Senate Bill 527: "Adult Involvement" in Abortions for Minors

The abortion rights movement in New Hampshire -- into which the author of this blog fits firmly and irreversibly -- is in a boil over Senate Bill 527, newly introduced in the Legislature by an impressive coterie of pro-choice legislators.

Entitled "An Act Relative to Adult Involvement for Minors Seeking Abortion," the bill would require abortion providers in New Hampshire to offer a particular kind of counseling to pregnant women under the age of 17. Here, verbatim, is what the counselors would be required to do:

(a) Explain that the information being given to the minor is being given objectively and is not intended to coerce, persuade, or induce the minor to choose to have an abortion or to carry the pregnancy to term.

(b) Explain that the minor may withdraw a decision to have an abortion at any time before the abortion is performed or may reconsider a decision not to have an abortion at any time within the time period during which an abortion may legally be performed.

(c) Explain to the minor the alternative choices available for managing the pregnancy, including:

(1) Carrying the pregnancy to term and keeping the child;

(2) Carrying the pregnancy to term and placing the child for adoption, placing the child with a relative, or obtaining voluntary foster care for the child; and

(3) Having an abortion, and explain that public and private agencies are available to assist the minor with whichever alternative she chooses and that a list of these agencies and the services available from each will be provided if the minor requests.

(d) Explain that public and private agencies are available to provide birth control information and that a list of these agencies and the services available from each will be provided if the minor requests.

(e) Discuss the possibility of involving the minor’s parents, guardian, or other adult family members in the minor’s decision making concerning the pregnancy and whether the minor believes that involvement would be in the minor’s best interests.

(f) Provide adequate opportunity for the minor to ask any questions concerning the pregnancy, abortion, child care, and adoption, and provide information the minor seeks or, if the person cannot provide the information, indicate where the minor can access the information.

Apparently this bill enjoys the support of New Hampshire's biggest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE), but most of the rest of the state's Reproductive Rights Coalition, including NARAL New Hampshire and the state's two feminist health centers, virulently oppose the legislation.

I don't like it either. But I nevertheless counsel restraint and circumspection among those who are concerned about the bill.

As everyone knows, last session the New Hampshire Legislature, under the aegis of the new Democratic Party majority, repealed the state's parental notification statute, thus bringing a welcome end to the ignominious Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and back. The statute was unconstitutional because it lacked an exception to the notification requirement for when not having an abortion would endanger the health of the pregnant teen. It was also horrible public policy, because a young girl who finds herself pregnant should be able to terminate the pregnancy -- period.

It would be nice if every girl in that situation wanted to involve her parents in the decisionmaking, but anyone who has ever been a teenager knows what an impossible proposition that is. If my daughter becomes pregnant when she's 16, she should be able to have an abortion regardless of whether she decides to confide her situation in one or both of her parents. In either instance, she should have kindly, compassionate and knowledgeable people around her for help and insight.

As I trust the preceding two paragraphs demonstrates, I am stridently pro-choice. But I also know that mainstream public opinion strongly favors some kind of compulsory adult involvement in the process by which a pregnant minor decides whether to have an abortion. Many, many people who proudly call themselves "pro choice" favor such a requirement. From that standpoint, it is hardly villainous that a bunch of pro-choice Democrats in a closely divided (13-11) chamber would want to innoculate themselves from allegations by the authoritarian right that they are insensitive to public opinion about abortions for minors.

Some of those Democrats hold vulnerable seats. Those in the pro choice community who would question those legislators' support of Senate Bill 527 ought to remind themselves what it was like when there were Republican majorities in one or both chambers. That, after all, in combination with a cynical Republican governor who liked to pander to the religious right, is what gave rise to the irksome parental notification statute that the Democrats repealed last year.

They should also ask Fran Wendelboe, the dyspeptic doyenne of anti-abortion legislators, what she thinks of Senate Bill 527. Highly educated guess: She hates it, because it is calculated to appease people sincerely concerned about parental and/or adult involvement but will do absolutely nothing to decrease the number of abortions actually performed on minors. That's because every abortion provider in New Hampshire already provides counselling to their patients, quite proudly.

Some of my medical provider friends loathe Senate Bill 527 because it is prescriptive when it comes to what gets said by providers to patients. They see that as an infringement on their sacred right to use their best judgment regarding what to say and what not to say to patients.

In response, I say -- with affection and respect -- providers, get over it. The world of healthcare is suffused with mandatory disclosures, most of them arising out of the urgent need of doctors and nurses to avoid losing lawsuits. Ever heard of "informed consent"? What could be more prescriptive than that ...?

The bill needs some further clarification -- by way of an amendment -- in order to assure feminist health centers that their ability to provide services to minors will not be hampered by rigid rules about who must deliver the counseling. There is also vast mischief potential in the provision of the bill that instructs the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to promulgate rules to implement the counseling requirement. Rulemaking is a byzantine process and the DHHS has an extremely mixed record when it comes to using its authority in an enlightened and compassionate manner.

But that's what the hearing process, and committee deliberations, are designed to accomplish -- fixing bills.

Abortion, and the crusade to eliminate it, is properly viewed not as a medical debate nor even a discussion of when life can reasonably be deemed to have commenced. It's really a public policy question that stands at the heart of the eternal struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Those who would outlaw, or severely restrict, abortion don't give a damn about life -- if they did, the wouldn't be so willing to cough up exceptions for pregnancies arising out of rape or incest. What the anti-abortion movement wants is control -- because if they can assert authority over this most intimate part of women's lives, and by extension the lives of men, then control of everything else by an arrogant aristocracy will be easily attained.

Is it really that unimaginable to passionate pro-choicers that the typical New Hampshire parents of a teenage girl thinks it is reasonable that before their 15-year-old has an abortion someone has to tell her that she as a right to change her mind, even at the last minute, that abortion is one of several alternatives available to her, and that she ought to consider whether she would like to discuss her decision with her family? Indifference to that reality plays straight into the hands of the authoritarians.


Postscript: It has been pointed out that a correlation exists between the women senators who have signed on as co-sponsors and the female members of the State Senate who endorsed Hillary Clinton as opposed to Barack Obama in the recent New Hampshire primary. The mere fact that anyone could wonder whether the Clinton-Obama rivalry is somehow driving this bill is proof positive that the New Hampshire Primary is hardly the priceless asset to the state that conventional wisdom insists it is. Who needs something so uniquely calculated to sow discord and mistrust among people who should be staunch political allies?!

Cheating and its Discontents

The first thing that needs to be said about the never-ending Hanover High School cheating scandal is that everyone involved should get over it, and themselves. If you are a parent of a high school student who has become embroiled in this controversy at any level, you should thank whatever force you think guides the universe for giving you an offspring that has actually been around long enough to get to high school and cheat. There are families around you who are not as lucky.

(People who have the N1303K mutation know that pretty well, I note in the margin.)

But if you truly have nothing to do than obsess about this teapot tempest, consider the latest developments, as reported in the Valley News:

An investigation by Hanover High School officials into the cheating scandal that roiled the school community last year has ended with disciplinary action against 14 students, of whom 10 had already been criminally charged in connection with the incident, school administrators said yesterday.

Hanover High School Principal Deb Gillespie said school officials had identified more than 30 students suspected of cheating, including the 10 facing criminal charges.

But in the end, she said, lacking hard evidence with which to pursue many of those students, the high school was able to identify and punish only those willing to confess.

Four in addition to the 10 charged did so.

What was interesting about the article was the divergent reactions of two parents whose kids were both charged criminally and disciplined academically.

First there's Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon, who characterized his son and the 9 other criminally prosecuted students as "scapegoats."

“The message that Hanover High School has sent is that cheating is perfectly fine as long as you get someone else to steal the test for you,” Kenyon told his colleague who wrote the Valley News story. He was alluding to the widely assumed (and highly plausible) assertion that, although ten students did the actual breaking into the school and stealing the exams, many more students thereby obtained the exams and thus are guilty of cheating. Kenyon is peeved the school didn't go after more of them.

Contrast that reaction to that of Nancy Formella, co-president of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and thus at least as prominent in the local community as Jim Kenyon is. Formella has simply declined politely to issue any public comment about the cheating scandal whatsoever. Her son is appealing his conviction to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which suggests that the Formella family shares with the Kenyon family the view that an injustice has been visited upon them.

But, unlike Jim Kenyon, Nancy Formella has the good judgment to realize that any public comment she might make on this subject would be self-defeating. The "I blame society" approach Jim Kenyon has taken -- he's been previously quoted as attributing the whole mess to what he characterized as the school's high-pressure academic culture -- comes across as whiny and hypocritical. Maybe that's because it is whiny and hypocritical, coming from a man who makes his living in significant part by holding others accountable for what he perceives to be their moral lapses.

As for the merits of Kenyon's assertions about the school's decision to go after only some of the students involved in the scandal: His lament is particularly preposterous coming from a news reporter. A journalist who works for a daily newspaper should understand as well as anyone that prosecution (whether of the criminal or disciplinary variety) is always a matter of discretion. Sometimes a guilty person gets away with something because the authorities see extenuating circumstances, but more often than not the decision has a lot to do with a lack of admissible evidence. Next time there's a bank robbery and the cops catch some but not all of the perpetrators, is Kenyon going to use his column to argue that the criminals nabbed by the authorities should be released scot-free?

In fairness, one has to be willing to indulge the possibility that the police and the school are making examples of young Mr. Kenyon and young Mr. Formella in part because they are sons of prominent people in the community. Well . . . as suggested in Luke 12:48, "to whom much is given, much is required." It's not irrational for the authorities to determine that if they go after the offspring of the high and mighty, then everyone will understand that the rules apply to all. I am guessing that this, too, informs Nancy Formella's laudable public silence.

Speaking of fairness, the Valley News ought to consider the ethical implications of letting their beloved Jim Kenyon use the paper as a platform for spreading his controversial take on the cheating scandal. Presumably, the editors justify quoting him on the ground that they would quote any parent of one of the cheaters if that parent chose to be interviewed.

There's at least two things wrong with that rationale. First, as anyone who has ever been quoted in the newspaper knows, context is everything and no reporter ever gets it exactly right. So, an interviewee who is a stranger to the reporter, and has no access to that reporter in the newsroom during the writing process or thereafter, is in a much less advantageous position than Jim Kenyon is when quoted by one of his colleagues. Second, Kenyon's take on the scandal is awfully close to the views of the controversy as expressed on the Valley News editorial page.

It's probably a coincidence. But this is one of those situations in which it is not enough to avoid impropriety -- it's also necessary to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

New Hampshire Primary: Bah Humbug!

As Usual, Shallow Journalism

This blog, which views its constituency as the worldwide solidarity movement of people with the N1303K mutation on Chromosome 7, supports the presidential candidacy of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. But you don't have to be an Obama partisan to be annoyed by the typically glib and superficial way the results of the New Hampshire primary were reported this week.

Here's the classic formulation, from Manchester Union Leader political reporter John Distasio: "Hillary Clinton's upset win after being written off by the polls and national media set the Democratic race on an entirely new course."

A variation is this smug assessment from the Concord Monitor editorial page: "New Hampshire voters think for themselves. With just five days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, pollsters, pundits and even the candidates themselves worried that voters here would be unable to resist the wave of support for the Iowa winner - particularly on the Democratic side - and simply rubberstamp the early results. But - surprise! - the last-minute circus was no match for the full year of cogitating that voters had already committed to this race."

Even the Monitor's January 9 headline -- Democrats Pick Clinton -- was self-serving and misleading.

Here's what really happened. Although pollsters and self-proclaimed "political junkies" (a truly noxious phrase, as if politics were a narcotic that a sober person would strive to avoid) decided that because Obama won the Iowa caucuses, he would sweep to victory in the New Hampshire primary. But when the primary votes were tallied, Clinton actually emerged with more votes.

Specifically, Clinton got 39 percent of the vote, while Obama took 36 percent. Former North Carolina senator John Edwards lagged behind, finishing third with 17 percent of the vote. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson came in fourth, with 5 percent, followed by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich with 1 percent.

Lost in the shuffle is the fact that Clinton and Obama go to the convention this summer with exactly the same number of New Hampshire delegates committed to them. In this sense, they tied. And that, of course, is the only sense that officially matters -- since a primary election, unlike a delegate selection, is a delegate-choosing exercise and not a contest that results in someone winning office.

Indeed, since the New Hampshire primary doesn't actually decide anything other than delegates, a more nuanced view of the results would focus on the fact that Clinton and Obama emerged as candidates of roughly the same level of public support, with Edwards significantly behind and everyone else of no consequence. (Thus Richardson's subsequent decision to drop out.) And the relevant question, as one ponders whether Clinton or Obama will ultimately be the nominee, why 22 percent of the electorate chose Edwards or Richardson as opposed to Clinton or Obama. In other words, if your subject is the success or failure of the Obama campaign, in New Hampshire or ultimately, analysis should focus on Obama vs. Edwards and Obama vs. Richardson, at least as much as Obama vs. Clinton. Or, for that matter, on Obama vs. GOP primary winner John McCain, since they were the serious contenders for the independent voters who got to pick a party affiliation on primary day.

(Another aside about glib reporing: It is not true, as everyone seemed to report, that independent voters get to vote in the New Hampshire primary. In fact, New Hampshire law simply allows voters to register in a political party right at the polls. This registration persists unless the voters change it, which town clerks seem to allow right at the polling place. Such a practice turns political parties into a farce. If we don't want to continue to have political parties, we should stop using them as instrumentalities of semi-final election rounds.)

Analysis should also focus on the primacy effect. This is a recognized phenomenon, which comes down to the fact that candidates whose names appear closer to the beginning of the ballot tend to fare better than those whose names appear later on the ballot. In this year's primary, the candidates' names were listed alphabetically -- Clinton, obviously, way before Obama on the list of approximately 20 Democrats. (What actually happened is that, under New Hampshire law, a letter is randomly drawn as the top letter -- this time it happened to be Z -- and thus the alphabet for purposes of this primary was ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY. But there were no "Z" candidates.) The salient fact is that every ballot in the state was identical. Formerly, they varied precinct by precinct, which tended to avoid the primacy effect in statewide elections.

The other big subject, of course, is the now-endemic inability of polls to predict election results. This, at least, is something the feeble press has noticed. The cause is intuitively obvious: a huge portion of the electorate can no longer be reached by phone. With any luck, this will lead to the demise of the polling industry altogether, which will surely redound to the benefit of democracy. It's polls, after all, that generate all the "horse race" coverage of elections, with its attendant focus on campaign tactics as opposed to issues.

Look, I like Hillary Clinton as much as many of her supporters do. Senator Obama didn't begrudge her right to claim victory in New Hampshire and neither do I. How splendid it would be to watch callow frat boy George Bush stand there at the inauguration and watch this particular woman take the oath as our first female president. But both the New York senator and the Illinois senator, as much as anyone else, deserve thoughtful, perceptive and nuanced coverage of how they did in New Hampshire. We didn't get it.

What's so great about it anyway?

And that's just the first reason that the sacred cow should be slaughtered once and for all. I refer to the myth that the New Hampshire primary is a sancrosanct political ritual, a time-tested brand of so-called "retail politics" that deserves to be perpetuated even as the evidence mounts that it is fundamentally unfair to the other 49 states.

My point is that it isn't even good for New Hampshire. Why? Because there is a finite amount of political energy in any given place, and all the primary fuss takes people away from the important business of state politics. Trust me -- I am at the New Hampshire State House all the time these days -- it really matters who your state senator and your state representative are. Even in a state like New Hampshire with a constitutionally 'weak' governor, the chief executive wields enormous power. Nobody would say New Hampshirans shouldn't care about whether Judd Gregg and John Sununu should continue to represent a state that grows ever more blue in the U.S. Senate. But the New Hampshire primary only takes caring people away from those subjects. Worse, it sets them against each other (as they divide themselves among the respective presidential camps within the party) and thereby sows mistrust and resentment. Enough already!

The cynics among you may be tempted to observe that I live in Vermont and not New Hampshire. But I am on record as having had this opinion during the seven years (1999-2006) I was a New Hampshire resident, during which time I voted in two New Hampshire primaries. I recall sharing my view with my state senator, the principled and intelligent Peter Burling. He pointed out that the primary brings a lot of money into New Hampshire, by which he meant money donated by the presidential candidates to the campaign funds of state politicians. It's an interesting argument, but you'd have to get an economist to convince me that this is a net gain. After all, every dollar I donate to Barack Obama (which he then turns around and gives to my state senator) is a dollar I didn't donate to my state senator directly.

At least we can trust the machines!

Consider the following excerpts from last weekend's New York Times Magazine article about touch-screen computerized voting machines from technology reporter Clive Thompson:

One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience, that complex software can’t function perfectly all the time. It’s the nature of the beast.

When invisible, secretive software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software — combined with touch-screen machines’ well-documented history of weird behavior — allows critics to level almost any accusation against the machines and have it sound plausible.

And the original, left-wing opposition to the machines in the 2004 election focused obsessively on Diebold’s C.E.O. proclaiming that he would help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes” for Bush. Those fears still dominate the headlines, but in the real world of those who conduct and observe voting machines, the realistic threat isn’t conspiracy. It’s unreliability, incompetence and sheer error.

Case closed, as far as this blog is concerned. New Hampshire and Vermont both use optical scanning technology -- which, as Thompson points out, is established and trusted. It creates the all-important paper record of voters' votes. This is one question that can and should be put to rest.

Not to put too fine a point on it, and at the risk of causing offense, I ask in all earnestness: Can you really see the people from the IT department of your workplace being left in charge of the fundamental instrument of democracy? I sure can't.

In Journalism, Display Isn't Everything -- But Almost

Bob Watts, formerly the art director of the web-zine Salon.com, died of cancer recently. Though a devoted Salon.com reader, I'd never heard of the guy until I read the tributes his colleagues posted about him today at the site.

I also share an inability to explain what drew me to these postings. Perhaps it was just a desire to read something different on a lazy Sunday afternoon. More likely, it was the intriguing notion of an art director remembered for his "fearlessness."

I learned a lot about salon.com by reading these tributes -- and as a devoted reader of the site, I am grateful to have a bit of a feel for what it is like to work there. I find myself wishing I had stopped in when I was in San Francisco a few months ago -- Salon employees sound like people who wouldn't mind hanging out a bit with a random reader wandering by.

In fact, they reminded me of my colleagues at Maine Times, the now-defunct alternative newsweekly where I worked as a staff writer from 1986 to 1990. That's not terribly surprising, since alternative newsweeklies are the historical antecedents for Salon.com (and phenomena like Salon.com clearly the present, and the future, of the kind of journalism alternative newsweeklies first invented in the 1960s).

My colleagues at Maine Times were all better reporters than I was, but at least I had enough insight to hang around the art department. It was my custom to hover over the drafting tables to see how my stories were going to look on the page. The folks doing the work at those tables certainly knew I took a lively interest in their endeavors. Though I am not certain, I believe they thought it a good thing that a writer cared about where his words were going.

Graphics seemed so key to me that I knew the paper was in trouble when, in 1988, it commissioned a total redesign from the guy who had recently done the same thing for the Boston Globe. Unfortunately they guy had only one design in him, and soon Maine Times looked like a tabloid version of the Globe. Gone was the distinctive, if home-grown, look of Maine Times, with its bold images and the banner emblazoned in duplicate across the top of the cover, in the typeface also used for that purpose by Vanity Fair but, to my recollection, nobody else.

The long slow death of Maine Times is someting I date from that juncture. Twenty years old at the time, the paper sputtered on for another decade or so, through not one gut two more ownership regimes. I knew just when to leave; my parting gift in 1990 was the original of an Earth Day poster Maine Times commissioned from contribuing artist Robert Shetterly. The going-away present for the person who left after me was a pink slip.

Thus my visceral appreciation for why the good people of Salon.com would be especially bereaved by the death of a beloved colleague whose art gave the web-zine a distinctive look. I was especially moved by what King Kaufman, Salon's excellent sports columnist, recalled about his deceased colleague: "He was one of those guys who could be good at pretty much anything that interested him, and it seemed like everything interested him. He's the only person I've ever known who was fascinated by art, technology, music, kids, photography, food -- and horse racing. And that's just the stuff I know about and remember."

Bob Watts sounds like the kind of person few of us have the pleasure, and the honor, of working alongside. And it's remarkable that he cared about art -- so much so that he went to the trouble of starting to do that for a living at midlife, first arriving at Salon to serve an internship, as reported in the tributes.

At the government agency that comprises my day job my office has the best art in the place. And, on Monday, I will try to be a better colleague than I was on Friday.

P.S. I hope, in the circumstances, that the Bob Watts image I appropriated, above, from Salon.com falls within the "fair use" doctrine of the federal copyright law.

Dear Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield:

Sent today to stateofnh@anthem.com --

I am in receipt of your letter, dated December 20, 2007, postmarked December 28, 2007 and received by me today. Your letter indicatesthat Anthem looks forward to serving me and my family, but then goes on to say that you can't serve my family until I provide a list ofprimary care providers (PCPs) for each of us because "[u]nfortunately, Cigna Healthcare did not provide the requested information."

The biannual ritual of switching between Cigna and Anthem is reallybeginning to get on my nerves. It appears that every biennium, Cigna and Anthem submit proposals to serve as administrator of NewHampshire's self-insurance fund for state employees, whereupon the non-incumbent figures out how to outbid the incumbent and the contract changes hands. Every two years the ritual begins with some effervescent communication from the winner promising that the transition from the loser to the winner will be seamless. And every two years the transition is anything but seamless. Your letter -- andthe fact that you dated it eight days prior to the date you bothered to mail it -- is the latest evidence of this dismal reality.

While it is likely that most families subject to this dreary regime incur only minor inconvenience as the result, for me and my family this causes a major disruption. My daughter is a cystic fibrosis patient. She makes lots of claims. And, even though my insurance is not the primary coverage as to my daughter, what will now happen the next time one of my daughter's caregivers seeks reimbursement from mywife's plan is that the other plan will deny coverage because it can no longer confirm whether my daughter is covered under any other health plan. This is true even though, under the standard industry practice for coordination of benefits, my wife's plan is ALWAYS the primary one for our children (because her birthday happens to comeearlier in the year than mine does).

In this instance, it now happens that both my plan and my wife's are with Anthem -- but, frankly, if that makes the transition any more smooth or logical, you'll be receiving a claim from my cardiologist and my orthopedist because Iwill have a heart attack and fall out of my chair.

As to the requested information about my family's PCPs, I don't getwhy it is my responsibility to provide you with this information before you can do your job. Presumably Cigna is contractually obliged to provide you with this information as a part of the transition process. So, the fact that you opt to make this my problem rather than theirs is simply another example of a insurance company taking advantage of its ability to cajole its insureds unconscionably bythreatening to withhold coverage it is obliged to provide.

Your letter demands that I provide not only the name of our family's PCPs but also their addresses, phone numbers and Anthem PCP numbers.I'm happy to provide their names and their institutional affiliations, because this data is readily available to me. Someone you actually pay to do work, as oppose to attempt to intimidate into doing freework, can dig up the rest of the information.

Here is the list:

[redacted]

Issue my cards immediately, please. By "issue" and "immediately" I mean: cause the cards to be printed AND MAILED today. Do your job. The taxpayers of New Hampshire are paying you far too much money for your thus-far mediocre services.

Sincerely,

Rose's and Felix's Dad