The Sacredness of Life and Liberty

George Lakoff, Elisabeth Wehling, Reader Supported News

16 July 12

he New York Times, on June 5, 2012, reported that so-called "morning-after pills" work by preventing women's eggs from being fertilized, and not by preventing fertilized eggs from being implanted in the womb. The latest scientific findings show that "the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, and some pills also thicken cervical mucus so sperm have trouble swimming."

In short, morning-after pills do not operate on fertilized eggs at all. Why should this matter? Because many conservative Republicans, as well as the official Catholic Church, believe the metaphor that Fertilized Eggs Are People, and that preventing such egg-people from being implanted in the womb constitutes "abortion," and hence, in their view, baby-killing. The Times article correctly reports that "it turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work."

That's the truth. Does the truth matter?

It has now been six weeks since that report was made public. But there has been no call from conservative Republicans and the Catholic Church supporting the use of "morning-after pills" to prevent the murder of babies on the grounds that you can't murder babies who don't exist.

The point is clear. The truth doesn't matter.

The point was made over a decade ago in my (George Lakoff's) book Moral Politics, which observed that conservatives against abortion were not in favor of guaranteed prenatal or postnatal care for mothers and children. Such care is crucial in determining the health and survivability of the babies. In short, conservatives against such policies do not care about the well-being of the babies at all.

The issue really has been control - who controls reproduction, men or women? Hence, the prevalence of parental and spousal notification laws governing abortions. The abortion issue is really about male control in family life - and in society in general. It also involves the notion that women who engage in immoral behavior, such as sex with partners they do not seek to have children with, ought to bear the consequences of their actions as a "just punishment." To establish that control, both conservative Republicans and the Catholic Church propose taking a metaphor literally, that A Fertilized Egg Is A Person. Taking the metaphor literally allows for the claim that preventing abortions constitutes saving lives.

That this is a metaphor is clear. Imagine that you want to buy a horse. You pay for a horse, and what is delivered to you is a fertilized horse egg. You would probably feel cheated. You can't ride or race a fertilized horse egg. It isn't a horse. Even in Texas. You need a mare and a lot of development. A single cell isn't a horse, a cluster of undifferentiated cells (technically, a "blastocyst") isn't a horse, a cluster of differentiated cells isn't a horse, a horse embryo isn't a horse, and a horse fetus isn't a horse. You would feel cheated if you were sold any of them.

Why mention Texas? Because the Republican Party of Texas recently came out with its 2012 platform. The party proposes a ban on all means to prevent the development of a person, from single-cell to cell cluster, from cell cluster to embryo, from embryo to fetus, from fetus to person. It bans the prevention of development, whether abortion or the morning-after pill, calling for a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution and protection of cells and cell clusters under the Fourteenth Amendment. This means no freedom for families, couples, and rape victims to decide whether or not they need to allow the development of fertilized cells - or even the fertilization of unfertilized cells. They want to enshrine in the Constitution the metaphor that Cells Are People, in this case, Americans, which they see as protecting human life, and American life.

There is much that is wrong with this. First, cells and cell clusters (or "blastocysts") are not people.

Second, the GOP's policy does not protect American life at all. For example, arguing that this bill guarantees that "all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death" is nonsense. Real safeguarding of human life would involve measures that the Republican-dominated Texas legislature opposes: universal health care, a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, protection against starvation, and a ban on poisonous food and environmental pollution in the name of corporate profit.

Specifically, it does not mean improved pre- and postnatal care, which could in fact save children's lives. The U.S. has a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, to great part due to lacking pre- and postnatal care. According to the 2011 United Nations World Population Prospects report, we rank number 34 in infant mortality. As a comparison, Japan (rank 3 on the list) has less than half as many infant deaths. By next year, the U.S. is expected to be 49 (according to the CIA World Factbook).

When couples want to have a child, the issue of development becomes paramount. Fertilization is not automatic. Sometimes artificial insemination techniques are needed. Even in normal cases, development is, or should be, monitored closely, with regular tests. Would-be mothers need to be very careful, since what happens in prenatal development matters. No alcohol. No drugs. Watch out for poisons like pesticides in foods. Eat carefully. Each stage of development is crucial. A child is not automatic. A child is a lot more than an egg, a blastocyst, an embryo, or a fetus. Development takes intention, effort, physical protection, and good health care.

The Texas GOP evokes the Cells Are Americans metaphor by referring to cells as unborn children. Based on this metaphor, human attributes are mapped onto cell clusters: people have feelings, people have constitutional rights, people can be crime victims, people can experience physical pain, and so on.

The Texas GOP then extends the metaphor to constitutional rights, requesting "total Constitutional rights for the unborn child." It extends it to victimhood in urging the State to "consider the unborn child as an equal victim in any crime, including domestic violence." This means that a young woman who is raped by her father or uncle will be kept from stopping cell development in her body. The same Crime Victim Frame is used by the Texas GOP to prevent surrogate pregnancies, calling the commonplace practice "human embryo trafficking" and asking for a ban on it.

The notion of a crime victim, of course, implies the ability to experience mental or physical pain, afflicted by a villain. The GOP introduces this notion by supporting legislation that requires doctors to "provide pain relief" for cells and cell clusters during abortion.

Here's what progressives need to do: Never use the Cells Are People metaphor, even in arguing against conservative policy. Never use the term baby or unborn child to refer to a blastocyst, embryo, or fetus.

Stop using the term abortion. It has misleading properties. When we speak of "aborting a mission," the mission was intentional and planned, and the original idea was to bring it to an end state. What happens with an unwelcome pregnancy is nothing like this. The pregnancy was not intentional, not planned, and there was never any intention of bringing it to an end state. Rather, what is desired is development prevention, keeping any development from happening. That development can be prevented at many stages, from unfertilized cells (via morning-after pills), to blastocyst to embryo, from embryo to fetus, from fetus to a non-fully-formed-human, to an unviable human (one that can't live outside the womb). The earlier the development prevention, the better for the woman.

Never use the expression partial birth abortion. It's a conservative political tool, not a medical reality. Here's the Texas GOP in its 2012 platform: "We oppose partial birth abortion." The term was invented by a hired, conservative language professional. The image is grisly, and that was the point. But no such thing exists. The medical condition it is supposed to represent is one where a potential child cannot survive, either because it has no brain, or because of some other equally awful condition. And usually, the mother's life is at risk. This has nothing to do with either giving birth or with more common reasons for preventing development.

Whenever possible, avoid the term morning-after pill. It evokes a prototypical frame of immoral behavior, bad decision-making, the inability to "just say no" at a party or during a date. It excludes the fact that the treatment can help rape victims prevent development, be used in cases where other birth control methods failed, and so on.

Never evoke the Consumer Frame. It has been introduced to the debate by the term Pro-Choice, and is now used everywhere. For example, in the GOP's 2012 platform, where a decision for development prevention is labeled as a woman ordering an abortion, as if she were shopping. The frame hides the fact that such decisions are never made easily and are commonly made by men and women, and often their families, together.

The reason not to use the above language is that it can both hide reality and does not adequately communicate the moral values that underlie progressive policy. The right to limit development is a matter of liberty and family freedom.

First of all, all of the issues above concern men as well as women. Remember, 100 percent of all pregnancies are caused by men, and a child implies lifelong involvement for the man as well as the woman.

Describing pregnancies and development prevention as women's issues hides that fact. Additionally, in violence against women such as rape, the man is the issue. We need to get over the idea that these are women's issues.

For many women the issue of preventing a pregnancy is a matter of liberty, of the freedom to live your life as you want. You can think of it as a pro-liberty issue. It is also a matter of having the family that makes sense to you, and so it is a pro-family issue, a matter of Family Freedom, the freedom to plan your own family.

Women seeking freedom have always, and will always, seek to control development of life within their bodies. Where there have been laws against this, there have always been back-alley abortions, which are dangerous and have led to the maiming and death of women.

Furthermore, protecting human life is a real issue in the United States. Protecting human life is one of the moral mandates of government. The lives and health of infants, children, and mothers - as well as all other Americans - should be protected through accessible and improved health care, pre- and postnatal care, a ban on poisonous food and environmental pollution, a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, and so on. Even in Texas.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

The Romney 'Fact-Checking' Scandal

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

15 July 12

elf-styled "independent fact-checkers" at the Annenberg Center and the neoconservative-dominated Washington Post have positioned themselves as ardent defenders of Mitt Romney's claims that his Bain Capital tenure ended in 1999 despite questions raised by contradictory information submitted by Romney himself.

Indeed, the behavior of these "fact-checkers" is rapidly becoming the journalism scandal of Campaign 2012 as the likes of Brooks Jackson at Annenberg's FactCheck.org and the Post's Glenn Kessler act more as querulous lawyers protecting Romney than as journalists seeking the actual facts surrounding Romney's curious business narrative.

Much as the Post's Ceci Connolly and the New York Times' Katharine Seeyle engaged in aggressive - and dishonest - journalism to portray Vice President Al Gore as a serial liar during Campaign 2000, Jackson and Kessler are performing a similar role in portraying President Barack Obama and his campaign officials as liars now. [For the history, see Consortiumnews.com's "Al Gore v. the Media" or Neck Deep.]

Yet, despite the pro-Romney protectiveness from Jackson and Kessler, the questions raised by the Obama campaign and a number of journalists about Romney's dubious claims are clearly legitimate. These questions about whether Romney completely divorced himself from his venture capital firm when he rushed off in February 1999 to head the Winter Olympics stem, in large part, from public disclosures that Bain Capital filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For instance, one summary of Bain investments via Bain Capital Fund VI, dated Feb. 13, 2001, lists Romney as "the sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Capital and thus is the controlling person of Bain Capital."

Yet, in his presidential campaign disclosure form in 2011, Romney declared that he "has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way" after leaving Boston for Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Olympics job on Feb. 11, 1999. Jackson and Kessler treat Romney's bald assertion as fact despite the conflicting evidence.

There are also logical questions that any journalist worth his or her salt would ask: "Mr. Romney, does your claim mean you had no contact with your former Bain associates by telephone, e-mail or in person in that time frame? Did you really build a Chinese Wall between yourself and your company?"

Common sense would tell you that Romney did have conversations with his long-time subordinates. There was no legal reason not to, and he was involved enough to sign some of the SEC forms listing him as the person in charge. (Only later, after it became clear that Bain-related plant closings and job outsourcing after February 1999 were a political liability, did Romney start insisting that his separation had been total.)

If Romney now confirms that he had some contacts with Bain executives, the next questions would be when, what, why and with whom. Are there e-mail messages or memos that could be examined? So, instead of offering those kinds of details, he cites the work of these "independent fact-checkers" to shield him from the inquiries.

TV Excuses

It was a startling aspect of Romney's brief round-robin interviews with five TV networks on Friday that he was allowed to skate away with squirrelly responses to these questions.

For instance, in the NBC interview, correspondent Peter Alexander asked, "after February 1999 you never attended a single meeting for Bain, a business meeting, even by phone, attending a meeting regarding Bain or Bain-controlled entities?"

Calm and collected with a patronizing smile on his face, Romney responded: "You've got quite a few questions there, so let's go through them. I didn't involve myself in any way with Bain Capital's enterprise after February 1999."

Alexander followed up: "Not participating in a single meeting either in person or by phone?"

Romney answered: "I can't recall a single meeting or a single participation in an investment decision by Bain or personnel decision."

Even if Romney's answer could be technically true - and it contradicts what Romney told the Boston Herald when he headed off to Utah with his stated intent to "stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions" - there are many other business-related topics not covered by Romney's narrow denial.

Romney also is hair-splitting when he references Bain "entities" in his federal campaign disclosure. While the average reader might think Bain's investments would fall under this "entities" rubric, Romney apparently is excluding his board membership on behalf of Bain at companies in which Bain held major interests, such as Staples and LikeLife.

On that point, Annenberg's FactCheck.org bends over backwards into a protective crouch for Romney, saying, "We think the term 'Bain Capital entity' on Romney's disclosure forms could only refer to Bain's various investment funds, not to companies in which it invested." Gee, how understanding of you!

Missing Hours

These "independent fact-checkers" also show little curiosity about discrepancies over how much time Romney was allegedly working during this time period.

FactCheck.org accepted self-serving accounts about Romney working 16-hour days, seven days a week, after he arrived in Salt Lake City. But Kessler instead cites Romney's statement to a Massachusetts election board that - as head of the Winter Olympics - he "worked, on average, over 12 hours per day, 6 days per week." One might wonder where the missing 40 or so hours went.

But the two "fact-checking" teams appear more interested in shutting off lines of inquiry about Romney's work at Bain Capital than in getting to the bottom of the many mysteries. Kessler even takes the position that it's no big deal to file false SEC forms.

"There is a journalistic convention that appears to place great weight on 'SEC documents,'" Kessler wrote. "But these are public filings by companies, which usually means there are not great secrets hidden in them. The Fact Checker [i.e. Kessler], in an earlier life covering Wall Street, spent many hours looking for jewels in SEC filings."

Though it's hard to judge how inept Kessler was in examining SEC documents, I spent four years editing securities-regulation coverage for Bloomberg News and some of our reporters were quite adept at mining the filings for nuggets. It's also an area where companies must tell the truth, with minimum spin, or face serious consequences.

Many corporate executives, at places like Enron and WorldCom, went to jail, in part, for filing false or misleading disclosure documents. It is indeed a potential felony to knowingly sign and submit SEC records with materially false information, such as telling potential investors that a person is in charge when the person is not in charge.

One of the "great secrets" hidden in SEC filings should not be that the guy listed as CEO isn't really the CEO.

Whether a criminal case can be built upon Bain Capital's admittedly false filings may be open to question - given statutes of limitations and other issues - but it's hard to understand how "fact-checkers" would take such a forgiving view of a politician signing false and misleading documents.

What does it say about Mitt Romney that he would repeatedly sign legal documents that contained information that he knew to be untrue - and why would "fact-checkers" defend him for doing so.

But FactCheck.org's Jackson and the Post's Kessler treat these transgressions with a "boys will be boys" casualness, almost as if one is supposed to rally to the defense of well-bred white men who run powerful private-equity firms and have lots of money.

Kessler wrote that he "concluded that much of the language saying Romney was 'sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president' was boilerplate that did not reveal whether he was actually managing Bain at the time." Yet, whether "boilerplate" or not, the filings were false and/or misleading.

Kessler even adds that "there is no standard definition of a 'chief executive,' securities law experts say, and there is no requirement for anyone to have any responsibilities even if they have that title." Oh, really? Here's how Investopedia (a reference source that Kessler has cited in the past) defines a "chief executive officer":

"The highest ranking executive in a company whose main responsibilities include developing and implementing high-level strategies, making major corporate decisions, managing the overall operations and resources of a company, and acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors and the corporate operations. The CEO will often have a position on the board, and in some cases is even the chair."

To claim repeatedly over a period of more than two years that someone was the CEO - and thus the "controlling" person - if that were not true represents what many securities regulators would call a "material" deception.

Though Bain did file some documents without reference to Romney, as Kessler notes, that does not and should not absolve the firm or Romney from responsibility for filing others with what they now say is false information.

A Different Tone

While devising endless excuses for Romney and his Harvard Business School buddies, these same "independent fact-checkers" heap scorn on the African-American president and his campaign for daring to raise these impertinent questions about the much-admired Romney.

Annenberg's FactCheck.org mocked a six-page letter from Obama's campaign with the flippant response, "your complaint is all wet." In giving Obama "three Pinocchios" for pointing out the discrepancies in Romney's Bain story, Kessler said he spared Obama a fourth Pinocchio (a total "whopper") with the grudging admission that "there is grey area" regarding Romney's last few years at Bain Capital.

In a larger sense, however, this issue of exactly when Romney left Bain is a ruse, a diversionary line of defense that Romney has been building since he ran for Massachusetts governor in 2002. The reason for this ever-expanding moat is that it lets Romney deny responsibility for Bain-related plant closings and off-shoring of jobs that occurred from 1999 to 2002.

But the key question is not when Romney left but who set in motion the strategies that led to the plant closings and the job off-shoring. It was Romney who pulled the trigger on investments in companies whose business model involved facilitating these actions for other companies.

For instance, as Washington Post investigative reporter Tom Hamburger explained in a front-page story on June 21, Romney's venture capital firm "owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components."

In other words, Bain Capital wasn't just investing in companies that shipped jobs overseas themselves, Bain owned companies that were trailblazing the practice of outsourcing American jobs to low-wage companies like China and India. The story said:

"A Washington Post examination of securities filings shows the extent of Bain's investment in firms that specialized in helping other companies move or expand operations overseas. …

"Bain played several roles in helping these outsourcing companies, such as investing venture capital so they could grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they navigated this rapidly developing field."

A Lucrative Foray

As Hamburger reported, "Bain's foray into outsourcing began in 1993 when the private equity firm took a stake in Corporate Software Inc., or CSI, after helping to finance a $93 million buyout of the firm. CSI, which catered to technology companies like Microsoft, provided a range of services including outsourcing of customer support. Initially, CSI employed U.S. workers to provide these services but by the mid-1990s was setting up call centers outside the country.

"Two years after Bain invested in the firm, CSI merged with another enterprise to form a new company called Stream International Inc. Stream immediately became active in the growing field of overseas calls centers. Bain was initially a minority shareholder in Stream and was active in running the company, providing 'general executive and management services,' according to SEC filings. …

"The corporate merger that created Stream also gave birth to another, related business known as Modus Media Inc., which specialized in helping companies outsource their manufacturing. … Modus Media grew rapidly. In December 1997, it announced it had contracted with Microsoft to produce software and training products at a center in Australia. Modus Media said it was already serving Microsoft from Asian locations in Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan and in Europe and the United States."

All those events occurred while Romney acknowledges that he was the hands-on CEO at Bain Capital. Hamburger also describes continuation and expansion of these outsourcing activities after February 1999. But those activities were simply an extension of what Romney had started.

To pretend that there was some bright line between the "good" Bain Capital before February 1999 and the "bad" Bain Capital afterwards is downright silly. It is even sillier for "independent fact-checkers" to suggest that Romney had no responsibility for what his own company did.

If these supposed "fact-checkers" really cared about facts, perhaps they would use their new status as Romney's favorite defenders to ask the Republican presidential candidate to release Bain Capital's internal records that would show whether he did or did not have any contacts with his subordinates after February 1999.

The "fact-checkers" might also press him to release his tax returns. So far, all they have done is throw brickbats at others who have tried to raise questions regarding the vetting of a man who wants to be President of the United States but doesn't want to tell the American people much about how he earned his money or even where it is.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq" and "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'" are also available there.