always, just as they always have in the past.

The question is: Can we ever come to understand this simple fact and overcome this flaw in our DNA?