Monthly Archives: April 2021

Mansur Shaheen | Apr 9, 2021

A bill that would prohibit the practice of disability abortions passed through the Florida House Health and Human Services committee on Tuesday, though not without its detractors.

House Bill 1221 was filed by Rep. Erin Grall in late February. Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez filed the identical SB 1664 within the same week. The bill would make it a felony for a physician in the state to perform an abortion if they knew the mothers sole reasoning for wanting the procedure was because they had found out their child would be born with a disability.

Disabilities included in the bill are any physical disability, physical disfigurements, Down syndrome, scoliosis, dwarfism, Albinism, amelia or a physical or mental disease.

Grall received pushback from Democrats in the committee on the bill. Representative Nicholas Duran questioned whether or not the bill may prevent physicians from asking key questions to patients seeking medical treatment. Representative Tracie Davis believes the law would be struck down by federal courts due to past decisions such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

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Grall said the questions fell outside of the scope of her bill and responded by saying her bill was filed to combat eugenics, a process where certain traits are systematically removed from the gene pool.

Whether or not disability abortions are eugenics has been a point of contention for many in recent years. As technology improves, parents can now find out a lot about their children while they are still in the womb. Some experts fear that parents may be more willing to abort their children based on certain traits, which can be considered eugenics. Some, including Grall, compare these types of abortions to the eugenics performed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party to Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Representative Michelle Rayner said that many disability advocates she had spoken to opposed the bill, though. She also said the bill did not truly do enough if the goal was to help the disabled community:

It is claimed that this bill is about valuing [the] lives of people with disabilities. Then I would pose the question, wheres the rest of the bill? This bill is based on the premise that disability is static, it is not. Its also based on the misconception that disability is strictly defined by pathology, that is also incorrect. More often than not, it is our environments that are far more disabling than our disabilities. When people with disabilities have the supports and resources, we know many people with disabilities are more capable of being fully functional members of society.

Wheres the part of the bill that fixes the patchwork of systems we spend literally years of our lives waiting on? Where is the part of the bill that addresses medical institutional bias? What is being done to ensure that these kids and their families have the support that they need to thrive and opportunities when they grow up, instead of joining the rest of us in log jams that are weightless for services? This bill isnt about disability, it uses disability to push forward an agenda having nothing to do with disability.

The bill does have its advocates, though. Rep. Tyler Sirois lauded the bill and praised Grall for filing it. A representative for Florida Voice for the Unborn, an anti-abortion group in the state, gave testimony:

The goal of this bill is simple: To stop the legal discrimination against unborn children who have been diagnosed with a genetic disability or a potential genetic disability prior to their birth. All abortions, in my opinion, are heinous, but these types of eugenic abortions are particularly evil because they purposely target the handicapped for elimination from society.

The bill passed the committee by a 12-8 vote. It will now go to first reading on the house floor.

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Florida abortion bill passes through tense committee meeting - State of Reform - State of Reform

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) The University of Richmonds board of trustees has suspended its decision to leave names associated with racism on two campus buildings.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reported Monday that the board is reviewing options for a broader and more inclusive process. The board said it expects to share its plans soon.

The university announced in February that it would not change the names of two buildings. A dorm was named for Douglas Southall Freeman, a university trustee and rector from 1925 to 1950. He had supported segregation, white supremacy and eugenics.

The university had changed the buildings name earlier this year to Mitchell-Freeman Hall. It added the name of John Mitchell Jr., a former enslaved man who became editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper.

Another building is named for Robert Ryland. He was instrumental in founding what is now the University of Richmond and was the schools first president. He owned at least seven slaves.

The boards decision followed complaints from students and faculty.

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U of Richmond to reevaluate decision on renaming buildings - Associated Press

We can now properly analyse the effect of a four-year-old Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy. Its caused poverty to increase. And the policy may also have caused an increase in abortions. But exclusive research by The Canary has also found birth rates among the poorest women have dramatically fallen; potentially also due to the policy. Yet so far, the DWP maintains that there isnt a problem.

The two-child limit is a DWP policy. The then Tory government brought it in on 6 April 2017. It meant the DWP would only pay Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit for two children in a family; any more than this the DWP would not count in benefits calculations.

The policy has been controversial. A court ruled in June 2017 that the policy was discriminatory against single mothers with children under two. Then, in April 2018, another court said the cap was unlawful. This was in relation to young carers. The so-called rape clause, where women have to prove theyve been raped to get an exception to the two-child limit, also sparked outrage.

Now, four years on, the long-term effects of the two-child limit are clear.

The Canary reported in 2018 that the number of households likely to be hit in the future by the cap would explode. In April 2018, just under 71,000 households were subject to the limit. Now, as of April 2020, the number has rocketed to 250,000:

In April 2018, around 200,000 children were affected. Now, this figure is over 900,000:

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) data on poverty, there has been a four percentage point increase in the number of households below average income where three or more children live; up four percentage points from 43% to 47%. Thats nearly a 10% increase:

As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) wrote:

estimates suggest that by the end of this Parliament, more than 600,000 families are likely to be subject to the limit, pushing an estimated 1.3 million children into, or deeper into, poverty.

The CPAG also looked at abortions.

It found that there was a sharp overall increase after 2017:

In 2016 in England and Wales there were just over 185,000 abortions. By 2019, this had increased by 11.74% to just over 207,000.

But crucially the CPAG said that abortion rates for women who already had two or more children increased most rapidly after 2017:

The Canary analysed the birth rates for women by socioeconomic status; that is for the richest and poorest women.

Our research found that birth rates fell generally. This was comparing 2017 and 2019 figures. The biggest falls have been among the poorest households. In the table below, 1.1 is the richest, 8 is the poorest:

We cannot directly say that the falls are due to the two-child limit. But given the effect of the policy on abortion and poverty rates this additional impact is likely. Moreover, the reduction in birth rates in the poorest groups is sudden.

As The Canary previously reported, between 2013 and 2016 birth rates in groups 5-8 fell overall by 0.9%. Now, between 2017 and 2019 this accelerated to a 12.4% fall. But this drop also correlated with the 11.74% increase in abortions. Because the poorest women are having abortions at over twice the rate of the richest:

There is no comparative yearly data for abortion rates per socioeconomic status prior to the two-child limit being introduced. But abortion rates had been rising across all groups between 2013-2018. It appears from the data that between 2018 and 2019, increases in abortion rates were most marked in the poorest groups (a 0.9 point increase in the poorest versus a 0.4 point increase in the richest):

The Canary asked the DWP for comment. A spokesperson told us:

Universal Credit has provided a vital safety net for six million people during the coronavirus pandemic and is supporting people back into work through our comprehensive Plan for Jobs.

In 2020, 85% of all households had two or fewer children, which is reflected in our policy. There are appropriate exemptions in place.

But the DWPs own research shows that these exemptions are tiny. In April 2018, the number of households with three or more kids the DWP gave an exemption from the limit to was just over 2,800. By April 2020, the number was around 12,500; an average of 4.75% of households hit by the policy across the UK. This is actually a reduction on 2018, where the percentage was around 8% of the total households having an exemption.

The two-child limit has been perhaps the Tories most noxious policy. Its hard not to look at it and think that the DWP and government intentionally designed it to stop poor people having children. Because as the CPAG noted:

If these findings are related to the two-child policy, it is horrifying. Chinas one-child policy was driven by burgeoning birth rates. We have sub-replacement fertility. There is no other country in history that has adapted social security policy to increase child poverty to reduce fertility or encourage abortion. It is a completely outrageous assault on liberty.

The word for this would be eugenics. And successive Tory governments and the DWP have meted it out, without recourse.

Featured image via The Canary and Wikimedia

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The DWP policy that is nothing short of eugenics - The Canary

by: Christine Sexton

News Service of Florida

Physicians who terminate pregnancies solely because women dont want children with disabilities could face felony charges under a bill moving through the Florida House.

Members of the House Health & Human Services Committee voted 12-8 on April 6to advance the controversial bill (HB 1221), which would apply tophysicians who know or should know abortions they perform were requested solely because of prenatal diagnoses, tests or screenings that indicated fetuses would have disabilities.

The Republican-controlled committee approved the bill on a nearly party-line vote, with Rep. Mike Caruso, R-Delray Beach, the only GOP member to vote against it.

Bill sponsor Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, argued the bill was necessary to prevent eugenics, which involves using reproduction to try to lead to people with certain characteristics.

She said the Legislature has a duty to have difficult conversations and that she believes the proposal would help prevent abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

Members of the committee spent more than an hour asking questions and debating the bill, with the debate passionate and, at times, personal.

Committee member Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, discussed her experience of raising a child with an intellectual disability. Tant said she was first advised something was wrong after a sonogram when she was 11 weeks pregnant.

My doctor threw up his hands and he said, I dont know what to do. Theres something wrong. I dont know what it is. Go see a specialist and you might need to consider termination, Tant recalled. The termination I considered was the termination of my doctor. I couldnt take that step. I worked too hard to get there.

But her decision against having an abortion made in consultation with her husband and physicians and, she said, prayer --- has come at an emotional and financial cost, she said.

Tant told committee members she had to fight to get her son early intervention services when he was as young as 3 and had to fight for him throughout his education. While its been hard, its not a decision she regrets, Tant said.

Every single family must have the right to determine their own family issues, she said. They must make their own decision without mandate from people like us who are not directly involved in their lives.

The bill includes in the list of disabilities such things as physical disabilities, intellectual or mental disabilities and Down syndrome. The bill includes an exception that would allow abortions necessary to save the life of a mother whose ife is endangered by a physical disorder, illness or injury, provided that no other medical procedure would suffice for that purpose.

Physicians who know or should have known that abortions were being performed because of prenatal diagnoses of disabilities would face third-degree felony charges and regulatory consequences.

If lawmakers ultimately pass the bill, Florida would be the 10th state to enact a law to prohibit so-called disability abortions. According to a staff analysis, such restrictions have been passed in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Tennessee.

Indianas law has been permanently enjoined, while legal fights continue about the laws in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. Bans remain in Mississippi and North Dakota.

Committee member Kelly Skidmore, D-Boca Raton, said the bill would put another layer of shame on women who choose to have abortions and said it would force women to potentially lie to their physicians or shop for doctors who will performabortions.

Tant also said the bill is moving forward while the House considers making a $40 million reduction to a Medicaid program that helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities live in their homes and communities.

So the message is clear, we really dont value people with disabilities, she said, adding more than 23,000 people are on a waiting list for what is known as the iBudget program.

After the approval Tuesday by the Health & Human Services Committee, the bill is positioned to go to the full House.

But the Senate version (SB 1664), filed by Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, R-Doral, remains stalled in the Senate Children Families and Elder Affairs Committee. That committee is chaired by Sen. Lauren Book, a Plantation Democrat who supports abortion rights.

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Ban on 'disability abortions' backed in Florida House - Palm Coast Observer

Later in life, the tall, shambling Scotsman (who lived from 1847 to 1922) embraced eugenics, arguing that the deaf should not intermarry lest their offspring make the general population deafer. As Booth writes, He wanted the deaf eradicated, their marriages to each other forbidden, their procreation ceased. Due largely to his faulty (and obtusely inhumane) research, 40 percent of the total German deaf population was sterilized during the Nazi era.

Bell was the nineteenth centurys chief oralist, at war with the manualists. Manualist teachers trusted those who found both comfort and efficiency in sign language. But Bell refused to see deaf people as individuals who could make their own choices. To him they were broken and needed fixing. Heres his beloved wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell: Your deaf mute business is hardly human to you. You are very tender and gentle to the deaf children, but their interest to you lies in their being deaf, not in their humanity.

Booths interest in the subject is intimate. Her grandparents on her mothers side were deaf, and as her grandmother lay in a hospital bed near the end of her life, doctors treated her like she was invisible, or a freak, as Booth looked on in seething rage. They showed no capacity to communicate.

Often they didnt look at her face at all, Booth writes. They avoided her eyes, which were hungry for information and seemed to embarrass them. If they spoke to her, they held their eyes big and moved their mouths in long, round shapes. They seemed to think that their distorted mouths could substitute for a certified interpreter, but my grandmother could make little meaning out of the charade. Like Bell, they could not, or would not, humanize the deaf.

Much of the book takes place in Boston and Cambridge, where Bell did the bulk of his research on making improvements to the telegraph and inventing the telephone. Theres some dramatic tension here, especially as Bell wrestles with patent deadlines in his attempt to be first with the phone (a process during which he seems to have cut in line and bent the rules). During these passages, however, Bell, like the book, is really biding time until he can return to the arena of deaf education.

All kinds of ideas are percolating beneath the surface of The Invention of Miracles. Assimilation is a big one: for Bell, the only worthy goal for the deaf was to meld into the hearing world, to leave their deafness behind, to come as close to being a hearing person as humanly possible. He wanted nothing less than to end deafness. Learn to talk; if you sign, do it in private, or only as a last resort.

But as oralism came to dominate deaf education, largely through Bells reputation, deaf communities responded by further embracing sign. Bell, unwilling to accept that he might be wrong, forever stuck in his own head, barely seemed to hear his opponents. If he had, perhaps he would have recognized the cruel irony that the deaf, to whom he devoted so much of his life (however wrong-headedly), grew to hate him. Today there is a Deaf culture, a Deaf community, and Bell is widely perceived as an enemy. Within the culture, Booth writes, he is sometimes referred to as the father of audism, of discrimination against the deaf.

The concept of language is never far from these pages. As Booth writes, in popularizing the approach of teaching the deaf to speak above all else, Bell helped create a crisis of language deprivation. Bells methods of teaching the deaf to speak were difficult to grasp, and extremely time-consuming. Among the consequences: many students ended up with no language at all. And many were shortchanged on the rest of their education, which went by the wayside as Bell and his adherents fixated on the priority of speech at the expense of all else. Booth saw the consequences in her grandfather, who, discouraged from signing, became functionally illiterate.

In spite of her admitted enmity for Bell, Booth never portrays him as less than human. His mistakes created destructive ripples that hurt those he most wanted to help. This tension fuels the book, as does Booths wonderfully descriptive language and her skill in capturing her characters interior lives. Mabel worked on sketching him, Booth writes, marveling at her husbands mind, moving without a moments notice from torpedoes to telephones, tides to ruins to flying machines.

Despite his more monstrous ideas, Bell was no simple monster; if he were, The Invention of Miracles would be a snooze. Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subjects deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.

The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bells Quest to End Deafness

By Katie Booth

Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30

Chris Vognar, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is a freelance cultural critic.

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New biography of Alexander Graham Bell complicates the picture - The Boston Globe

Its not hard to see whats coming at the end of Voyagers, but like all things, its about the journey and not the destination. Thankfully, both aspects of this doltish sci-fi are equally worthless. Its central mission comes about because, due to global warming, humanity will have to abandon ship. The first step in that process is a mission thatll take 86 years and necessitate its crews reproduction. So, a diverse group of American kids (naturally, the main characters are still the same ol interchangeable white folks while everyone else fulfills sideline stock roles), created through some sort of barely addressed eugenics program, are shot into space, their only purpose being to procreate and prepare their descendants to scout a presumably inhabitable planet. Writer/director Neil Burger, a filmmaker whose stints in vapid YA (Divergent) and treacle (The Upside) seem to most inform Voyagers, is in rare form here: Everything in the film is done worse than the media it mimics.

The crux of the sci-fi is a nature vs. nurture debate tackled by stories both classic (Lord of the Flies, Voyagers most obvious influence) and recent (Raised by Wolves). What is natural for people? Laziness? Aggression? Justice? Order? What Voyagers suggests is that, left to their own devices, humans raised in isolation will revert to movie tropes.

The scientific expedition/thought experiment adds an additional wrinkle when Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead) figure out that, as an additional safeguard to the already outrageously unethical creation and brainwashing of these kids, the ships passengers are being drugged to tamp down potentially problematic feelings. Each kid drains a daily glass of blue that keeps them in check. Its like The Giver or THX-1138 or Vonneguts Welcome to the Monkey House orwell, you get the picture. Decreased pleasure response? I want increased pleasure, Zac says, somehow keeping a straight face.

That lines indicative of the utterly silly script, which sci-fi fans will love to poke holes through. How did this organization not see this potentiality coming? Why would they ever allow Colin Farrells ultra-dad and his stockpile of Earth mementos to accompany kids specifically raised away from human society? The subdued aesthetic, all digital displays and white interiors, doesnt do much to distract from these nagging questions, which only get harder to ignore as the film goes on.

As soon as they start skipping their medsa la Brave New World orok, ok, Ill stop doing thisthey start doing whatever comes naturally, be that fantasizing about Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) or wrestling in the exercise room. The changes (immediate and unfettered by conditioning or withdrawal) come signified by rapid montages of Earthling home video footage and flashes of stereotypical imagery: Flowers bloom, hairs stand on end, waves churn. They somehow want what theyve never had and know nothing of: Sex, violence, sensation. After one skipped dose, theyre so hungry for novelty that theyre zapping each other with live wires and making out in the cafeteria. Will this turn into some kind of weird space-Crank by way of Gaspar No?

Pretty wild stuff considering that before this, they all start off as interchangeable, robotic figures whose stoic faces mirror their shared monochrome uniform. It seems that throughout their extended childhood/training, they never got any sort of socialization nor developed any personalities. That emotionlessness translates to actors without much to do, with everyone turning in wooden performances (through no real fault of the performers themselves, who all fall in line with their dull characters) besides Whiteheads Zac, whoas soon as hes off the druginstantly becomes a slimy sociopath. A bit irresponsible and shortsighted for humanitys last hope to be a stolid group that turns out to be one step away from reverting to horny id monkeys.

Well, ok, you say. Lets see how this weird horndog story plays out, I guess. But Voyagers isnt content to let its drama unfold. That might mean having to do something with its characters. So, theres also the rumor of an external force that may or may not be threatening its inhabitants. (Another full-scale lift from Flies). POV shots tracking through the ships corridors creep up on unsuspecting passengers, score mounting like a slasheras if they didnt have enough to deal with already.

Needless to say, the film quickly abandons its orgiastic (yet obviously always PG-13) sensory explorations in favor of a tired tale of desperate factionalismjust in case you were worried that the film might actually push some unique boundaries. Its action is shot shakily and without meaningful attempts at comprehensibility; its lust is shot with a bit more tactile interest, but with the unnatural barriers of the ratings system keeping things constrained. Moral debates feebly come up in obvious scenes that screech the film to a halt, but from the very premise to its ultimately cowardly conclusion, Voyagers is clearly only interested in the most simplistic and titillating angles of its setting: Airlocks, secret caches, security footage. Ideas of civilization, of morality and colonizationof what it means when we think of humanity forming a new homeare ironically far from this sci-fis mind.

The reason its so easy to get hung up on all the facile writing is because the film is so dulla result of narrative predictability and aesthetic familiarity. These stark white walls have kept many more interesting premises and compelling characters sequestered in the lonely vacuum of space. We start picking at contradictions just for something to pass the time.

Lord of the Flies was a provocative (if flawed and cynical) work because of the inherent imperfections in humanitys social structures. When kids are raised inhumanlyisolated from society and trained from birth by computers for a single missionand face what amounts to the same scenario, that relevance disappears. It becomes less a commentary on human nature and more a critique of a narratives own contrivances. And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesnt need any more than its already going to get.

Director: Neil Burger Writer: Neil Burger Starring: Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, Fionn Whitehead, Colin Farrell, Chant Adams, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Viveik Kalra, Archie Renaux, Archie Madekwe, Quintessa Swindell Release Date: April 9, 2021

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

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Voyagers' Sci-Fi Lord of the Flies Riff Is Painfully Dumb - Paste Magazine