Download Monica Potts comes on to address the problems with “No Wedding No Womb”. Also, revelations about unethical STD testing in Guatemala in the 40s, and the radicalism of Prop 62 in Colorado.

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It Gets Better

U.S. apologizes to Guatemala for unethical STD research in the 1940s

Guatemalan President calls experiments a “crime against humanity”

Fetal personhood makes no sense

ACOG on the danger of personhood laws

Rachel Maddow on Ken Buck running away from his support of 62

62 would ban in-vitro treatments

Rush Limbaugh: seriously deluding himself

On this episode of Reality Cast, Monica Potts will be on to talk about the No Wedding No Womb campaign.  Also, I have a segment on the news that the US funded unethical STD research in Guatemala in the 40s, and another on the problems with Prop 62 in Colorado. 

You’ve probably heard about it, but I want to mention it anyway, because this is one of the best ideas I’ve seen for using the internet for activist outreach.  The idea is to counter the epidemic of gay youth committing suicide in response to bullying. You have adult gay and lesbian and queer folks telling the camera about how they made it through the hell of youth and now they’re happy and well-adjusted, and you will be, too, if you just get through your youth. 

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If you want to contribute to the project, it’s called the It Gets Better project, and it’s on YouTube.   Just remember that the idea is to show off how much better your life got as you aged.  So recount your bullying experiences, but please talk about why it was so worth it to get through it, because life gets better.  I particularly like the ones where couples speak together, because I think for teenagers, the hope that they can find real love one day is a big motivator.

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Recently, a big news story hit the airwaves that could be considered the platonic ideal of a history coming back to haunt us kind of story.  It starts with Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies Wellesley.  She was doing some research on the 1960s Tuskegee study, where some black men were purposefully not treated for syphilis by researchers who were interested in tracking the progress of the disease.  And digging in deeper into history, she found another example of blatantly unethical research funded by the U.S. government.

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In this case, it seems that everyone was given penicillin, but that in no way, shape or form excuses this unethical research.  Knowingly infecting people is just way too dangerous, even if you think you have a cure.  Nowadays, when they’re looking for people that are likely to catch certain STDs to study them, they seek out people who are already making choices that put them in the way of the disease and just record what happens when you provide interventions.  For instance, a famous study that showed how effective condoms were at preventing HIV transmission involved studying HIV negative people who openly and with full knowledge of the risks had sexual relationships with positive people and used condoms, and I do believe they found that no one in that study got HIV.

This is a completely different thing.  Deliberately infecting people is bad enough, but syphilis is particularly nasty, because if it spreads unchecked it will cause death and often madness.  But in case that wasn’t scary enough, the methods they used to make sure people caught the disease will curl your hair. 

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The spine thing probably seems weird to modern people who almost never have to deal with syphilis in its advanced forms, but I suspect the reason they injected it directly into the spines is that is where syphilis often tends to go over time.  Which is why it causes madness.  According to the researcher Reverby, despite the fact that everyone was given penicillin, the records show that not everyone was likely cured. 

This story is a disaster on two levels.  First of all, it’s just the shocking assault on basic human rights.

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The U.S. has apologized, and that’s helpful, but the damage has been done to both the lives of the people affected and to the public’s trust in health care providers and scientists.  To make it worse, there are a lot of people out there, such as anti-vaccination kooks and anti-choicers, who are ready to pounce on a story like this and use it to make unfounded claims that the entire field of medical science is not to be trusted.  Anti-choicers, for instance, are trying to imply that the HPV vaccine hasn’t been tested properly in an effort to discourage parents from vaccinating their girls, which will set those girls up to have a relatively high risk of getting cervical cancer.  They’d definitely be eager to conflate what happened in the 40s with what’s happening now. 

But there are a couple of reasons modern science can’t be judged by this incident.  Without discounting how horrible this sort of thing is, it’s because of the potential for things like this to happen that science has developed rigid ethical standards for testing.  And another thing to think about:

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Same doctor.  One man managed to single-handedly do more damage to the public trust in medical science than even the incident where Merck pulled Vioxx from the shelves after it was revealed they suppressed evidence that the drug raised the chance that people with heart problems would have heart attacks. 

It’s tough to say what it will take to undo all the damage this sort of thing can cause.  The vast majority of researchers, particularly nowadays, would never violate the rights of research subjects in this way.  But we have this cultural image of a mad scientist, and this story is so horrific, that it’s all going to be seared into the public imagination basically from now until forever.

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insert interview

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Even though the voters of Colorado soundly defeated it last time it was on the ballot, supporters of a personhood amendment haven’t given up.  Bullies never do.  They’re certain that all they have to do to take away a woman’s access not only to abortion but to hormonal birth control and fertility treatments is to keep putting ballot initiatives on the ballot and hope the voters give in out of weariness.  Ballot initiative 62 in Colorado would, if passed, define a fertilized egg as a human being.  This purposefully vague law could be interpreted in many ways, all of them aimed at reframing women’s bodies as public property at best, and a weapon that has to be highly regulated at worst.  After all, under this provision, every time a sexually active straight woman has a period, there’s the possibility that she’s passing  a legal human being on to her tampon. Yes, it’s that stupid.  Since eggs are fertilized before they even implant, and many never do implant, you actually never know for certain if a so-called person was ever even there.  It turns every woman into Schrodinger’s baby killer. 

It also defies common sense to claim outright that a pregnant woman is actually two people, as this Choice USA video  demonstrates. 

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And that’s just with actual pregnant women.  As I noted before, any sexually active straight woman could at any point in time potentially have a fertilized egg floating around in her that hasn’t attached and she doesn’t know about.  And in fact, this is what the promoters of 62 are counting on.  They claim, wrongly, that the birth control pill keeps fertilized eggs from implanting.  In reality, it works by stopping ovulation.  But these are people who think an egg equals a 5-year-old, so they won’t be stopped by actual scientific evidence.  The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has warned that this bill is misogyny distilled.  Setting aside whether or not they’d get away with pretending the birth control pill is an assault on fertilized eggs, this law would prevent doctors from treating molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy or infertility.  It would also mean that the recommended treatment for when a woman has an incomplete miscarriage, which is to immediately do  a D&C to prevent her from getting an infection, would likely be banned.  It would also ban abortion.  The result of all this is that thousands of women will be in danger of infection, infertility, disability and even death.  We know this because similar laws and rules in other countries and in Catholic hospitals have created just this problem.

The good news is that ballot initiatives aimed at banning birth control, treatment of miscarriages, treatment of pregnancies gone wrong, and abortion are pretty unpopular.  So unpopular that a Senate candidate in Colorado had to back away from his original position on this.    Rachel Maddow showed how Ken Buck ran away from his initial support for 62 after his opponent hit him with it in ads.

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What’s really interesting to me about personhood amendments is that they really expose the anti-choice lie that they’re just really pro-life and not anti-woman.  Anti-choicers like to go on about babies and motherhood, but personhood amendments hurt women even if there’s no chance of there being a baby.  Forcing doctors to wait until an ectopic pregnancy bursts a woman’s fallopian tube before they remove it doesn’t save a single potential life, but it can snuff out a woman’s future ability to have children.  The personhood amendment would also mean that women who want children but struggle with infertility would have their access to motherhood shut off.

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This demonstrates that anti-choice nuttery is based in a worldview where men dominate women and pregnancy is about reinforcing patriarchal power structures.  Anti-choice beliefs are anti-woman and anti-child, because they’ll pick forcing women to become infertile or even having them die over allowing women to have rights. 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, he’s definitely got to be kidding edition.  Rush Limbaugh recently got himself worked into a self-delusional, self-righteous rant, and dropped this hilarious bit of nonsense.

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As Media Matters noted, Limbaugh has suggested that female politicians are castrating, he mocks professional women, he’s made supportive comments about sexual harassment, and he uses terms like “chickfying” to raise the alarm about women having power.  He’s also pretty reliable when it comes to opposing all progress on women’s rights, and he invented the term “feminazi”.