Fundiewatch: a Catholic prenatal diagnosis “counselling service”

Two of our local Catholic hospital networks have collaborated to offer a new so-called “counselling service, dubbed “Mamreh”. These two hospitals combined have a lot of community credibility already, as they provide the vast majority of private-hospital maternity services in this State. Baby-catching (or baby-cutting-out, for over half the births in these hospitals) is big business around here.

Mamreh has been taking out full-page ads in the local medical rags pushing their “counselling service” to doctors. The advertisements make no disclosure of the Catholic-medicine rider that the service operates under – which means no condoning, recommending, or counselling on termination of pregnancy, except in cases where the mother’s life is at substantial risk.

This service’s stated purpose? Counselling on prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis. Stating the bleeding obvious, the ad I’m looking at says, “Prenatal genetic screening and diagnostic test information can have profound medical, psychological, and social implications”. No kidding. It goes on, “To add to this there is often only a limited time in which to make critical decisions about a pregnancy.”

This window of defencelessness is crucial. Fundies want to ensure that women are rapidly bustled by their trusted doctors or midwives into a “counselling service” whose primary goal is to hide information from them. The ultimate goal of this type of counselling is to obfuscate information on options and to coerce women into continuing a pregnancy whether they wish to or not – or at least, to delay them just long enough so that the window for a readily accessible termination of pregnancy closes.

Fundies have been pulling this crap in Australia for years, first with tacit government approval and now with open government funding and encouragement, thanks to our papist Health Minister. Attempts to get fraudulent “unplanned pregnancy counselling services” to declare their “faith-based” bias up front have thus far failed.

And now these malignant woman-hating godbags are expanding their vile game to even more vulnerable women – those who are in the initial throes of learning that their fetus has a severe medical problem.

The Mamreh ad veers from there into outright sleight of hand:

“Mamreh Counselling Service explores self, motivations, beliefs and faith in the context of a patient’s own personal, cultural and social situation.”

Would you read this as saying that if your belief system allows termination of pregnancy in the event of severe congenital defect, the service would offer unprejudiced counselling on, and referral for, termination of pregnancy? Well, stop right there. This is not the case. Not remotely.

Do NOT go to this service, or any service like it, unless your goal is to be railroaded into continuing your pregnancy come what may. If a friend or relative has been referred to this service, make sure they know what they’re in for BEFORE they cross the threshold and the forced-birther brainwashing and guilt trips begin. A woman in this awful situation needs absolutely unqualified, unconditional support throughout her decision-making process.

Lying lies and the lying liars who tell them. We hatesss them, we does.

Filed under: ethics, fundies, medicine, obstreperation, reproductive freedoms

Lame jokes

I’m looking at you, Pavlov…

Once there was a boy who had no arms, legs, or torso. In other words – he was a head. He used to roll to school, and roll home again. He was teased unmercifully, and the girl he had a crush on wouldn’t give him a second look.

When a fairy godmother appeared and offered the boy one wish, he asked to be turned into an orange in the girl’s lunch box. (Obviously a rather dim bulb, this one.)

So, long story short, girl forgets to eat her orange, goes off on school holidays, and at the end of the school holidays the girl discovers the mushy mouldy orange in her lunchbox, and throws it against the wall, splat!

The moral is: Quit while you’re a head.

In the US, conservative culture itself is the lame joke. As Lauren at Unsprung explains: “A janitor who watches too much 20/20 was chagrined when he learned that the bag of human fetuses he found in the girls’ locker room was actually a sack of rotted oranges. …pro-life group protesting outside sadly put down signs and went home“.

Amanda Marcotte:

Imagine you’re a junior high school janitor and inside a girl’s locker you discover a Ziploc bag full of goo and rot around some unidentifiable object. What do you assume right off the bat it must be? A discarded and rotten lunch? At worst, a bag of puke? A prank of some sort?

Try a human fetus. (H/T.)

As you imagine, the bag of goo turned out not to be the discards from some sort of young teenage sex cult, but was in fact a rotten orange, though they had to verify this through the Dallas County Medical Examiner. (Well, the medical examiner probably had quite the laugh over this, so all is not lost.) And in retrospect, it might have seemed a little unwise to assume straight off the bat that junior high students are collecting fetuses in bags, but that they might be doing what kids do and being a bit sloppy in cleaning up trash left in their lockers. But let’s cut everyone involved in this a break. We all know that females are born naturally duplicitous, craven and immoral, and that they get a rise out of having all sorts of sex so they can lie about it and avoid the consequences of forced childbirth….

…Anyway, Bush-appointed members of the FDA believe that there’s a likelihood of emergency contraception-based teenage sex cults, so why would it be such a leap to imagine that junior high girls are running around having sex with the boys and escaping the due punishment by with Sapphic abortion parties in the girls locker room? It’s not like the Bush administration would have members that had a poor grasp on reality, right? The way the war is going certainly demonstrates that. Why I bet these teenage girls today with their girl power and their Title IX are able to self-abort by playing Britney Spears records backwards. That’s how far this country has fallen, due to the feminist infiltrators.

Lends a new meaning to the word loinfruit, doesn’t it.

(Boom-tish.)

 
 
 
Guest post by Helen

Filed under: conservatism, fundies, moral panics, reproductive freedoms

Read ‘Ems: more on the NT plan, barefaced hypocrisy, and a couple of amusing tidbits

What I’m reading today:

1. The AMA call has come. Yesterday’s email brought a plea from the AMA to volunteer 2-4 weeks in a central Australian community to perform governmental health checks on children. The email opens with a big fat BLAME:

The Federal Government is currently implementing a reform package to modify behavioural patterns in Aboriginal communities that have over many years had a serious adverse impact on their health.

Given that the AMA Indigenous Health Report Cards have focussed over and over again on the role of colonialism in the indigenous health situation, why the stilted behaviourist blamefest? Is this a subtle back-handed stab at the government’s approach to black-blaming, or is the AMA swallowing this hook, line and sinker?

The email goes on:

In a matter of weeks, the Government is planning to deploy the ‘first wave’ of health teams to conduct health checks for children in the communities. The teams will comprise doctors, nurses, Aboriginal health workers, and social workers. The doctors who lead these teams will be made aware of the cultural and social sensitivities involved in this operation. If you have had previous experience with Indigenous communities, this would clearly be an asset.

I am writing to Australian doctors seeking expressions of interest from suitably skilled and committed doctors to lead these teams on this important mission.

No specific skills are requested, and the email recipients have clearly not been targeted in any way. The commitment requested is two weeks, with the possibility of extension to four weeks, so there will obviously be no opportunity for any comprehensive training or mentoring.

Lots more after the cut – reactions from the RACGP, an Aboriginal women’s group in Katherine, the ACT HREOC, Rex Wild, government hypocrisy in discontinuing funding for the CDEP employment plan in WA, and some fun with antifeminist conspiracy theory and a baby dwarf hamster.

Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, fun, fundies, moral panics, racism

Abstaining from reality

A harrowingly detailed post from TerranceDC of The Republic of T (the post-title is his) about the way that AIDS education and prevention programmes worldwide, but especially in Africa, have been sabotaged by the Bush Administration’s insistence on not only solely funding “abstinence education” themselves, but actively defunding any organisation that wishes to use non-USA funds to educate about safe sex.

Just one of his example:

Crushing news out of Uganda last week. The Bush administration’s $1 billion experiment in using abstinence messages as the basis of HIV prevention has born its first fruit: In a public speech on May 18, Uganda’s AIDS Commissioner Kihumuro Apuuli announced that HIV infections have almost doubled in Uganda over the past two years, from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005. And despite this chilling wake-up call, Bush has empowered Christian right activists to continue to push their abstinence-only agenda at a UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS, to begin next week. According to a State Department email I obtained, the official U.S. delegation is stacked with some of the very people who contributed to the debacle in Uganda.

Uganda was once an HIV prevention success story, where an ambitious government-sponsored prevention campaign, including massive condom distribution and messages about delaying sex and reducing numbers of partners, pushed HIV rates down from 15 percent in the early 1990s to 5 percent in 2001. But conservative evangelicals rewrote this history–with the full-throated cooperation of Uganda’s evangelical first family, the Musevenis.

TerranceDC finds it difficult to finally utter the word, letting another quote do it for him, but the question has to be asked: aren’t policies which deliberately increase the numbers of African people dying from AIDS a form of genocide?

Please, read the whole thing.

Filed under: Politics, ethics, fundies, health

Jerry Falwell, dead aged 73

So he got his threescore years and ten, then. TANJ, except that he simply won’t get the glorious afterlife he’s been expecting.

The Carpetbagger Report has a timeline of various highlights of his bigoted authoritarian ranting career.

(via Ginmar)

Filed under: bigotry, conservatism, fundies

Yes and No

This post has been hanging around as a draft since February, because I wasn’t quite happy with it. Lindsay’s recent post (and my response), on how misusing “moderate” to describe faith positions which don’t preach intolerance imputes that the intolerant theology is the orthodox position made me recast it – everywhere that now reads “more tolerant” used to read “moderate”.

The image below speaks to me, but I don’t think it tells the full story. To my religious readers, I’m sure some of you will be offended by the picture. I hope you read the rest. The idea of non-overlapping magisteria [1]is taken to a ridiculous extreme, and certainly there are faith positions not as wilfully ignorant of contradictory evidence as that pictured here.

Image Credit: wellingtongrey.net

The faith side above is a reasonable representation of reactionary fundamentalist views such as Wahabists, Young Earth Creationists, steadfast Mormon polygamists etc. It’s not a reasonable representation of how a whole lot of people of faith I know think, act and believe.

Filed under: fundies, religion, skeptics

The Card’nal Pell eau d’ordure

From an opinion piece that I missed back in February, by Sydney’s Cardinal George Pell titled Scaremongers: “Global warming doomsdayers” are all wrong because, amongst other things, “January also was unusually cool.”

Meanwhile, from people who took actual measurements (emphasis added):

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the highest for any January on record, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Oops.

More blatant errors (and bonus flagrant theological howlers) from His Grace Eminence dissected at Recursivity.

(via)

Filed under: Science, fundies

In a nutshell

A portrait of the authoritarian/fundamentalist mindset:

(Bush) believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. — Colbert

Filed under: fundies

We’re in ur land, redeemin ur children.

The United Aborigines Mission. This stuff went out of fashion years ago, didn’t it? Those missions – the ones that stole children, tortured them, and stripped them of their heritage – they’re completely gone, aren’t they? What with the Bringing Them Home report and all. Not a trace survives, at least not out and proud. Or so I thought.

Until I came across this.

Filed under: bigotry, fundies, indigenous, racism, religion

Gazumped, dangnabbit

Helen got around to mocking Conservapedia first.

Filed under: conservatism, creationists/ID, fundies, moral panics