Sluts, Floozy Patches and God’s super glue
by digby
This piece over at Huffington Post about the lies the right wing tells about birth control is astonishing. But this one really takes the cake:
The odds that a woman who is raped will get pregnant are “one in millions and millions and millions,” said state Rep. Stephen Freind, R-Delaware County, the Legislature’s leading abortion foe.
The reason, Freind said, is that the traumatic experience of rape causes a woman to “secrete a certain secretion” that tends to kill sperm.
That’s a good one. I always admire that stuff that has absolutely no basis in reality.
I couldn’t help but recall this Jonah Goldberg gem from 2006:
JPod – I have to say I lean (not embrace, just lean) toward the view that some of “the crass commercialization” of birth control is a bit demeaning to women, or to us all. Maybe we’ve seen different commercials. But I’m thinking of the ones which tell young women that this pill will also clear up their unsightly blemishes. I’m also thinking of those ads for that patch that you can wear for months, and — implied by the ad — display them in provocative places so as to send a signal that you’re good to go. Who needs a Chinese letter tatooed on your lower back when you can flaunt your floozy-patch like tail feathers?
Rush isn’t the only one, is he? This meme has been out there for a while.
But I don’t think any of these examples rise to the level of sheer inanity of this one, from the man George W. Bush named as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the office that oversees federally funded teenage pregnancy, family planning, and abstinence programs:
Forty percent of couples who live together break up before they marry and of the 60 percent that do marry, 40 percent of them divorce after 10 years. … So why do so many adults continue in a cycle of sex without a marriage commitment, cohabitation, and failed relationships? This perpetual cycle of misery is due largely to the role of oxytocin. The following is Dr. Keroack’s explanation of the cycle:
Emotional pain causes our bodies to produce an elevated level of endorphins which in turn lowers the level of oxytocin. Therefore, relationship failure leads to pain which leads to elevated endorphins which leads to lower oxytocin, the result of which is a lower ability to bond. Many in this increased state of emotional pain and lower oxytocin seek sex as a substitute for love, which inevitably leads to another failed relationship, and so on, the cycle continues.
There is hope for the weary brokenhearted, Dr. Keroack said, but it requires abstinence and plenty of time for healing.
Keroack’s fitting title for that novel presentation was “If I Only Had a Brain.” In an unpublished article that has become an established text of the abstinence movement, he wrote, “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” Keroack’s teaching on the role of “God’s ‘super-glue'” is accepted as irrefutable in an article titled Fornication and Oxytocin.
Dr. Keroack’s qualifications had been his job at one of those bogus crisis pregnancy “counselling” centers:
At Brandeis University’s 2002 Christian Awareness Week, Keroack presented the grim vision of human sexuality that he brings with him to the agency that directs the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs.
Eric Keroack, medical director of A Woman’s Concern Health Centers, a pro-life counseling organization, said sexual activity today is comparable to warfare.
“Sexual activity is a war zone,” he said. “What we have is this ongoing war. So we’re constantly coming up with better equipment,” he said, referring to contraceptive strategies and abortions.
“And the truth is that somewhere along the way people die in war,” Keroack added. He acknowledged that deaths from abortion-related complications are rare, but that “they die emotionally.”
Focus on the Family applauds Keroack’s use of ultrasound to influence women whom Keroack describes as “abortion vulnerable.” As medical director of five Boston-area crisis pregnancy centers, Keroack oversees ultrasound scans that he says help to provide “informed consent” for abortion procedures, even though their admitted purpose is to prevent those procedures from ever taking place.
[T]he odds that an unborn child will be brought to term, rather than aborted, can be very nearly inverted by an ultrasound examination, according to a study undertaken by A Woman’s Concern, a group of crisis-pregnancy centers in eastern Massachusetts. Before introducing routine ultrasound examinations for the women who visited their centers, A Woman’s Concern (AWC) found that 61 percent of the women classified by counselors as “abortion-vulnerable” would opt for abortion prior to an ultrasound examination, while 33.7 percent would choose to carry the pregnancy to term. Once ultrasound examinations were provided, 63.5 percent of the same “abortion-vulnerable” women decided to continue their pregnancies, and only 24.5 percent chose abortion.
Like most other CPCs, AWC was established to serve women who are alarmed by the prospect of pregnancy, and actively considering abortion. At the centers, trained counselors do their best to provide moral guidance and support to women who are often facing objectively horrific situations.
But in many cases, the best efforts of AWC counselors are not enough to change a woman’s mind. For the first several years of the organization’s existence, roughly two-thirds of the women who entered an AWC center planning to procure an abortion carried through with that plan.
The results of … ultrasound examinations, beginning in 2000, were so impressive that AWC soon adopted “the medical model” for all five centers. … The results of the ultrasound examination are assessed by AWC’s medical director, Dr. Eric Keroack, a board-certified ob/gyn.
For crisis-pregnancy centers, the AWC study suggests that investment in ultrasound equipment — and qualified medical personnel handle that equipment — could be the most effective way to drive down the number of abortions. Women facing problem pregnancies have no reason not to accept the offer of a free ultrasound test, and the results of that offer could be dramatic.
As detailed in the article quoted above, the AWC centers directed by Keroack delay women’s access to abortion care by suggesting to them that early miscarriages are common, that they could have an ectopic pregnancy or a blighted ovum, and that it would be best to wait a few weeks before making an appointment for an abortion: “For the CPC counselors, meanwhile, the extra two to three weeks provide another opportunity to persuade the woman that she should continue her pregnancy. And if the process calls for a follow-up ultrasound examination, there is one more opportunity for the mother to bond with her unborn child.”
This is so full of lies it would be easier to pull out the very few bits of the truth. The only thing for sure is that they caused grave damage to women who didn’t realize these creepy people were manipulating them into forced childbirth.
This fellow resigned from his post when it came to light that he’d been sued for malpractice and had very dicey credentials. But I think he made left his mark.
And yes, the right wing is so polluted with lies about birth control and abortion that they hardly even make sense. But then that’s the utility of not believing in science, isn’t it? You can believe whatever nonsense you want to.
.