The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Stupak Amendment: A Recipe for Disaster

A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:

Relax and enjoy it, ladies. Here comes the Progressive Democratic Party with another plan for you to take care of its needs.

I don’t actually care all that much about the women who will have to pay for their own abortions after Representative Stupak and the others added their amendment. There are only a few hundred thousand insured women needing abortions, compared with the millions of really poor women trying to buy their constitutional rights after the (Democratic) Congress took abortion out of Medicaid in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. Hey, women rich or lucky enough to have private insurance, welcome to the crowd of the people who can’t protect their interests (“women”). Your fate was sealed when the Democrats sold out poor women 30 years ago. And women let them do it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Hey, Seniors: Don't Call My Generation Entitled While You're Demanding Freebies

A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:

I’m all confused about which age group is supposed to be the Entitlement Generation. I thought it was mine; after all, I’m always hearing my elders snark about how today’s twentysomethings never graduate in four years, won’t submit to cubicle culture, and can’t get out of our parents’ basements. But it looks more and more like seniors are trying to strip us of our title ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

23-Year-Olds Are Poor, Not Delusional

A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:

Remind me again why one people between the ages of 18 and 25 don’t have health insurance? Oh, right, because “they are going to live forever and therefore have no use for doctors.” Or so says Tim Noah in this Slate piece griping about how young people might actually catch a break under Sen. Max Baucus’ newly-revealed reform plan.

Noah joins a chorus of other distinguished voices (Mark Steyn, anyone?) who have claimed—always without evidence, as far as I can tell—that 20-somethings believe they are immortal. Apparently there is middle ground on the subject of health care reform, and it consists of deriding young people for being such careless fools ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

What's So Bad About Calling the President a Liar?

Everyone seems to agree that it was bad for South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson to yell "You lie!" at the president last night during the health care speech. Gail Collins calls it "not a good plan," New York Democrat Joseph Crowley called it "outrageous," and Rahm Emanuel said: "No president has ever been treated like that. Ever." That's when I started to get suspicious. Rahm Emanuael? The man known to fit three "fucks" in a sentence, outraged by "lie"? The president himself said his opponents "lie" not seconds before, and it's much more unusual for a president to use that word than for some back-bench congressman. ... (Read more in DoubleX)

The Protesters Democrats Love to Hate

A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:

KJ, the Democrats may not have a poster child for health care reform, but they are getting a public enemy. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter got shouted down by anti-health care reform protesters at an embarrassing town hall meeting Sunday ... (Read more in Double X.)

O Health Care Bill, Where is Thy Spin?

A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Here's what I heard about one proposed health care bill last week: It's "sausage". It's Soylent Green. "Page 16" outlaws my current health plan. Here's what I didn't hear: How it helps anybody who doesn't have health insurance get some. What health care reform needs is a poster child ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)

Socialized Medicine and Natasha Richardson

It makes me uncomfortable when individual medical cases become fodder for national debate, from Terri Schiavo to Natasha Richardson. It seems macabre to turn a family's private grief into a public debate. But since you brought it up ...

You make a valid point about helicopters: They are perhaps overused here. I certainly wouldn't want to use one in the event of non-life-threatening injuries.

But I had a different takeaway about what makes Natasha Richardson's death the fault of socialized medicine. The New York Post's article on this matter suggested that the first hospital that Richardson went to might not have had a CT scanner and that by the time she got to a hospital with one, it was too late. This blog post says that she did have a CT scan at the local hospital, but that she wasn't transferred to a larger hospital with a trauma center for another three hours.

Either way, it sent me a-Googling for numbers comparing the United States with Canada. During a conversation with a friend who'd just had an MRI, my friend told me that the MRI tech had told her there are more MRI scanners in Orange County, Calif., than there are in Canada. If that's inadmissible as hearsay, there is this: Canada in 2007 had 419 CT scanners and 222 MRI scanners. We have more than 10,000 MRI scanners in the United States and more than 6,000  CT scanners. Even if you account for the population difference (33 million people in Canada vs. 300 million in the United States), this country is outfitted better with high-tech life-saving medical equipment.

Did socialized medicine kill Natasha Richardson? I don't think we can say one way or the other, and I hope that her family is able to ignore the hubbub and grieve in peace. Health care in this country is far from perfect. But even with all the problems we have, this is just one reason that I'll take my chances in the United States over Canada any day.

“Rule by Republican Hissy Fit”?

I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.

I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”

Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.

What Nebraska Learned (and Didn't) When it Allowed Parents To Abandon Their Kids

Everyone lusts after stories of bad mothers—the worse, the juicier. As you might recall, in the late 1990s, at the peak of the Clinton-era culture wars, a moral panic arose over "dumpster" or "toilet" babies—infants abandoned by panicked, often teenage moms who had told no one they were expecting a child. In the spring of 1997, the nation was riveted by an especially horrific case. In New Jersey, 18-year old Melissa Drexler gave birth to a baby boy at the senior prom, stuffed the child into a trash bin, and returned to the dance floor.The baby died, and Drexler served three years in prison.

"Safe haven" or "baby Moses" laws emerged as a response to such crimes. They allowed parents to abandon their children to the state at designated locations without being charged with a crime. The pro-life movement, which heartily supported the laws, contended that baby abandonment was on the rise because Roe v. Wade had eroded the "culture of life." That is doubtful at best—the abandonment of disabled, weak, and, in many cultures, female newborns has taken place throughout human history. Nevertheless, it's a good thing to provide a safe, anonymous way for struggling parents to turn an infant over to the state. Though safe havens are used extremely rarely, there's no reason for them not to be there.

But these laws had unintended consequences. As the New York Times reported last month, after Nebraska passed a safe haven law in July, officials were shocked that parents were abandoning children as old as 17. Sometimes the parents were suffering from mental illness; often the children were. Many of the families were uninsured or underinsured. But whatever the cause, in the midst of a financial crisis, and in a state with some of the lowest spending on mental health and child welfare services, dozens of parents seemed so unable to cope that they were ready to abandon their kids.

Today, Nebraska responded by amending the safe haven law to apply only to babies younger than 30 days old. And while that will prevent these other families in crisis from coming out of the woodwork, it will do nothing to address the underlying problems of poverty and health care. Just a reminder that while we obsess about freakish stories in our fervor for identifying society's "worst mothers," bigger problems are often hidden in plain sight.

New World's Record for Running, Standing, or Jumping Gall

Is Bullying Always a Bad Thing?

But a Boob Job IS an Investment

In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"

But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.

I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!

If You Can't Close the Sale, Does It Matter What You're Selling?

Have you no shame, Madam, in your shocking refusal to see things exactly as I do? Nah—but tone and temperament do matter, not only in winning elections but in working with Congress, moving public opinion, and negotiating with our allies and adversaries around the world. I just didn't hear Hillary's answers the same way you did, Hanna; treating relatively minor differences between her health-care plan and Obama's as monumental and catastrophic seems to me to be precisely the kind of all-or-nothing thinking that doomed her previous efforts. And even if she were better on paper, after the Bush years a lot of people want a president they can stand to watch on television.

Move Over, Michael Moore

I also see where the formerly admirable Ralph Nader claims he is being discriminated against; the New York Times reports that he has even compared the terrible marginalization suffered by independent candidates to bias against blacks in the Jim Crow South: "One is based on race," he said, "and the other is based on status.'' Exactly! And don't we have a right to hold his status as a world-class irritant against him? I say yes—and wonder if he doesn't have more safety concerns than Obama. Wouldn't you think Nader would get more invitations to step into the alley than he'd get votes at this point? Whenever I get into one of my global warming funks, his is the face I see.