I had no idea she was that young, which tells you how her life had been ravaged by drugs and who knows what else. Once a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, she reportedly got clean a couple of years ago and it may even be true that she remained so. No doubt they will do testing to determine the cause of death.
RIP.
[NOTE: Every now and then I may repost something from the past that might seem relevant or interesting. Here’s something I originally wrote in 2008.]
I grew up in an era in which abortion was both difficult to obtain and physically dangerous. Today’s commonplace alternative of raising the child as an unwed single mother was socially unacceptable in the extreme. Effective birth control was nowhere near as easy to find as it is now, either. But the lure of sex was just as great (last time I checked, that hasn’t changed).
My enormous public New York high school had a mostly working class demographic. But the two girls in my acquaintance who became visibly pregnant were from the “better” families. Although it sounds like the script of a movie, one was the captain of the cheerleading squad and one the head of the baton twirlers.
They were not my friends, and so I was not taken into their confidence about their lives. But by strange coincidence, my gym locker was directly across a tiny aisle from that of the first girl (whom I’ll call “Sally”) during our sophomore year, and similarly from that of the second (whom I’ll call “Linda”) when we were both juniors.
In those days we were required to go to gym class every day, and to suit up in hideous little one-piece blue cotton outfits with bloomer shorts. Nobody, but nobody, looked good in those things. But at least the boys never saw us, since gym class was strictly segregated by sex.
Sophomore year I noticed the formerly svelte and very attractive Sally gaining weight. I thought little about it—she had started out so thin that the weight gain still didn’t make her fat. But she also began to keep her gym suit unbelted.
Huge mohair sweaters were in style that year, and so for a while I thought little of it as I saw her changing back into her regular clothes after gym class. But her normally happy face grew sadder and sadder every day, and her native vivaciousness was replaced by a subdued demeanor.
Then one day she simply disappeared. The rumor—correct, it turns out—was that she’d been sent to one of those “homes” to have her baby and give it away. She returned a few months later with her body looking exactly as it had before any of this had happened. But there was a different aura about her, an expression in her eyes that told of dark adult experiences we didn’t share.
Junior year, when I started to observe across the way that Linda was fastening her sheath skirt with a safety pin under her sweater because the button could no longer reach the buttonhole, I was wiser. As the small safety pin was replaced by larger and larger ones, I watched and wondered what Linda would do.
Her disappearance, when it came, was briefer than Sally’s. The rumor (also true) was that her parents were raising the baby. She and her boyfriend continued to date right through college, although birth control presumably came into the picture because they managed to avoid another pregnancy. When they graduated from the university they married and reclaimed their now five-year-old child, and then went on to have several more—and to stay married, when last I heard.
Marilyn was a friend of mine during my junior year of college. Perhaps “friend” is too strong a word; she was one of three girls I shared an apartment with for a single semester. Marilyn was neither popular nor especially attractive, and her affect was what I would now call depressed. But I didn’t bother to give a name to it then.
When Marilyn began to have stomach problems—throwing up several times a day, and feeling nauseated much of the rest of the time—I didn’t suspect pregnancy at first. She was the sort of person who ordinarily was very open about all her troubles, of which she had many, and she never mentioned it as a possibility. She didn’t have a boyfriend and hadn’t been on a date in months, which also seemed to preclude a baby. And she kept asking me questions about nausea: what sort of illness might cause the kind of symptoms she was feeling? I hadn’t a clue.
This went on for a week or two before she told us: she was pregnant, after all. In those days there were no kits to be had in the drugstore or the Walmart (there was no Walmart). But there were doctors to whom one could go, and that’s what Marilyn had done.
If she had been depressed before, she was in anguish now. She couldn’t sleep and she didn’t eat. Her main activity—aside from throwing up, which occupied the bulk of her time—was crying. Her face seemed permanently puffy, her eyes a sickly pink, and so swollen they were almost shut.
The mystery of who the father might be was cleared up when she told us, with great shame, that she’d been visiting a friend at another college a month or so earlier and had gotten drunk one night and had sex with a guy she barely knew. She wasn’t even sure how to reach him, but in any event she had no intention of doing so.
What Marilyn did intend to do was to have an abortion. But nobody knew where to go to obtain one.
Marilyn’s best friend Helen, the girl with whom she shared a bedroom in our two-bedroom-four-girl apartment, asked around. Her boyfriend knew a friend who knew a friend who knew a friend who knew…and thus it was set up. Eight hundred dollars cash was the price, a large sum in those days. The address was in the inner city. The date was next week.
Marilyn didn’t have that kind of money. And her parents were the kind she couldn’t confide in, or so she thought. So people gave a little bit, and asked around for contributions. Somehow the sum was raised, and when the day came Helen went with her in the morning to the assignation.
They returned that evening. Marilyn was still crying nonstop. I’ve forgotten most of the details of the story they told, but it was harrowing. The “office” had been no office at all, just a dirty room in a foul part of town, with a lookout with a gun standing guard in the next room. The “doctor” was probably not a medical man, and he had little to say. There was no anesthetic. It had been terribly painful. At least they had the decency, and the knowledge, to tell her to take her temperature regularly for a week or two and to go immediately for medical help if she developed a fever.
Marilyn spent the next two weeks in the apartment with a thermometer in her mouth. She removed it only to eat and sleep, and to look at it at intervals to see the reading. Her crying began to taper off, as did the bleeding (the nausea was now gone), and slowly things went back to business as usual.
Marilyn had always looked sad. But now there was an extra depth of sorrow in her eyes, although her relief was palpable. I kept in touch with her for only a few years after that, and her life wasn’t going too well. But Marilyn had always had troubles, and I’m not so sure it would have gone a whole lot better even without the pregnancy and abortion.
As time went on abortion became legal. Still, I was always profoundly happy that I managed to avoid an unwanted pregnancy and the attendant terrible decisions that I never wanted to face. But I learned that many of my friends and acquaintances did confront them—a third to a half seem to have had unwanted pregnancies (often through contraceptive failure, particularly IUDs)—and chose to abort. Some of them seemed to breeze through the experience with little anguish, while others feel deeply guilty to this day.
The variety is almost endless, the decisions tough. The possibility of unwanted pregnancy is something every actively heterosexual woman must face, except those who know they are infertile (and they face other sorrows). All of these women did the best they could in difficult circumstances. I leave judgment to others; I prefer to have compassion for them all.
I still buy CDs.
But then, I’m a Leonard Cohen fan, and apparently that’s the sort of archaic thing we folks do.
If I’m just buying a single song, though, I usually pay my 99 cents (or $1.29, because inflation has hit the iTunes store) and bypass the hard copy. But any more than a few songs and it’s the CD for me—often a used one, because they can be cheaper.
Why do I do this (besides the fact that I’m a technological dinosaur)? I figure it gives me more versatility. I can hear a CD on a player, my computer, or in the car—plus I can put the entire thing on my iPod and have it do whatever iPods do.
What’s the downside? I haven’t figured out any. The only possible difficulty is storage, and CDs are so small that I really can’t consider it much of a problem, especially since I was raised on records, which are considerably bulkier.
Not just bulkier, but more fragile. They were so very easily scratched, especially when the owner had the listening habit I did—which was to play a favorite song and then change the record. This required a special skill that has probably gone the way of so many techniques from the olden days, such as cutting ice from ponds and storing it before the days of the freezer. I had laboriously learned how to deftly pick up the playing arm so that it made a clean break with the record, and then change to another selection swiftly, letting the arm down silently and ever-so-gently in just the right place.
I don’t need to do that any more; CDs and MP3 players make it so easy to select a track. But I still prefer (or think I prefer) the sound of records. To me they have a warmer, richer, fuller timbre. Digital technology has always seemed slightly metallic and tinny to me, despite (or maybe because of) its clarity, although I’ve made a complete transition to it.
And you?
Socially, yes. Otherwise, not quite as much of one as you might think.
Somewhat like Romney, Santorum has the problem of coming from a somewhat liberal state (although nowhere near as liberal as Massachusetts) where he had to please his constituents. Unlike Romney, Santorum’s a career politician, with no executive or private sector experience to speak of.
This commenter makes an interesting point with which I agree:
How many more months are we going to keep pretending that the argument worth having is who is or is not conservative?
There are only two questions remaining, and those have been the ONLY questions remaining for months now:
1.Who of a bad lot has the best chance of beating Barack Obama?
2. Who of a bad lot will govern the MOST conservatively?
If you think that almost any of these guys is a shoe-in to beat Obama, then it’s the answer to question #2 that will determine the candidate you support. If you think unseating Obama will be difficult and the race hard, then the answer to question #1 will be the one that is most helpful when you decide for whom to vote in the primaries.
And if you, like some people who comment around the blogosphere, think that the eventual Republican nominee isn’t conservative enough (whomever he might be), and that there’s really little difference between him and Obama, then by all means stay home on Election Day. But when Obama wins and goes on to claim more executive power, leads the country in an ever-leftward direction through extra-legislative means, vetoes the more conservative bills of a (possibly) Republican Congress, continues a foreign policy destructive of our relations with allies and weak on some of our enemies, and appoints some very young (in other words, with long tenures probably ahead of them) and very liberal Supreme Court justices and federal judges, then you can look in the mirror and congratulate yourself for having had a hand in causing that to come about.
I’m old enough to remember the rigid boundaries that these movements were supposed to be correcting, and I’m glad the worst of them have been removed. But it’s been an awfully slippery slope, hasn’t it?
…with John Hinderaker, with the exception of his first sentence. Unlike Hinderaker, I never was “confident that Republican voters would oust Barack Obama in 2012, hold the House and, in all likelihood, take the Senate.”
And that’s because what Hinderaker calls, “the fratricidal Republican Party” was bound to find an opportunity to try to destroy its chances. I couldn’t have predicted the exact way it would happen, but the pattern of self-sabotage has been too clear.
However, although I never thought it would be easy to defeat Obama, I have by no means decided it won’t occur. As I keep saying, a lot more will be happening before next November, much of it impossible to predict—and although the Republicans will almost certainly continue to hurt themselves, whether the blows will be fatal to their chances of election remains to be seen.
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that President Obama has decided to extend the exemption for abortion coverage of employees to not just the Catholic Church, but church-affiliated companies. He probably didn’t expect the extent of the protest, and of course he doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize his re-election.
It’s really not an exemption, either: just an “accommodation.” It’s a small concession that will probably put out the fire that was beginning to start. I wonder whether his allies in the Catholic Church have considered what a second-term Obama, who no longer will have to worry about re-election, would do.
Here’s the way the accommodation would work:
…[O]n Friday, the White House rolled out a new rule, where insurance companies, rather than faith-based agencies, will offer birth-control coverage directly to these employees and foot the bill.
“If a charity, hospital or another organization has an objection to the policy going forward, insurance companies will be required to reach out to directly offer contraceptive care free of charge,” one administration official explained.
This should immediately raise a red flag in any discerning reader: what can they possibly mean when they say “free of charge,” and does anyone believe such a thing possible? I’ll tackle the second question first: yes, some people either think this will be provided out of thin air—or from those supposedly exorbitant insurance company profits or other money that comes solely from someone else.
For the answer to that first question: what the Obama administration means is that the cost will be perceived by the consumer as “free of charge,” and that may be all that matters. At least, they hope that it will be perceived that way.
In fact, that perception is one of the points the entire enterprise of providing “free” contraception or “free” health care counts on. Have you ever noticed that one of the features of government-regulated health insurance is usually the number of services that receive mandatory coverage, some without even requirng co-pays? And simple catastrophic coverage—which many people want, and which certainly would drive health insurance costs down—is not allowed (by the way, an option for more minimal coverage options is one of the things Romney fought for in Massachusetts, and lost to the Massachusetts legislature. But I digress.)
It’s no accident that there is so much mandatory coverage in government-controlled health insurance, because one of the goals is to get people to obtain more preventative health care. Now, I’m not against prevention; “an ounce of prevention” and all that. The question is how to go about encouraging people to get it, and who will be paying for it when they do—with liberals, conservatives, and libertarians falling on their expected sides of the spectrum with their answers (too big an issue to get into in this post, but feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the comments section).
There isn’t much question, however, what Obamacare’s proponents think: their calculation is that, the more a service is perceived as being “free” (or at the very least, pre-paid), the more likely it is to be used. And that this will encourage people to get more preventative care, and to use things like contraception.
It’s a lot like the food on a cruise ship: hey, the meals are already paid for, so why not just chow down? The only difference is that people pay their own cruise fares, and of course one doesn’t usually come off a cruise ship healthier than at the start.
But none of it is really free; it’s factored into the price of the service, whoever foots the bill. So mandatory contraceptives are hardly free, but if they are perceived as such, and getting them incurs no extra charge to the consumer’s pocketbook that he/she can see, the argument is that contraceptives would be more likely to be purchased and used, and therefore more unwanted pregnancies would be prevented.
I’ve already dealt with how much a person would have to pay if purchasing contraceptives out-of-pocket; it actually isn’t all that much, and most working people (the ones we’re talking about here, since we’re discussing employer-offered health insurance) could well afford the cheapest forms of contraception. I also wonder about the basic premise behind the mandatory coverage: how many people actually hold back from using contraception solely because of the expense, and would use it if it were paid for (“free”)? I’ve long been under the impression that the usual reasons for skipping contraception are far more emotional and complex than that. A quick Google search doesn’t really provide the answer, either (although, for example, this list of reasons why teens forego contraceptives doesn’t even include cost as a factor).
As for the question of who would actually be paying for these contraceptives now, if not the Catholic institutions:
It’s difficult to see how insurance companies would avoid using premiums to cover the costs of contraceptives. They could, perhaps, use premiums from non-religious employers. Those businesses wouldn’t likely object on faith-based grounds, but they probably wouldn’t be keen on footing the bill for people who aren’t on their payrolls.
Well, perhaps they wouldn’t be keen on it. But how many people would understand that that’s what’s happening? Most people who might realize that this wouldn’t actually be “free” might not be able to figure out who was really bearing the cost, and the administration would be counting on that.
[NOTE: By the way, that WaPo article I’ve been linking to that explores the catch in the administration’s accommodation is by Ezra Klein. Since I’ve criticized him in the past, I’ll give him his due here; I’m surprised he wrote an article so relatively critical of Obama, but he did.]
…some of the pseudo-green practices discussed in this thread are like a dieter putting that packet of artificial sweetener in his/her coffee to go with the piece of chocolate cake by its side.
Just asking:
Aren’t low-flow toilets so inefficient that you often have to flush an extra time or even extra times?
Aren’t energy-saving bulbs so annoyingly slow to get up to speed that people often leave them on all the time rather than wait for the light to brighten?
Doesn’t the recycling of bottles and cans and containers mean that a lot of water is wasted washing them out for the recycling bins?
And I’m always confused by the “paper or plastic” dilemma (not that they even ask anymore; it’s plastic all the way). All those long years they told us plastic in landfills was bad, but now protection of trees takes precedence? I know, I know; we’re supposed to bring our own cloth bags. But how many people do? And don’t most people buy many bags worth of groceries at a time? Are we supposed to carry a whole set of empty ones into the store?
[NOTE: notice that today I’m trying desperately to stay away from the topic of the Republican primaries. Just for today.]
If the Obama administration thought they could sneak this one in (mandatory coverage of contraception) under the rubric of women’s rights, they must be surprised at the depth and breadth of protest it has aroused:
Abortion rights organizations, pro-choice Democrats, and the media have all characterized the debate over this contraception coverage rule as a struggle between the White House and the Catholic bishops. In its editorial supporting the decision, the New York Times praised the Obama administration for “with[standing] pressure from Roman Catholic bishops and social conservatives.” But that’s not accurate.
The list of Catholics who have lobbied the administration to consider a broader definition of “religious employer” than now exists — one that would cover institutions like Catholic universities and hospitals — includes politically progressive Catholics who have been close allies of the White House, like Father John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame who stood up to conservatives who wanted Obama disinvited from giving the school’s commencement address in 2009.
Those “progressive” Catholics who supported Obamacare—and without whose support it probably would not have been passed—feel double-crossed. But they have no one to blame but themselves for trusting that this administration would protect the rights of Catholic institutions (other than churches, which are exempt).
The controversy is part of a much larger power struggle which one could frame this way: how far is the federal government allowed to go to “protect” us? Health care insurance is a major front in this battle, whether it be the individual mandate (personal freedom) of the mandate for contraception coverage (religious freedom). At the same time we demand liberty, many of us demand coverage for the poor and the sick who are not able to pay for insurance, which is a contradiction that takes us out of the realm of what’s usually called “insurance” and into the realm of a government entitlement program. And, since health care is very expensive, that takes us into the realm of big bucks.
And these days, even the issue of religious freedom is poorly understood by many people. For example, in the comments section to the post I linked above, the lead comment at the moment contains this quote [emphasis mine]:
Many of us who have worked for Catholic institutions are not Catholic; many are Catholic, but all of us retain the American right to our own opinions and legal private behaviors. The government should not be attempting to force women to follow the church’s belief systems.
Keep in mind that these institutions are not funded solely by the church and the people who use them. They are heavily funded by the government and most would fail miserably without that money…
The real problem here is that a bunch of once revered, now mostly irrelevant old men are still trying to control women’s sexual behavior with a lot of verbal logistics that almost no women are willing to buy anymore.
I missed the part where Catholic hospitals were forbidding their employees to use contraception. I missed the part where not having something paid for is tantamount to stopping a person from getting it. But doesn’t this perfectly illustrate a certain liberal mindset? It goes like this: pay for it for me or you’re infringing on my right to obtain it.
By the way: when last I checked, contraception didn’t cost all that much, depending on what type is used. So I Googled it, and here’s what I found (these figures are from 2010, so I assume there hasn’t been a whole lot of change). If you go to the website, you can see that we’re talking about a range of from about $60 a year (for example the diaphragm, after an initial expenditure of a doctor visit and about $75 for the diaphragm itself) through $150 or so (condoms and a number of other methods) and all the way up to a whopping $600 a year max (for the most expensive type of birth control pill).
Compare that to the cost of a cell phone or cable TV, for example, which most low-income working people (which is what we’re talking about here) seem to be able to pay for. Is this cost really so onerous a burden that the consciences of Catholic institutions must be compromised in order to save its employees the money? But apparently, this is the hill on which the Obama administration wants to fight.
And that hill’s a slippery slope.
Inquiring spambots want to know:
What is love then, nocleg Zakopane
Good question.
[NOTE: In my continuing quest to show how educational spambots can be, I offer that “Zakopane” turns out to be a city in Poland (funny, it doesn’t sound Polish). It appears to be the Aspen of Poland and rather pretty, actually.
And by the way, now might be as good a time as any to note that, whenever I see the word “Polish” written out like that, I have a tendency to read it as “the stuff you put on shoes and silverware to make them shine.”]
Commenter “T” writes:
Because Newt can be seen as cranky, his attack ads seem more in keeping with his persona. That doesn’t make them right, or even effective, just more consistent. because of that consistency, IMO they can also be more readily dismissed by the viewer.
Mitt, OTH, has tried to position himself as an exectuive, a CEO, the country’s potential CEO. When his campaign unleashed their onslaught of ads against Gingrich (both in IA and FL), they struck me as totally out-of-character to this persona. As a result, I’m more disappointed in Romney at the moment than Gingrich…
So my question is: Given this result from such venomous ads how can Romney’s campaign believe they’re running an effective campaign, especially now, in light of yet another non-Romney resurgence?
Commenter “Lisa” responds:
I have to say I am so tired of hearing about Romney’s “venomous ads.” I live in a state (Utah) where all I have been hearing for months are the anti-Romney ads. They aren’t kind and loving. Are we to believe that Gingrich and Santorum are as clean and white as new fallen snow in this political game and Romney is the devil incarnate? Please. Politics is a dirty game…If Romney doesn’t attack he is “too weak and doesn’t have the fire in his belly.” If he attacks, he is vicious and dirty and “has a glass jaw.”
I’m offering these comments because they highlight an issue I’ve thought about many times before, one that’s become big this primary season: so-called “attack ads.” We hear about it every time there’s a big election: voters want candidates to be positive and not attack each other, but attack ads work.
Well, of course they do. And I think it’s very silly to play a game of “who started it,” because—and here I’m in full agreement with “Lisa”—politics is a dirty game.
The dirtiness is hardly new, as anyone who’s ever seen this ad can testify (I remember it well):
Of course, one big difference is that this is a primary, not a general election, and yet another example of the circular firing squad that is sometimes Republican politics. But that’s not new, either, although I agree that it has reached previously unscaled heights (or would that be “depths”?) this year. And that’s very worrisome; any candidate who survives is tainted goods, and the statements of his Republican opponents will become fodder for many Obama campaign ads. On the other hand, perhaps it will all be old news by then, and the candidate somewhat inoculated against the reviving of attacks of which the public has become heartily sick.
But I have long had trouble with the use of the words “venomous” and “attack” because of the way they tend to be thrown around. The same is true of “eviscerate” and “destroy,” both of which I’ve seen a lot of lately (the words, that is, not the acts). Do these words really apply to these ads? Or are many of them just pointing out flaws in the candidate’s record or positions? Is it just ads that are erroneous that you mind?
Also, as with “T,” do you think Romney is especially hurt when he does this, and Gingrich isn’t because people expect it of him? I disagree entirely; I think negative ads are always a double-edged sword for all candidates who use them. And while it’s true that Gingrich’s negative ads may be in line with his persona, many people reject that persona, and Newt himself explicitly rejected it in his earlier statement that he wouldn’t attack the others, he’d focus on Obama. Also, as “Lisa” has pointed out, Romney was in a position where almost any response of his would have would be criticized, either for being too mean or too nice, too aggressive or too passive.
One other thing to remember in this particular campaign is that it features a huge use of PACs. How much control does a candidate really have over their content and tone? I confess that I don’t know. The law states the answer must be “none,” and although it’s naive to believe that that’s really true, I do wonder how much of their direction comes from the candidates and how much is independent.
It’s my impression that in this campaign the worst ads by far have been from candidates’ PACs. One difference, however, between Romney and Gingrich is that many of Gingrich’s “attacks” on Romney have come out of Newt’s own mouth, and these truly have been more vicious than those of anyone else in the race. I think this has hurt him far more than it has helped.
So I’ve got a request: I would love for someone to give me a YouTube link to the offensive ads in question, especially ones that were official ads from the candidate rather than from PACs. Those ads either weren’t ever shown where I live or I just don’t watch enough TV to have seen them.
[ADDENDUM: By the way, I’m still looking for an answer to the request I made in that last paragraph.]