In a little café, while waiting for a mechanic to paste back together my cranky, geriatric Peugeot, I found myself discussing something men — and especially French men — never discuss. Abortion.
It wouldn’t have been mentioned, of course, if a woman hadn’t brought it up. She wandered in with a sheaf of rough posters announcing a Communist-led counter-demo to fight against the “monarchists,” among others, who are attending Saturday’s annual right-to-life march in Paris, reported here in Novopress. “I should go,” said my companion, a retired Latin teacher. “It would be a good place to meet women.” It was an old joke, but he enjoyed it so much he repeated it twice to his friends, who were also old.
“Why do you Americans make so much over this?” he asked. “With abortion, you kill each other.” No kidding. I think what he meant was that, counter-demonstrations notwithstanding, abortion just isn’t the burning, divisive issue in most of Europe that it is in America. “Les néo-cons make it impossible for women,” he said. “So what are they supposed to do?”
So I told him about Kansas, every Democrat’s favorite example of a neo-con theocracy, where there are more restrictions on crappie fishing than there are on abortions; where one of the state’s most influential political donors is Dr. George Tiller, whose late-term clinic in Wichita has made Kansas notorious and Tiller rich; and where the state’s Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius, is so protective of abortion “rights” that she even vetoed a bill requiring routine inspections of health clinics, lest the inspection inconvenience abortion docs. The proposed legislation was the result of a TV exposé that showed cockroaches and rats in an abortion clinic that was alarmingly filthy. How filthy? As one Kansas journalist told me when I was there last year, “It was so filthy you wouldn’t want your sister to go there.” For sure.
Now a well-financed effort is underway to ask Kansans to take the same “anything goes” approach to embryonic stem cell research as they already do to abortions. A Missouri billionaire named James Stowers, founder of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, is pumping money — as much as $16 million so far in Missouri and, according to one state legislator, another $12 million or so in Kansas — into local political races and, in the process, advocating positions on embryonic stem cell research and abortion that most Europeans would call extreme.
The results have been a bit ironic. In Kansas, voters are being treated to the spectacle of a former “moderate” GOP leader named Paul Morrison switching parties to run a Stowers-funded campaign for attorney general as a Democrat against the Republican incumbent, Phill Kline. Morrison’s big issues? They are two: Kline’s assumed opposition to embryonic stem cell research; and his insistence that abortion providers obey the law requiring them to file a report with authorities when doctors find evidence of child molestation. The state attorney general enforcing the law is something Morrison, with the help of the Kansas press, has painted as extreme. Meanwhile, Morrison and Sebelius are both staunch advocates of unrestricted abortions and unrestricted embryonic stem cell research, positions the local press describes as “moderate.” Their rivals, such as Jim Barnett, the mild-mannered Emporia physician and GOP gubernatorial candidate, are often portrayed as conservative flakes.
But if Kansas were in Europe, it would be a rogue state, isolated from others by the weirdness of its social policies.
Americans often assume that because Europeans are limp on foreign policy, they must be lame on social policies, too. But in even the most liberal bastions of the EU, where judges haven’t tried to smother debate by issuing decrees, abortion is still the subject of a reasonable discussion, as the BBC reported last week. In most European countries, abortions are almost entirely illegal after the first trimester. Embryonic stem cell research, meanwhile, is viewed warily, especially in countries once ruled by Nazis, who also engaged in genetic “research.”
When the issue of stem cell research came up before the EU last July, Germany and Austria led the effort to impose common-sense restrictions, as the Daily Telegraph reported. Elisabeth Gehrer, Austria’s science minister, asked if the EU really wanted “300-400 fertilized human embryos to be destroyed to create stem cells? This destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines is not something we can support. We do not want community money, which includes Austrian money, to support this.”
Gehrer’s comment was reported under a wistfully misleading headline and lead in the International Herald Tribune, which also quoted the EU’s research commissioner: “[The EU] will not pay for the destruction of embryos with EU money,” he said. This was echoed by Germany’s research minister, Annette Schavan, who told reporters, “The protection of human dignity, the right to life, need to be properly entrenched. There should be no financial incentives for the destruction and killing of embryos.”
Noble sentiments from the weasel brigade. Of course, if Kansas politicians had uttered these words, they’d be branded as right-wing wackos by Democrats and by the Kansas press.
This weekend in Kansas, where statewide elections are only weeks away, residents will see the start of an avalanche of expensive direct-mail pieces and media ads all touting Sebelius and Morrison or claiming that unless embryonic stem-cell research is given a clear green light, jobs and money will vanish. They’ll be sponsored by Stowers-funded PACs with high-sounding names such as “Kansans for Life-Saving Cures.”
In fact, as this piece in the Kansas City Star explains, Stowers money has already had a huge impact on the election. Sebelius has raised four times as much money as Barnett — and, as the Wichita Eagle reports, more from out-of-state sources, which would include Stowers, than her opponent has raised all together.
Mary Pilcher Cook, a Republican legislator from suburban Kansas City and a particular target of Stowers, worried that voters didn’t know what was happening in their own state. “As I go knocking on doors,” she said, “I find that unless they’ve been educated through their church, they just don’t know what [embryonic stem cell research] means. They believe what they read in the paper and in the ads.”
The local press routinely conflates “stem cell research” — which nearly everybody supports — with “embryonic stem cell research” — which only billionaires and “moderate” Kansans support.
But Pilcher Cook’s Democratic opponent, she notes, isn’t helpful in clarifying the argument. Complains Pilcher Cook, “She keeps talking about ‘nomadic stem cells’” — something that might give Bedouins and itinerant shepherds pause, and would certainly alarm most Europeans, but probably wouldn’t bother many Kansans in the least.
— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.
