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Preeti on the Web |
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Providing Food for Thought |
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How Low Would They Go? |
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Black babies have a higher infant mortality rate than babies in Costa Rica and the Indian state of Kerala. How much do those moralizing conservatives really care about protecting black babies? |
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How draconian could conservative policies ever go? |
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October 18, 2005 |
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To Contact Preeti: preetiontheweb at yahoo dot com |
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Please note that all text on this webpage is copyrighted ©. Please do not quote or paraphrase without using proper citations. |
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In 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a novel about three explorers who stumbled upon a utopia in some remote corner of the world. This peaceful society’s highest priority was promoting the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of its children. This utopia was a land without any men; they had exterminated themselves in a final orgy of war. Through some mutation of science-fiction proportions, the women had learned to reproduce without them. Gilman obviously wasn’t unique in observing that violence and crime are often disproportionately perpetrated by people belonging to a certain demographic category—in her case, men. Once, I read in a psychology textbook that 79 percent of violent crime in the U.S. is committed by males between 15 and 28. In the margin, the authors printed a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that perhaps quarantining males during these high-testosterone years might be the magic solution to reducing violence. Given examples such as these, I wasn’t too stocked when former Republican secretary of education William Bennett recently said, “…you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Virtually no American of any political persuasion is going to endorse a policy of forced abortion to reduce crime, but Bennett’s comments truly make me wonder just how draconian Republicans and other “compassionate” conservatives are willing to go in how they treat people. Take conservatives’ numerous sins of omission—not what they’ve done, but what they fail to have done. For example, their failure to support equal access to healthcare among the poor has contributed to unacceptably high rates of mortality among black babies. According to the Center for Health Statistics, 14.4 out of every 1,000 black babies never make it to their first birthday, compared to a rate of 5.8 for whites. In Costa Rica, infant mortality is 10.5 per 1,000, and in the southern Indian state of Kerala it’s 10 per 1,000. How much do those moralizing conservatives really care about protecting black babies? Bennett defended his controversial comments by saying, “I was pointing out that abortion should not be opposed for economic reasons…. Immoral policies are wrong because they are wrong, not because of an economic calculation.” But, what about conservatives’ failure to support moral policies, citing economic reasons? Conservatives are constantly trying to pass tax cuts and reduce funding for governmental services, such as healthcare, because they “cost too much” and “waste taxpayers’ dollars.” Yet, how many black babies have died while waiting for the benefits of tax cuts for the rich to “trickle down” to them? And, when it comes to the dilemma of whether ends justify the means, conservatives have shown that they callously have a high threshold of what they’re willing to inflict upon other people in an attempt to possibly achieve some supposedly laudable goal. Last November, the well-respected medical journal Lancet reported that during the first 18 months of the war in Iraq, the country had experienced nearly 100,000 additional civilian deaths than it otherwise would have. Using a technique that is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists, researchers surveyed households about the number of births and deaths they had experienced in the 15 months before and the 18 months after the invasion. A person’s risk of death after the invasion was 1.5 times higher than it was before—2.5 times higher if Falluja was included. Infant mortality had increased from 29 to 57 per 1,000, both because of coalition bombings and women’s inability to access hospitals for childbirth due to security concerns. Apparently, Bennett and his ilk find it unacceptable to abort black fetuses to reduce crime, but they don’t have moral qualms about killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that never even existed. Ultimately, while Bennett acknowledged the reprehensibility of aborting blacks to reduce crime, we should remain vigilant for other extreme statements from people in the public eye. With a skyrocketing national debt and the “war against terror,” conservatives have shown that they’re no holds barred. They seem to have little problem with starting wars and leaving the poor to fend for themselves. Many find racial profiling, torture, and sexual humiliation acceptable. Some, such as author Michelle Malkin and Rep. Tom Tancredo, have even endorsed internment camps and bombing Mecca. Just how low would conservatives ever go? Without a vigilant public to hold them in check, we could end up finding out the answer to that question the hard way. |