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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.
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Are we really preparing to underwrite private insurance companies? I'm sorry, but when did they ever do that for us? In fact, I'd say their current symptoms involve a pre-existing condition, wouldn't you? If we're gonna nationalize this bunch of heartless scammers, mightn't this be an excellent moment to think seriously at last about a single-payer health care system? You gotta give John McCain and Sarah Palin credit for chutzpah, running around squawking that Barack Obama's health care plan is booga-booga scary socialist. But the idea that we should reserve our largesse for bean-counters looking for reasons to cut off benefits mid-chemo makes me feel Sicko.
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Actually, Dana, I am a big fan of moral bullying, and wish it had been more effectively used to keep us out of Iraq. I'm hopeful that eventually, through better moral bullying, we will join other civilized nations in outlawing capital punishment. And it is only by building a moral consensus - bullying, if you prefer - that we'll ever see a real reduction in the number of abortions performed in this country every year. I'm not so sure I approve of the particulars of the law Emily wrote about; if the evidence is iffy on whether having an abortion is any more likely to lead to depression than giving birth is, for example, then doctors obviously shouldn't pretend otherwise. But as to whether they are being "forced to lie'' when they point out that there's a person in there, we will never agree. I get that if you don't see an abortion as the taking of a life, you'll see this exercise as offensive. But if you did see it that way, why would you blanch? (You'd still expect doctors to behave with compassion -- and if these are the same doctors who perform abortions, why wouldn't they?) But why would people who sincerely feel lives are at stake think, "Darn, I'd like a shot at saving those lives, if only I didn't have to go so far as to make women read a piece of paper and then sign it; that I will not do!'
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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!
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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.
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One recent Hillary line that sure works for me is the one about how it's no more OK to discriminate against sick people than it is to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. For the last two years, my friend Lisa Girion of the Los Angeles Times has been documenting how insurance companies currently get away with murder in this regard, canceling policies as soon as customers file a claim by hoking up evidence of some pre-existing condition. As it turns out, there is a word for this: recission. And secret bonuses for the most prolific recissors! On Saturday, Lisa finally had some good news to report: One of California's largest for-profit insurers, Health Net Inc., has reversed course and stopped canceling sick policyholders. But what caused the switch? On Friday, the judge in a case that would have been perfect for John Edwards ordered Health Net to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it had dropped—wait for it—in the middle of her chemotherapy. Don't you wonder how many millions more they'll have to spend in pink PR, trying to get across how much they really do care about us? This is why God made trial lawyers—to convince companies it is cheaper to do the right thing the first time.
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.
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