Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Outdoor Smoking: A Compromise

Last month, I went ballistic over New York City's plan to ban smoking in parks and public beaches. My argument was that you don't have to ban smoking on every square inch of park land to protect nonsmokers from the person next to them. You can chalk off spaces where smoking is prohibited. Just figure out how much clean breathing room people need, and draw a line.

It looks like I may get my wish—not in New York, but in Los Angeles. L.A. already forbids outdoor smoking in parks and beaches. But yesterday, the city council advanced a proposal to ban outdoor smoking at restaurants. And this time, the ban isn't comprehensive; it's spatially circumscribed. Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times spells out the details:

A Los Angeles City Council committee voiced support today for a ban on smoking in the city's outdoor dining areas, but ordered several changes to the ordinance before sending it to the full council for approval.  ... The legislation ... would ban smoking within a 10-foot radius of outdoor dining areas. The proposed no-smoking area around mobile food trucks and food kiosks would extend for 40 feet.

Ten feet sounds about right. After I attacked the New York plan, an anti-smoking researcher challenged me to examine studies of outdoor secondhand smoke. So I did. Among other things, the studies noted that smoke exposure levels from outdoor cigarettes were "very localized." One study reported:

We observed a clear reduction in OTS [outdoor tobacco smoke] levels as the distance from a tobacco source increased. Generally, average levels within 0.5 m [meters] from a single cigarette source were quite high and comparable to indoor levels, and OTS levels at distances greater than 1 or 2 m were much lower. ... At distances larger than 2 m, levels near single cigarettes were generally close to background.

Roughly translated, this means that if you're downwind of an outdoor smoker, standing within two feet subjects you to exposure comparable to being indoors with that smoker. Move seven feet away, however, and you're breathing normal air. Accordingly, a city that prohibits indoor restaurant smoking to protect nonsmokers should extend this policy to smoking within two feet of an outdoor dining area. Beyond seven feet, the restriction loses its logic. I don't see any harm in extending the radius to 10 feet, just to play it safe.

The Los Angeles proposal is still being haggled over. For all I know, the buffer zone will end up being 15 or 20 feet. The important thing is that it'll be clear and limited. If we're lucky, it will set a precedent for regulating outdoor smoking based on science, not revulsion. And you'll be free to light up and enjoy your cigarette, as long as you keep your butt out of my face.

Hooked on Soda Taxes

When taxes on cigarettes were first proposed, the revenue was supposed to be used to help smokers quit and to prevent others from starting. But it didn't take politicians long to siphon the money away for other purposes. Now state governments count on cigarette revenue to help fund their budgets. We've all become nicotine-dependent.

Like the tobacco-tax movement, the soda-tax movement began with a rationale of preventing and curing addiction. And like the tobacco-tax movement, it's evolving into a revenue addiction.

More here.

No Smoking in Your Apartment

No smoking if you share a floor. No smoking if you share a ceiling. No smoking if you share a wall. That pretty much covers it.

More here.

The Abortion Coverage Dilemma

The argument being made by pro-choice groups is perfectly logical: If you standardize health insurance through federal subsidies and coverage requirements, people might lose benefits they used to enjoy in the private sector. But that's more than an argument against excluding abortion. It's an argument against health-care reform altogether. The left's argument against abortion exclusion is the right's argument against socialization.

More here.

The Fresca Rebellion

It's the left that's turning conservative. Well, not conservative, but pushy. Weisberg put his finger on the underlying trend: "Because Democrats hold power at the moment, they face the greater peril of paternalistic overreaching." Today's morality cops are less interested in your bedroom than your refrigerator. They're more likely to berate you for outdoor smoking than for outdoor necking. It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg.

More here.

Sex Selection: Nobody's Business?

Last week, when Ross Douthat made a case for "regulating abortion," I asked him and other pro-lifers how far we should go. The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act has a maximum jail sentence of two years for doctors who perform the forbidden procedure. Is that the kind of regulation we should apply to abortions? Would the country stand for it?

Today, let's turn the tables on those of us who oppose abortion regulation. How far should we go? Would you oppose regulation even of abortions aimed at preventing the births of girls? Because there's increasing evidence that such abortions, which take place by the millions in Asia, are now being done by the thousands in the United States as well.

Let's start with the data noted here last year, when

economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.

A recent paper by economist Jason Abrevaya adds:

The evidence from the California natality data is particularly striking for Indian births between 1991 and 2005: second-born children are 0.9 percentage points more likely to be boys, third-born children 6.6 percentage points more likely, and fourth-born children 8.1 percentage points more likely. Moreover, Indian parents are significantly more likely to have a boy (and a terminated pregnancy since last birth) if they have had only daughters previously. The simple framework of Section 4.5 suggests that the unusually high boy percentages among third- and fourth-born Indian children in California would be consistent with gender-selective abortion rates of around 10%. ...

Using census data, Abreveya estimates that from 1991 to 2004, U.S. families of Chinese or Indian descent aborted more than 2,200 fetuses just for being girls. (For the data, see Table 13 of his paper; he explains his calculations on Pages 23-24.)

Researchers had expected sex selection among Asians to decline as they became Americans. But in today's New York Times, Sam Roberts reports:

Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion. ... [A] number of experts expressed surprise to see evidence that the preference for sons among Asian-Americans has been so significantly carried over to this country.

Roberts quotes one woman who got pregnant with a boy after having two girls. The woman says flatly: "If the third one was going to be a girl, then I would say probably I would have terminated."

Should that abortion be allowed? And if legal intervention in such cases is unwise, should we do something short of that? Should schools teach that aborting girls is wrong? Should doctors counsel couples not to do it? Should community leaders speak out against it? The last president called for a culture of life. Should this president call for a culture of respect for women?

What about purveyors of sex selection? Roberts notes that at least one assisted reproduction provider, the Fertility Institutes, offers sex selection and "has unabashedly advertised its services in Indian- and Chinese-language newspapers in the United States." (The company has also promoted and withdrawn an offer to select embryos for "eye color, hair color and complexion.") This form of sex selection takes place when the offspring are tiny, dish-bound embryos, not fetuses. The clinic's medical director, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, says the practice is "not harming anyone." Is he right? Should he be allowed to continue peddling sex selection (as he does in this video) to Asian-Americans? And if it's fine to advertise this service at the embryonic stage, why not at the fetal stage?

Absolutists on both sides need to think carefully. If you're pro-life, how far are you willing to go in regulating abortion? If you're pro-choice, how far are you willing to go in leaving it unregulated?

Abortion, Morality, and the Law

Banning abortions isn't just a statement of "respect for human life," as many pro-lifers imagine. It's a commitment to investigate, prosecute, and punish.

I'm all for morality, custom, compromise, and common sense. These elements of society have plenty to say about abortion, and they're saying it. But criminal law? Do we really want to go that far?

More here.

Self-Regulated Abortion

If you've ever been on TV, you've probably had one of those moments where something comes out of your mouth, and a few seconds later, your brain catches up and wishes you'd said it better. I had one of those moments yesterday on Hardball. Chris Matthews, Ceci Connolly, and I were talking about the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Matthews raised the point that under Roe v. Wade, abortion early in pregnancy is a personal decision, whereas later in pregnancy, "it should be more of a community decision." He suggested that "there has to be some conditions set here when you have a late-term abortion."

My response was and is that you don't have to pass laws to establish such restrictions. Conditions are in fact set, and elements of the community do in fact participate in the decision, as the pregnancy moves further along. Here's how I said it on the program:

Under the voluntary system, there are voluntary, private, doctor-by-doctor, state-by-state limits on what people will actually do, so that the numbers go down precipitously. First of all, only 12 percent of the abortions in this country happen after the first trimester. So you wipe out 88 percent of them. Of that, you`re down to about 5 percent by 16 weeks. By the time you get up to about 20 or 21 weeks, you`re down to 1, 1.5 percent of all the abortions in this country.

Well, this is a bit confused. There are at least three layers of regulation in what I was talking about, and I didn't properly sort them out. There's federal regulation, most recently in the form of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. There's state regulation, which allows for more local control and variability but isn't voluntary in the sense I intended. And then there are the self-imposed restrictions of each doctor. That third layer is the main reason why very late-term abortion providers such as Tiller are so rare.

But I left out the most important regulator of abortions: women. The reason why so few abortions happen late in pregnancy is because the women who face them don't want to wait. If they know they don't want a baby, they try to end the pregnancy as fast as possible. If they're not sure, they try to reach a decision quickly. There are dawdlers, hiders, and self-deluders. But by the time you get to the late stages in which Tiller was operating, the self-regulatory system has taken care of 99 percent of abortions. And of the remaining 1 percent, a significant number are the result of nasty medical surprises along the way. So let's not pretend that in the absence of legislation, late-term abortion is out of control.

One more thing: I thought I was being original when I asked yesterday whether killing abortion providers is a logical expression of the belief that abortion is murder. I wasn't. TNR's Damon Linker (and maybe others I haven't yet found) beat me to it. Linker asked pro-lifers:

Who is the better, truer member of your movement? The man who murdered serial "baby killer" George Tiller? Or Robert George and other (comparative) moderates, who reject the use of violence to save the innocent?

Good question. This is an opportune time to recommit to nonviolence and to dialogue.

Redefining Food

New York City Health Commissioner Tom Frieden has just been named to head the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In announcing his new job, the White House touts his expertise in health care reform, swine flu, and tuberculosis. But Frieden's distinctive expertise isn't in infectious diseases. It's in chronic diseases associated with eating. Frieden is the world's most ambitious innovator in redefining unhealthy foods as not really food. By rhetorically pushing these items out of the category of sustenance, he's paving the way for more aggressive regulation of what you eat.

First Frieden went after trans fats. There, he had a good case that the targeted ingredient was industrial, not nutritional. But he wasn't shy about exploiting that angle. In its two documents explaining the city's ban on trans fats, Frieden's health department uses the word artificial 77 times.

Then he went after salt. Only 10 percent of the salt we consume "is found naturally in food," the health department declared in a bulletin devoted to topic. The vast majority was "processed" and "packaged" by "manufacturers." Frieden used this point in his campaign to pressure food companies to halve the salt content of high-sodium foods.

Then, last month, Frieden and Kelly Brownell, the director of Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, propose a penny-per-ounce excise tax on "sugared beverages." Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they rejected the notion that soft drinks were sacred "because people must eat to survive." On the contrary, they argued, "sugared beverages are not necessary for survival."

I'm not saying these initiatives are out of line. I detest trans fats, soda, and excess salt. But let's be clear about what's going on: We're recategorizing things so we can get away with aggressively regulating them.

Americans don't like the idea of bureaucrats banning or restricting unhealthy food. We tend to think it's none of the government's business. But food-related disease, particularly obesity, has become a huge problem for any government agency charged with disease control and prevention. If Frieden can persuaded us that trans fats are artificial, sweet drinks aren't necessary for survival, and most of the salt we eat is unnatural, then maybe we can accept restrictions on them as akin to regulation of tobacco or additives, not a jackbooted assault on eating in general. And if we do, I'll be curious to see what Frieden goes after next.

Surrogacy and the State

Is the global market in womb rentals out of control? Does it need regulation?

I wondered about that three weeks ago when I saw this Reuters story: "Poverty Makes Surrogates of Indian Women in Gujarat." The $4,000 to $8,000 paid to successful surrogates in India is "a huge sum of money in a country where many live on less than $2 a day," Rina Chandran reported. But compared with U.S. rates, it's cheap. That's why foreigners have begun

to flock to [Nayna] Patel's clinic, drawn by the lower costs, relaxed attitude toward surrogates and lack of legislation. A draft bill on surrogacy is pending before parliament, and meanwhile, hundreds of clinics have mushroomed across the country, with critics saying touts promoting this "reproductive tourism" care little for the health or rights of the surrogates. ... Patel has a list of nearly 200 [would-be surrogates] and is seeing more women walk in everyday because they are feeling the pinch of the slowdown.

And yet, Chandran noted, Patel "draws the line at gay couples."

Cheap reproductive labor for wealthy foreigners, but no gay parents allowed? For the usual incoherent combination of lefty reasons—not enough private discrimination in working conditions, too much private discrimination in family values—I felt the urge to support regulation of the industry.

Then, yesterday, Reuters published another investigation of overseas surrogacy conditions, this time in China. "With China's rising affluence, increasing numbers of infertile couples have been seeking surrogate mothers," James Pomfret reported. "Surrogacy agencies have been recruiting girls, often from poor villages, to have babies on behalf of prospective parents."

Should the government do something about this? Actually, authorities are already on the case:

In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, three young surrogate first-time mothers were discovered by authorities hiding in a communal flat. Soon afterwards, district family planning and security officers broke into the flat, bundled them into a van and drove them to a district hospital where they were manhandled into a maternity ward, the mothers recounted to Reuters. "I was crying 'I don't want to do this'," said a young woman called Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with four-month-old twins. "But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle," the 20-year-old told Reuters. ... Another of the surrogates, who said she'd come from a village in Sichuan province, recounted how officers made her take pills then surgically removed her three-month-old fetus while she was unconscious.

This isn't the kind of policing liberals have in mind when they call for tighter regulation of the fertility industry. But the tricky thing about official intervention is that once the state gets its foot in the door, you don't necessarily get to dictate what it can and can't do.

Every time the global market in human body parts and rentals looks ugly enough to regulate, I'm reminded how much uglier things can get when the government steps in.

The IVF Battlefield

Thanks to the octuplets mom and legislative attempts to harness the backlash against her, a political framework for fighting about in vitro fertilization is beginning to take shape. This is a new issue for most of us. Here's an attempt to start making sense of who's proposing what.

You don't often get to see a new issue form before your eyes. It's kind of like the formation of a constellation. There's a big explosion, stuff flies in all directions, and gradually the pieces begin to align in relation to one another. That's what the biotech explosion is doing to politics right now. IVF regulation is one of the constellations taking shape. Let's take a look at who the players are and what they're after.

The initial battle that has brought them together is the fight over Georgia Senate Bill 169, which I wrote about Wednesday ("Crocktuplets"). On Thursday, the bill was sent to a subcommittee. The Associated Press says the bill is dead. The Los Angeles Times says it could survive in some form if a compromise is worked out by Monday.

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Ralph Hudgens, professes shock that it has become a flashpoint for abortion politics. "There is nothing in this law to limit abortions. I can't believe that people are reading that into it," he told the Times.

Please. We're not stupid. The bill says:

A living in vitro human embryo is a biological human being who is not the property of any person or entity. The fertility physician and the medical facility that employs the physician owe a high duty of care to the living in vitro human embryo.

And:

Nothing in this article shall be construed to affect conduct relating to abortion as provided in Chapter 12 of Title 16; provided, however, that nothing in this article shall be construed or implied to recognize any independent right to abortion under the laws of this state.

In other words, lawyers have inserted a "this doesn't affect abortion" clause so that Hudgens can claim the bill doesn't affect abortions. And we're supposed to take this seriously, even though the bill makes every embryo a human patient and stipulates that if Roe v. Wade falls, this bill can't be construed to keep abortion legal.

Did I mention that Georgia Right to Life helped Hudgens draft this supposedly abortion-neutral bill? Actually, I did. But I missed the bill's more important source: the Bioethics Defense Fund. BDF, whose self-proclaimed mission is to "address the human rights violations involved in human cloning and embryo research, abortion, and end-of-life," says two of its lawyers flat-out wrote the Georgia bill. The group adds:

BDF is grateful for the consultation and analysis provided by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, who opined that with added conscience protections and with public education on how this legislation limits violations against vulnerable human life, the Georgia bill "could be supported consistent with John Paul II's position on incremental legislation contained in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae."

A statement by Fr. Thomas Berg, L.C., Ph.D., of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person concluded that the BDF drafted bill is "an incremental approach aimed at minimizing the harm done [and] is an essential tool for undermining the greater evils in our culture."

I know these people. I spent several days with them at the Vatican four years ago. They're as pro-life as you can get. When they call the Georgia bill an "incremental" approach toward the pope's vision, I assure you that abortion is in the crosshairs.

By the way, BDF proudly quotes a supporter's description of the Georgia bill as "model language" for legislation in other states. So you can expect more Georgia-style bills elsewhere.

That's the pro-life camp. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Sean Tipton, the ASRM's public affairs director, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Georgia bill "says that decisions about how to treat [infertility] patients will not be made by patients in consultation with their physicians, but by politicians." That line comes straight out of the pro-choice playbook on abortion. It's a categorical indictment of government interference. And politically, it's highly effective.

Much of the muscle against the Georgia bill seems to have come from Resolve, a group whose mission is "to ensure equal access to all family building options for men and women experiencing infertility." Resolve may be emerging as the NARAL of IVF regulation. It says its members pumped thousands of e-mails and letters into Georgia to stop the bill and helped opponents "pack" Thursday's hearing.

In addition to the pro-life and pro-choice camps, at least two hybrid positions are taking shape. One is to broadly regulate the fertility industry, preferably under federal control. This is the agenda of the Center for Genetics and Society. CGS has a complex philosophy that could roughly be described as leftist. Here's its mission statement:

The center supports benign and beneficent medical applications of the new human genetic and reproductive technologies, and opposes those applications that objectify and commodify human life and threaten to divide human society.

The Center works in a context of support for the equitable provision of health technologies domestically and internationally; for women's health and reproductive rights; for the protection of our children; for the rights of the disabled; and for precaution in the use of technologies that could alter the fundamental processes of the natural world.

Basically, CGS is a home for people who don't trust private industry and prefer to regulate it, but from the standpoint of environmentalism, equal access, and women's rights. It's for pro-choicers who are more socialist than libertarian.

CGS wants congressional hearings and federal regulation to address the octuplets case and the fertility industry's lack of oversight. Its agenda is ambitious but unclear in its details. If you have the time, check out its proposal for "Responsible Federal Oversight of the New Human Biotechnologies."

A fourth position is to embrace government intervention but much more modestly. This is the idea behind legislation recently filed in Missouri, which would put some of the fertility industry's voluntary guidelines into law. The ASRM says self-regulation is already preventing octuplets-type abuses. But Missouri state Rep. Rob Schaaf has filed legislation to enforce these limits. Unlike the Georgia bill, Schaaf's bill is short and direct. Its operational text consists of one sentence:

When treating infertility, physicians within the state of Missouri shall not implant more embryos into a human than the current recommendations set forth by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, or its successor.

Schaaf argues that "it is within the realm of the state to make sure that doctors don't participate in things that are harmful to people." So if you don't trust complex regulatory schemes like the Georgia bill but aren't afraid of government intervention in the fertility industry per se, piecemeal measures like this one may be the way to go.