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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL
LOBBY
Former top
CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers
the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful
it is. Read
how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated
by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton
to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing
of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send
full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security
Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a
true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch
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Not planning on getting pregnant? The
Center for Disease Control (CDC) doesn't care. As far as they
are concerned, if you are one of the 62 million women in the
U.S. of childbearing age, you are pre-pregnant. A vessel. You
are a future fetal incubator.
And, according to the CDC,
the medical establishment, government, media and cultural crusaders
should join in enforcing this state of pregnancy preparedness
on you.
In April, the CDC issued a
new report detailing measures to be taken to intervene in the
life, health care, and behaviors of all women, "from menarche
[first occurrence of menstruation] to menopause, who are capable
of having children, even if they do not intend to conceive."
The report bemoans a situation
in which half of all pregnancies are unplanned and focuses in
on the potential harm caused to fetuses by their female incubators
between the time of an unexpected conception and the recognition
of pregnancy. Never mind making it easier for women to decide
for themselves whether or not to become pregnant. Never mind
ensuring that women have the ability to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Not once, in its entire 43 pages, does the CDC's report even
mention birth control or elective abortion.
Instead, the CDC report is
framed in, and takes even further, the logic that has galvanized
the anti-abortion movement for years. Now, not only is the developing
life of a fetus, a potential human being, considered more valuable
and important than the life of the woman whose body the fetus
is part of-the potential life of a non-existent
fetus takes precedence over the life of the woman.
But what is a fetus? It is
a nothing more than a potential human being. And
the only way it can grow into a human, a separate social being,
is by being a subordinate part of a woman's body and her biological
processes for months.
The fact that there is so much
confusion over the truth that a fully formed woman's life-and
her will-is more valuable than this subordinate part of her own
biology is a very sobering sign of the times. And of where things
are headed if there is not a huge outpouring of rage, furious
resistance, and indignant, uncompromising insistence that "Women
are NOT Incubators!"
The CDC report calls for a
radical shift in medical care so that at every point of interaction,
women's doctors are to stage "interventions" to make
sure they are healthy and prepared to give birth. Want to take
your newborn in for a check-up or your eight-year-old in for
a high fever? Expect an "intervention" into your eating
habits, weight, and behavioral risk factors.
Got diabetes or epilepsy and
looking for the care that is best for you? Wrong approach, says
the CDC: "Separating childbearing from the management of
chronic health problems and infectious diseases places women,
their future pregnancies, and their future children at unnecessary
risk."
Further, the report notes that
attitudes and behaviors about child-bearing and child-bearing
preparedness are "influenced by childhood experiences and
prevailing social norms among adults." And it calls for
a cultural and media crusade aimed at changing "public attitudes"
and about "the importance of preconception health behaviors,"
including the risks of tobacco use, alcohol, obesity, and diet.
Get prepared for religious
fanatics migrating from the doors of abortion clinics they are
closing to instead harassing women who enter bars, smoke cigarettes,
or eat at McDonald's. Get ready for the prosecution of women
who engage in these activities for crimes against their future
fetuses. Get ready for women to be totally surrounded and surveilled
by their own doctors and people in "education, housing,
and urban planning." And get ready for calls to weed out
and even sterilize women who are deemed by the state or other
agencies to be unfit to bear children.
Sound too extreme? Wake up
and look around!
Already there is a movement
of theocratic lawyers, backing up a movement of fundamentalist
pharmacists who refuse to fill women's prescriptions for birth
control. Already a second state, Louisiana, has joined South
Dakota in banning abortion throughout the state, and Senator
Tom Coburn and others have called for executing abortion providers.
Already laws passed to "protect" fetuses have been
used against people who, lacking safe and destigmatized access
to legal abortions, self-induced or helped a woman induce her
own voluntary abortion, landing them in jail!
Consider that Rev. Thomas J.
Euteneuer, the leader of Human Life International based in Virginia,
has called the repressive anti-abortion laws in El Salvador "an
inspiration." As the New York Times Magazine described the
situation in El Salvador, "In the event that the woman's
illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a
hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute,
where the government's doctors analyze it and retain custody
of her uterus as evidence against her."
And think what it means that
the born-again Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, has met and
lent political support to the "Snowflakes." This is
a fundamentalist movement that has begun to find women to be
incubators and bring to term every single frozen embryo that
would normally be discarded from fertility clinics. Then, in
a very sick and sinister fashion, they take these human babies
and parade them around-including in photo ops with the Prez-to
crusade against stem cell research and any woman who would chose
not to be such an incubator.
As for the CDC's pretense of
concern for the high infant mortality rates among uninsured,
poor and oppressed women, it is stark: for instance, the mortality
rates for infants born to Black women in Brooklyn are comparable
to the rates many Third World countries. But, when you get right
down to it, this report has potentially genocidal implications.
It talks of intensive interventions
into the lives of women who are at high risk, singling out race
and economics as determining factors. But the "interventions"
are not aimed at solving the conditions that cause women to be
poor, to lack health care, or to be trapped in abusive relationships.
Rather, the report blueprints a way to exploit these women's
poor conditions to further intrude into, and even criminalize
women for, their intimate affairs and every aspect of their lives.
Let's not forget this country's
long and shameful history of removing children from Native Americans
who were deemed unfit to raise them. Or its history of forced
sterilization of Black and Puerto Rican women without health
care, who came to hospitals to give birth.*
This is a report that concentrates
a viciously immoral stance towards half of humanity. It needs
to be answered: by scientists and doctors taking on its recommended
strategies, by social scientists and historians bringing to light
what has happened before in places like Nazi Germany when all
women were classified as breeders, and most of all by millions
of outraged women and men who refuse to march forward into a
real-life Handmaid's Tale.
*Reports of this practice continued
up until the 1970s. See Killing
the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty,
by Dorothy Roberts, or Judith A.M. Scully, "Maternal mortality,
Population Control, and the War in Women's Wombs: A bioethical
analysis of quinacrine sterilizations", in 19 Wisconsin
International Law Journal 103.
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