Judge Karen Schreier got one thing right in her ruling last week on South Dakota's law putting bureaucrats and ideologues between women and their doctors. Her Honor declared that the portion of the law "requiring doctors to tell pregnant women that abortion increases the risk of suicide and suicide ideation is 'untruthful and misleading.'"

Funny: that's what I said last year about the sloppy science cited by abortion-ban proponents. And that's what the Harvard Review of Psychiatry said just this week:

In a review of 216 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of abortion and mental health, the authors of this study found that “the most well controlled studies continue to demonstrate that there is no convincing evidence that induced abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is a per se significant risk factor for psychiatric illness.” (p. 276) [cited by "Serena", "New Study Debunks 'Abortion Trauma Syndrome,'" Feminists for Choice, 2009.08.24]

But I'm sure Harvard is biased. They're just liberals who want women to kill their babies so there will be fewer kids growing up to go to college and pay tuition... oh, wait a minute....

Some more interesting facts from Feminists for Choice:

• The percentage of pregnancies termianted by induced abortion is about the same in the U.S. as worldwide, about 22%.
• In terms of physical risk, women are more likely to die from childbirth, appendectomy, or tonsillectomy.
• If women who have abortions suffer any depression, it's more likely caused by the very anti-abortion protestors professing to protect them:
  

  "[Entering] abortion clinics through a group of anti-abortion demonstrators [is] a stressor that has been shown to be associated with psychological distress . . . [And] increasing a women’s belief in her ability to deal with having an abortion decreased her likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms following abortion. Such findings suggest that insofar as inaccurate “informed consent scripts” undermine a woman’s belief in her ability to cope after an abortion, they may contribute to her risk for depression [p. 270 of the Harvard study, emphasis Serena's]."

The whole anti-choice movement appears to be doing more harm than good. If Leslee Unruh and Steve Hickey are truly worried about women's well-being, they'll at least stop trying to bad laws based on bad science.

...fact-based comments welcome at the Madville Times!

I'm not the only one wondering about the impact of South Dakota State University President David Chicoine's appointment to the board of ag-industrial giant Monsanto. SDSU Collegian managing editor Amy Poppinga (hey! she worked for the mighty Madison Daily Leader last summer!) reports that some SDSU students and faculty wonder if Chicoine's new corporate obligations will taint SDSU's research and mission:

Chicoine was appointed to the 11-person board as an independent member on April 15. Through that position, SDSU's president will help hire, fire and evaluate Monsanto's management. As an independent board member, he said he will provide objective input.

Still, some students and faculty are concerned his position might create a conflict of interest. Monsanto recently donated $1 million for a plant breeding fellowship at SDSU, and according to a Securities and Exchange Commission report, the seed company has given SDSU $222,000 in research grants thus far in the fiscal year 2009. Between a retainer and benefits package, Chicoine will personally receive about $400,000 for his work with the board this year [Amy Poppinga, "Conflict of Interest?" SDSU Collegian, 2009.04.29].

$400,000 a year, just for coming to board meetings? SDSU pays Dr. Chicoine "just" $300K to be the university's CEO. I don't begrudge a guy for making some extra income—heck, if being a corporate board member pays that well all over, I'll do it! But when your part-time gig pays you more than your main job, you shouldn't be surprised if some of your people wonder where your primary allegiance will be.

(The Rapid City Journal explains that Monsanto is actually paying Chicoine just $195K, plus another $195K in stock options.)

Junior agronomy major Shawn Mohr explained the problem this way:

"He is the face of the university.... What he chooses to do, even in his personal life, may affect the way SDSU is viewed by the general public."

Mohr said SDSU could lose credibility as an independent research institution through Chicoine's affiliation with the seed company.

"We won't become Monsanto-tainted, but our research, to other agricultural companies, producers and counterpart universities, might be seen as Monsanto-tainted," he said.

Concern that Chicoine's appointment would compromise SDSU's status as an independent research facility prompted Mohr and five other members of SDSU's Students' Association, to put forward a resolution opposing the appointment. That resolution failed Monday by one vote.

On concerns the Monsanto might be trying to influence South Dakota's biggest university, Dr. Chicoine responds with the howler of the week:

Despite the university's ties to Monsanto, Chicoine said he was chosen for his background as an agricultural economist, not for his position with the university.

"They didn't choose me because I'm the president of SDSU. I think it was due to my professional background and my experience as an administrator" [Poppinga, 2009.04.29].

Right. I'm sure the "Current Employer" line on Chicoine's résumé never crossed Monsanto's mind.

Chicoine insists Monsanto wouldn't have picked him if there were any conflict of interest; after all, he says, Monsanto wants independent board members who can give objective feedback... which is why Monsanto balances all the big-industry CEOs on its board with representatives from the Sierra Club, Dakota Rural Action, and other groups interested in protecting the environment and small-scale, sustainable, organic agriculture. Again, riiight.

Read more at the Madville Times!

No, no, no—just as we strike a small victory for science and intellect by electing the smartest man on the ballot to the White House, self-published author (it's like blogging, but with paper) Don Parker decides to give Madison a shove back toward the Dark Ages. Elisa Sand reports in tonight's Madison Daily Leader that Parker is forming a Madison chapter of IDEA—Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness.

Mr. Parker has already mastered the standard propaganda of the creationist wolves in scientist's clothing:

• Parker: "It's promoting freedom in science to go where the evidence leads."
• Sand: "While the concept sounds like an argument for creation, Parker says it's more than that. Creation has a religious theme that says everything was created by God. The theory of intelligent design says a higher intelligence had to be responsible for certain things, but it doesn't define what that higher intelligence is."
• Parker: "I want to provide awareness.... My primary concern is we're losing our freedom to discuss it. Some states have passed laws against teaching intelligent design."
  

Bunk, bunk, bunk. Parker wants to muck up education by fooling folks young and old into thinking that supernatural hokum is equivalent in intellectual merit to genuine biology and evolutionary research. He takes the standard fundagelical tack, ignoring science and the law and dressing up a fool's crusade and a noble stand for freedom.

Parker is saying nothing that wasn't found to be utter nonsense in the famous 2005 case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District et al. If you want to understand why Parker and his fellow travelers are wrong on so many levels, read the ruling of Judge John E. Jones, III. It is a lengthy decision, but a tour de force of legal and scientific explication.

Don tells Elisa he's hoping to schedule a debate with a college professor. Even if I were a full-bird prof, I would not have time for this nuttiness. Let David Bergan drop in for a guest lecture. Let Sibby come to town and live-blog the IDEA events. Let folks huddle in the library to cling to visions of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Intelligent design is a canard, a parlor game that contributes nothing to our scientific understanding of the universe.

I can live with Don's using the schools to promote his happy little books. I can live with my neighbors joining the club Ning and knocking themselves out with re-enactments of the Scopes trial. But Don, if you and your anti-science club come anywhere near the school board and our public school science curriculum, I will raise heck.

...comments always welcome at the Madville Times!

...IM11 Supporters Sure to Boycott Sanford SD Projects

South Dakota subprime lending magnate T. Denny Sanford has donated $30 million to support embryonic stem cell research. Unfortunately, such research is illegal in South Dakota (see SDCL 34-14-16 through 34-14-20), so Sanford is plunging his $30M into the economy of that other big SD, San Diego, home of the San Diego Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. (Also motivating the donation: fewer letters to change in the name: cross out Diego, insert -ford.)

Sanford's money will build a new research facility to be shared by consortium members the Burnham Institute, the University of California San Diego, the Salk Institute, and the Scripps Research Institute. The shared facility will allow researchers to interact and share ideas more easily. As South Dakota's Initiated Measure 11 supporters would maintain, Sanford's money will also go toward killing babies.

...or would they? As my lovely wife has discovered, the IM11 crowd seems unable to resolve whether destroying fertilized embryos outside the womb is the crime suggested by their "life begins at conception!" rhetoric. In vitro fertilization inevitably results in the production of surplus embryos that are not successfully implanted in the uterus. Yet the anti-abortion crowd that would make every woman a ward of the state to protect the conceived embryos in their wombs seems to recognize no crime in the production of excess embryos for the sake of in vitro fertilization. (South Dakota's embryonic protection laws also specifically except in vitro fertilization.)

Of course, IM11's supporters are too busy pushing more bad legislation to figure out their own contradictions. Maybe after the election they'll have time to work up a boycott of Sanford Medical, the Crazy Horse monument, the Children's Home Society, or any of the other projects Sanford the embryo destroyer has supported with his money.

comments always on at the Madville Times!

Ben Stein has struck me as an intelligent individual. His commentaries on economics on American Public Media's Marketplace have struck me as generally well reasoned.

But SD Moderate directs our attention toward the kind of loony anti-intellectualism that shows Ben Stein is just another Hollywood actor trading in celebrity and sound bites. (Conservatives like to dish that line out about actors who advocate causes like electric cars and saving whales; it seems fair to apply the same attack to actors preaching the radical right-wing gospel, don't you think?)

National Review Online's blog excerpts an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, in which the erstwhile erudite Stein boils down thousands of years of scientific progress into a single sentence: "Science leads you to killing people."

Right. Tell that to the folks in med school, or the architects designing earthquake-resistant buildings.

Actually, it all makes sense now: Ben Stein's performances in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Wonder Years were part of a quiet crusade to make education look fatally boring. Telling us science is about killing people fits right in.

Stein's rant echoes the absurd anti-intellectualism that some of our elected officials engage in to rationalize their failed policies. Kelsey at DakotaWomen points us toward a Daily Show clip that makes fun of the failed federal abstinence-only sex education policy. The segment includes this all too real quote from Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee, who responded to the testimony of health education experts before Congress Wednesday with the following:

It seems rather elitist to me for people who maybe have degrees in this field to feel that they, because they've studied, that somehow they know better than the parents.

"Elitist" must be the new orange for Republicans looking to dress up ignorance as principle. Duncan appears to join Stein in a perverse elitism of their own. They seem to be saying, "We don't know as much as others. We aren't experts. We don't get how the world works. Therefore, we are superior."

I thought the whole point of getting an education was to improve oneself. I thought having a degree was something to be proud of.

But maybe (and here's the Madville Times sweping generalization of the morning) this anti-intellectualism explains the dismal state of funding for education in South Dakota. Maybe our Republican governor and elected officials don't really think science and degrees are that important. If science brings money (high-income workers, federal research grants) to South Dakota, great. But education itself? The general public getting enlightened? Oh no, can't have that. Education is just for snooty elitists who want to kill people.

If we want our kids to excel in school, if we want them to beat the Chinese and Koreans on math and science tests, we need to tell them education matters. Comments like those from Stein and Duncan can only encourage kids to tune out their teachers and revel in their ignorance.

submit your intelligent comments to The Madville Times!

Sometimes I read Dakota War College just for the funnies in PP's blog feed:

The CDC recently reported a rise in the teen birth rate. Many wonder why when we are learning about filed contraceptive measures at school are those same schools handing out condoms. Doing so is likened to a story my grandfather always told me, “It’s like giving a kid candy and telling them it’s not good for them and they shouldn’t eat it, but here it is just in case you get a craving for some. Wouldn’t we wonder why so many kids are eating candy?” It’s like giving teenagers the keys to your sports car and a six pack and telling them to be good and not get into trouble or wreck the car. Let’s stop promoting unclear messages and let our children know that the only safe way and the best way is abstinence. It encourages healthy choices and healthy life styles. ["J-Unit" -- another fearful anonymous blogger, perhaps just one of several pseudonyms used by Leslee to create a false impression of multivocality, "CDC reports rise in birth rate," Abstinence Clearinghouse Blog, 2007.12.17]

No sources, no quantification of the dominance of nefarious condom-hander-outers in our schools, just that classic rhetorical strategy, argumentum ad grandfatheriam (throw quote marks around your own words and ascribe them to your grampy).

Here's the Madville Times's funnies for the day:

And here's this morning's AltCause argument for the policy debaters tuning in: Bush's stubborn adherence to the abstinence-only sex-ed policy, despite all evidence to the contrary, is a more likely cause for the reversal of the teen-birth trend. The argument that the increase in teen births links to teachers talking about contraceptives is bogus.

1. Not teachers' fault: The increase in teen births in 2006 reported by the CDC is the first increase since 1991. let me put my old Republican hat back on for a moment: even when that no good wife-cheatin', intern-lovin', sex-crazed Bill Clinton was in office, kids were managing to to have fewer kids each year. Teachers couldn't talk about current events without bumping into a conversation about sex. There is likely little difference in the attitudes of sex-ed teachers toward contraceptives now from their attitudes in the 1990s. Put another way (and turning that musty old Republican hat a bit sideways for a little Sibby effect), public education is as filled with godless secular humanists now as it was in the 1990s. If condom-loving teachers were responsible for increased teen birth rates, the 1990s would have seen kids having kids at increasing, not decreasing rates (and our K-12 enrollments wouldn't be dropping...).

2. Bushes' fault? The last time the teen birth rate increased, President Bush (41) was in office. Concurrent with the present increase, President Bush (43) is in office. Hmm... see a pattern?

3. Bush's fault: Or maybe the real problem is that the current president ignores science and reason by funding abstinence-only education programs whose effectiveness has been questioned by study after study, expert after expert:

3a. Surgeon General David Satcher released a report in early 2001 questioning abstinence education (as explained by Sean Cahill):

...there has been little research to demonstrate the effectiveness of this particular type of instruction. More comprehensive education programs that also provide information on condom use have proven effective in stemming disease transmission and pregnancy among already sexually active youth. Yet safer sex education has not been shown to increase or hasten sexual activity among youth [Sean Cahill, "Scared Chaste, Scared Straight: Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education in U.S. Schools," The Public Eye, Fall 2002, p. 12]

Bush ignored his Surgeon General and continued handing out abstinence-only education dollars to his friends Leslee et al.

3b. The American Medical Association (those would be smart people known as doctors) officially opposes abstinence-only education and favors comprehensive sex ed.

3c. The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2001 found an increase in contraceptive use and a concurrent decrease in adolescent birth rates. They also found the following:

Abstinence-only programs have not demonstrated successful outcomes with regard to delayed initiation of sexual activity or use of safer sex practices. Effective programs tend to provide practical skills, such as exercising control and increasing communication and negotiation skills through role-playing or interactive discussion. Programs that encourage abstinence as the best option for adolescents, but offer a discussion of HIV prevention and contraception as the best approach for adolescents who are sexually active, have been shown to delay the initiation of sexual activity and increase the proportion of sexually active adolescents who reported using birth control. [Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and Committee on Adolescence, (PDF format) "Sexuality Education for Children and Adolescents," Pediatrics (108:2), 2001, pp. 498-502]

For several other sources, see the footnotes to this Wikipedia article. Again, don't trust Wikipedia -- check the sources yourself. Also read here for harmful consequences of abstinence-only sex ed, and check the footnotes.

3d. This science has been available from the beginning of the Bush Administration. Yet the President persists in his irrational anti-intellectualism (perhaps bred as a self-defense mechanism from getting lower grades than the rest of those smarty-pantses at Yale who managed to cheer, drink beer, and still get straight A's) and promotes policies that defy scientific evidence and reasoning. Perhaps when your President ignores science and reason, kids get the message that they can too: "Come on, baby, you can't get pregnant if it's your first time."

Why would a president stand so obstinately against science, even when the policies derived from such irrationality harm kids? Could it be that the president's conservative friends are having too much fun feeding at the federal funding trough? To protect their federal funding, which increased 17-fold from 1997 to 2007, the abstinence-only industry opened a trade association office in DC. Trade association? I thought they were doing public health. Instead, the abstinence-only crowd has become "big business":

Its product is the promotion of chastity through speaking engagements and the selling of curricula and promotional materials. There is underwear emblazoned with “No Sex” on the crotch, T-shirts, pens and bookmarks — you name the tchotchke — but the serious money involves large federal and state grants. The movement is growing and gaining influence. [Camille Hahn, "Virgin Territory," Ms. Magazine (I know -- bastion of liberal feminism, surely not to be trusted), Fall 2004]

And the Bush Administration is happy to protect this big business for purely political reasons:

But the effectiveness debate has largely obscured one underlying reason for the Bush administration's support: politics. Funding abstinence-until-marriage programs allows the White House to reward conservative groups by putting them on the federal gravy train.... Though it flies in the face of small-government ideology, nourishing the nascent abstinence movement with federal funds marks an important shift in GOP strategy to court its restless social-conservative base. [Christina Larson, "Pork for Prudes: How Conservatives Score, While Teaching Kids Not To," Washington Monthly, Sep 2002]

People have a penchant for believing what they want to believe. But to make good decisions -- about sex, about public policy, about whatever -- they need to listen to science and reason. Abstinence-only? Nuts! Let's try reality-only. Even when you don't like it, facing reality is always the right choice.

Get your reality-only education -- and more hyperlinks than you can shake a stick at! -- at The Madville Times!