"Medically Induced Birth of a Non-Viable Fetus"

As Ayelet Waldman states, a simpler term for this is abortion.

Santorum is one of the most militant pro-lifers in politics today.  Does he really have no clue that his position would make these acts a crime?

You really have to wonder what makes people like him tick.

I Learned Something New Today

And to me the implications of it are mind-blowing.

Interesting post at Balloon Juice about how one aspect of the latent conservative racism just doesn't scan anymore:  Crime has fallen so dramatically across all categories - but especially in inner cities - that it's almost completely gone from the public discourse of those bad brown people:

Whether its because of more prisons and police, or less lead, there’s a hell of a lot less crime, so the danger to the Republican voters from scary minorities is mostly limited to their pocketbooks.

Less lead?  I just had to look....and what I found was this article in the Washington Post from 2007.  An excerpt:

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say that lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

There are so many implications to this - both good and bad - that I hardly know where to begin.

First, the environmentalist perspective.  It is amazing to me that we can see real time what a tremendous impact we can have on people's lives by regulating exposure to chemicals.  It really makes you wonder what kinds of things - things that we could fix fairly simply - we are doing today that are adversely impacting people's lives.  And it demonstrates that we must always be careful when introducing new chemicals into our society - it is extremely important that we thoroughly understand all of the impacts before they are introduced.  Even if that means delaying their introduction for an extended period of time.  [I do not know enough about the impacts of lead exposure over the short-term, but these long-term impacts - manifesting themselves in anti-social behavior decades after exposure - demonstrate the need to for extreme caution.]

Second, the political perspective.  Heaven forbid we discover another chemical agent in our daily environment that is as ubiquitous as lead was when I was growing up.  Does anybody seriously think that the lead eradication programs implemented during the 70s and 80s would stand a snowball's chance of taking effect in today political environment?

But most of all I am filled with a profound sadness by reading this.  How many deaths have occurred, crimes committed, people sentenced to prison for their lifetimes, all for antisocial behavior that science tells us is directly related to exposure to lead?  How many millions upon millions of lives have been ruined?

What a tragedy.

Happy New Year!

Sorry.  Been gone much too long...

And just a personal note.  For the last 4 or 5 years, I've always dreaded the coming year, wondering what new disasters will rear their ugly heads.  Those of you who know me personally know what I am talking about.  But for some reason, I have a very good feeling about 2012...