More Media Spin (Right Round Baby Right Round....)

If you grew up in the 80's you remember this little gem....



You remember it and now that you listen to it in 2017 you remember why this was a one-hit wonder band (well two hits I guess). As an aside, in case you are wondering what ever happened to them, the lead singer Pete Burns died in 2016. You will be shocked to learn that he was a homosexual and according to his Wikipedia page he was raped as a young boy. Early sexual trauma seems awfully common among homosexuals (i.e George Takei, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc.). It is almost like there is a connection between sexual abuse and later sexual confusion manifested as aberrant sexual behavior....

Anyway. Dead or Alive had nothing on CNN when it comes to spin. This story is technically a political story but I think the broader issues of media manipulation of public opinion belong on this page. The story in question was on CNN and the headline is so click-baity as to be almost farcical: 'Trumpcare' would send her to Mexico for birth control. The basic gist is that Trump is going to make people go to Mexico to get their birth control because he is going to close down Planned Parenthood. Gasp! If that Planned Parenthood clinic shuts down she would have to travel to a FOREIGN COUNTRY to get her birth control!

All Ariana and Kevin Gonzalez want is birth control.

As far as health care needs go, that's pretty simple.

But the California couple says that if the Republican alternative to Obamacare becomes law, they'll be driving over the border to Mexico to get it.

It's not that the Gonzalezes don't have insurance; they have very good insurance through Ariana's job as a high school teacher.

The problem is that "Trumpcare," as Ariana calls it, would probably run her health clinic out of town. It's Planned Parenthood, which the Republican health care proposal defunds because it performs abortions.

The Gonzalezes live in the Imperial Valley, an agricultural area two hours east of San Diego, with a severe doctor shortage. On average in California, there's one primary care physician for every 1,341 people. In the Imperial Valley, there's one physician for every 4,170 people, according to the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

For Ariana, that means it takes well over a month to get an appointment with her gynecologist and then four or five hours in the waiting room to see him, which means she has to take the day off work. At Planned Parenthood, she gets an appointment the next day and is in and out in about 30 minutes.

So she will have to go to a doctor and sit in the waiting room, and that is a hassle and takes a lot of time, even time off work. The outrage! It isn't like any American has to take time off work and sit around in the waiting room to see a doctor for literally every other health issue. And aren't we told over and over and over that what Planned Parenthood provides is "Reproductive Health Services"?  I guess for this one "health" issue someone having to sit in a waiting room and take time off of work is an outrage. I am sure that if the Left gets their dream fulfilled of single payer health care and there is no cost to going to the doctor or emergency room for any reason at all it will drastically reduce the wait times to see a doctor. (that was sarcasm BTW)

This seems like an outrage to me, those villainous Republicans sit around smoking cigars in secret meetings, twirling their moustaches like Snidely Whiplash and plotting ways to keep people from enjoying their sex lives. Every time a woman takes a birth control pill you can almost hear Donald Trump saying "Curses, foiled again!"

It has been a while and with eight kids it obviously wasn't a common feature in our lives but it seems to me that a prescription for birth control pills lasted a while, like a year or more. Another question that seems to jump out at me. The report says that Ariana has to take a day off of work because it takes a month to get an appointment and she has to wait in the waiting room for four or five hours, which, as someone who spent a lot of time in the offices of OB/GYN's the idea of  a 4-5 hour wait to see a doctor (more than half of the working day?!) seems like it might perhaps be an exaggeration (although the article quotes those timeframes more than once). But even if it is not, let me throw something else out there. Mrs. Gonzalez has a good job. Doing what? Well she is "a high school teacher". Now I seem to recall that high school teachers don't work in the summer for like 3 months. It takes a month to get an appointment. Doesn't it make sense that maybe you schedule that sort of time-consuming appointment, I don't know, IN THE SUMMER!? An emergency trip to the doctor is one thing but something you need to do annually that is time consuming for someone who gets the summer off sort of seems like a no-brainer to schedule in the summer months. I am a little concerned that someone who teaches high school students can't figure out that she should schedule lengthy medical appointments that require a long lead time to get during that part of the year when she is not at school? My sister is a high school teacher and has been teaching since well before I was in high school and as far as I know she has never missed a day of school. Maybe the issue here isn't that she has to miss work but that Mrs. Gonzalez doesn't seem to plan ahead at all.

It would also be great if you could use some other forms of birth control other than a birth control pill provided by Planned Parenthood or Mexican doctors. Like for example a condom. I looked it up and sure enough there is a Wal-Mart right in the town the Gonzalez family lives in, El Centro, Wal-Mart store number 1555. The store is on North Waterman Avenue and their phone number is (760) 337-1600 in case Mrs. Gonzalez happens to be reading this. I have never been there but I am confident that they sell condoms in their health and beauty department. If they don't, a simple search at Amazon for condoms brings up 20 pages of results, most available with free shipping in a couple of days. I did a Google search and there are at least a dozen drug stores in El Centro as well. The Wal-Mart is open 24 hours a day so if you run out they are always open. So pretty much anyone can get some sort of birth control for not much money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (except Christmas Day of course and who has sex on Christmas Day?). I get that not everyone likes using condoms or other forms of contraception or natural family planning but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. If you can't be bothered to plan a OB/GYN appointment in the summer when school is not in session and you can't be bothered to go to Wal-Mart to get a box of condoms, well maybe you just need to exercise a little self-control and restraint.

But Mrs. Gonzalez tells me this is un-American!

Ariana has a message for senators as they contemplate whether to pass the law, also known as the American Health Care Act.

"If (Planned Parenthood's) doors are shut, you'll be driving your own constituents to an entirely different country in search of health care, and that's not America," she said. "I don't think that's who we are as a country."

That is not who we are as a country. Huh. I hope Mrs. Gonzalez isn't teaching civics because I am pretty sure that being able to get oral contraception from a clinic that murders babies because you can't be bothered to make a doctor's appointment ahead of time or buy a box of condoms is not one of the central reasons this country was founded. I don't think birth control is in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. I haven't checked but I am pretty confident I am on solid ground with that assumption. When anyone says "That is not who we are as a country", you can pretty much bet that person has no idea what this country was founded on in the first place and doesn't care because an awful lot of people don't care about the Constitution or history, for them America means whatever they want it to mean and it usually involves someone else paying to make that vision a reality. But CNN isn't quite done with the human interest story.

Ariana, 23, knows what life would be like without Planned Parenthood in her town because she's lived it.

Before Planned Parenthood opened in the Imperial Valley two years ago, she became pregnant when she didn't want to, and then later she couldn't get pregnant when she did want to.

Without easy access to birth control, Ariana became pregnant at 15. A doctor tried to convince her to have an abortion, saying she was one of countless teen moms he'd seen just that week.

Without easy access to birth control, she "became pregnant". Weird, how did that happen? Did an angel appear to her and tell he that she would conceive and bear a son? I have eight kids and my wife never just magically "became pregnant".

Planned Parenthood was formed in 1942 out of the "American Birth Control League". I didn't realize that prior to 1942 every 15 year old girl "became pregnant" because they didn't have Planned Parenthood. Who knew? It just happened as part of puberty. Girls begin menstruation, breast development, hairy armpits and "become pregnant".

Oh that's right, she had unprotected sex even though literally everyone knows how to avoid pregnancy via contraception, which as mentioned above is readily available pretty much everywhere including where she lives. According to the story, Ariana Gonzalez is 23. I am almost twice her age and even back in the Dark Ages when I went to school and bands like Dead or Alive were churning out awful music we knew where babies came from. I am guessing that 8 years ago when she was 15 and "became pregnant" that same Wal-Mart store was there and they sold condoms and that the school she attended probably gave them out as well. I am glad she kept her baby instead of murdering it. It just seems odd that while she said that "her "maternal instinct kicked in," and she never considered termination", presumably because she knew that after she "became pregnant" that what was in her womb was her child, a human life, that she wants to keep the El Centro Planned Parenthood clinic open even though they kill babies as part of their "reproductive health services".

By any measure (here is a fairly neutral article from the Brookings Institute) out of wedlock births have exploded in the last fifty years, a time frame that coincides quite neatly with widespread contraception and legalized abortion. Far from reducing out of wedlock births, contraception and abortion has coincided with a major explosion in those births. Whether from a change in sexual morality or something else, like the lack of a stigma associated with out of wedlock births and the corresponding reduction of "shotgun marriages", having ample access to birth control has not reduced out of wedlock births, it has seen it explode. As the article I linked above (from 1996) notes:

What links liberalized contraception and abortion with the declining shotgun marriage rate? Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. Even women who would be willing to bear children out-of-wedlock could demand a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.

The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations without being able to exact a promise of marriage in case of pregnancy. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.

So in the past sexual activity was linked to pregnancy and therefore there was an implicit understanding of a commitment from men if their partner got pregnant. That is still true in Amish communities. It is not spoken of often but there are a fair number of "Sunday weddings" among the Amish which is a code for a shotgun wedding when an Amish girl "becomes pregnant" out of wedlock (most weddings around here are on Thursdays, so a Sunday wedding is squeezed into the church service and everyone knows what it means). There simply are essentially no, as far as I can tell, Amish single mothers. That reality, that having sex leads to babies and that leads to a commitment, was commonplace in human history for all but the last 50 years, or 98% of human history since the birth of Christ. But now, even though you can get contraception easily and cheaply everywhere (except the Imperial Valley in California apparently), women get knocked up at alarming rates. If you search this you will see liberal sources crowing about the "reduction" in unplanned pregnancies but they only look back a few decades rather than looking back when out of wedlock births were still socially stigmatized. Now instead of a social stigma for having a child out of wedlock, there is an expectation of sexual activity without commitment. That was true in 1996 when this article was penned and it is exponentially more true today. 

Women used to understand that there were "consequences" for sexual activity, that it was simply a biological fact. Not just pregnancy but serious emotional consequences as well. Those consequences used to be offset in part by an implicit commitment. If a man gets you pregnant, he is responsible to marry you and raise that child with you. If you don't think he is someone you would want to marry, don't have sex with him. That didn't always work out perfectly of course. But now men are free to demand sex from women with absolutely no commitment and women feel compelled to acquiesce because if they don't, their man will just go somewhere else where he can get sex without any strings attached. Remember the old saying "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?". Crude perhaps but true. Now men are getting the milk for free from lots of different cows and the cows are sending them nude photos. The hook-up culture on college campuses is a prime example of this. Women who want to have a boyfriend better plan on giving them sex on demand and whatever kind of sex he wants and without a corresponding commitment or the guy can just find someone else willing to do so. Women have paradoxically been turned into prostitutes by feminism without the pay. Is that the sort of progress they expected from their feminist "leaders"? Back to Ariana Gonzalez...

She said it scares her to think what will happen if her clinic closes.

"I don't think this is the direction that our country needs to be going. I think we're taking steps backward," she said.

She thinks about a photo that made the rounds on social media in March. It showed Vice President Mike Pence and a group of congressmen discussing the passage of the GOP plan, called the American Health Care Act.

"I see a bunch of men sitting around a table, discussing what I should be allowed to do with my body," she said. "My husband and I can decide what's best for us."

Not men, how can MEN make proper decision about ANYTHING! I guess I wonder what it would be like if the majority of Congress were women. Would Mrs. Gonzalez think that they were unqualified to make decisions that impact men? Maybe we should have a separate government for men and women, which is a problem since there are new "genders" cropping up everyday. Again I hope that Ariana Gonzalez isn't teaching civics because those awful men who are "sitting around a table, discussing what I should be allowed to do with my body" were elected by both men and women. 

See, here is the problem. You want to decide what is best for you and your family. That is pretty ironic for a lot of reasons (like penalizing people under Obamacare who didn't buy insurance and the general attitude of Senators from her state of California that want to tell the rest of us what we can do with every aspect our lives) but I get that. I am all for people making decisions for themselves. You can do whatever you want to with your body. That is your decision. The issue is that you want the rest of us to pay for your decisions. I don't have any interest in doing anything with Ariana Gonzalez's body but I also don't have any interest in subsidizing whatever she chooses to do. You want force the rest of America to continue to subsidize Planned Parenthood, including the clinic in El Centro where babies are routinely cut apart, dismembered, vacuumed out of the womb and disposed like trash (or sold as parts for profit). You demand that America fund these clinics because it is just so inconvenient to schedule a lengthy appointment with a physician for someone who has a job where they get 3 months off in the summer plus winter break plus other holidays throughout the year. You don't want to plan ahead, you don't want to use other forms of readily available and cheap contraception and you don't want to go to Mexico to get your birth control pills. You just want to swing by the Planned Parenthood for your birth control pills and I guess pretend that in the room next door a woman is having a "doctor" ripping apart a baby. Even though, as the article grudgingly admits, the GOP plan would provide half a billion dollars for community health clinics that provide contraception, she thinks it is "shameful" and "un-American". This from someone who thinks that America was founded on the promise of subsidized birth control.

The reality is that this is not about Planned Parenthood clinics being the most cost-effective and timely places to get birth control. That is never what it was about and that is not why Democrats are willing to sacrifice everything else to keep those clinics open. If another organization magically appeared that would replicate Planned Parenthood in every respect except abortion, it wouldn't be good enough. What liberals and their lackeys in the media care about is keeping Planned Parenthood funded and operating because abortion is their highest virtue, the unholy sacrament in their pagan religion of "Choice".

As an aside, if you think the primary care physician shortage is bad now, just wait until single payer goes into effect. As the son of a family doctor I can tell you that the prospect of going to medical school/internship/residency for years and years, getting into an enormous amount of debt, working an often stressful and time consuming job for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than specialists and basically being a government lackey is not going to attract the best and brightest for much longer.

This article from CNN is a prime example of the way the media distorts and outright lies. It is clearly aimed at eliciting a specific response from readers, a response of outrage. How dare those dastardly White men tell this sweet, innocent mom, who happens to be a minority of course, with her touching tale that she has to go to MEXICO to get her birth control pills! This isn't "news", it is brazen partisan propaganda no different from what you would get from Breitbart or National Review. If you want to consume what CNN or MSNBC or Slate or Mother Jones is selling, that is your business. Please at least be honest enough to admit that what it is doesn't fit into the category of news or journalism, it is little more than an opinion piece.

I read stuff like this nonsense from CNN and then I just have to laugh at those who seem genuinely baffled as to why so many Americans have no faith in the mainstream media. Pay attention folks, because you are getting inundated every single day with messages aimed at confusing the issues and squashing dissenting thought. It is only going to get worse.