The flood of “fake news” threatens serious damage to our
society as surely as floods have recently destroyed much of the Caribbean and
coastal US or fires have burned up much of Northern California. While it is
President Trump (whom I call the #Trumpenik, from the Yiddish “trombenik”, a lazy person
or ne'er-do-well; a boastful loudmouth) who uses the term most often, in fact it
is he and his allies who create most of the falsehoods. A central and terrifying one is
the denial
by the President and his EPA of global warming, certainly linked to the
increase in horrific storms and fires, and the counter-scientific efforts of
his administration to make it worse by increasing the burning of fossil fuels and refusing efforts to contain climate change despite the fact that it is “Trump country” that is supplying much of our nation’s alternative
energy.
Key to this fake news is the use
of “fake facts” to support reactionary political agendas. While these agendas
are mostly about making more money for the richest people and corporations
rather than the middle and working-class Americans who support them, they also
exploit a bizarre antipathy toward science among a good hunk of our population.
(One explanation is that science sometimes reveals
facts that are incompatible with pre-existing beliefs, so we reject them.
However, the Catholic Church finally got over its opposition to Galileo, so
maybe there is, eventually, hope.) Indeed, these people don't oppose all scientific
facts, but rather those that make them uncomfortable despite being true. This is suggested by the efforts to
manufacture false “scientific” facts to buttress social agendas. A prominent example
is the use of “fetal pain syndrome” to justify efforts to limit access to
abortion, particularly in the second trimester. The flaw here, of course, is that
the evidence for fetal pain is slim to none, certainly before the third
trimester, as shown is several reviews of the literature, and discussed at
length in this article in Popular
Science. LiveScience.com notes that “The American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists (ACOG) said it considers the case to be closed as to whether a
fetus can feel pain at that stage [20 weeks]
in development.” Of course, while the
number of people who would change their positions on the availability of
second-trimester abortion if they believed that the fetus experienced pain
during the procedure would be small to minimal, it provides a convenient, if
false, cover for efforts to restrict access, including a House bill that passed just this month in Congress.
This use of fake facts and junk
science has recently been expanded beyond restricting abortion to efforts to
limit access to contraception for women. Let’s get this completely
straight: access to contraception has been a terrific thing. It has
given women – and men – much greater control of their reproduction,
dramatically reduced the incidence of unintentional pregnancy (although this
still remains far too high), and, duh!, even reduced the incidence of
abortion. While the decision to use contraception should and does remain
up to the individuals involved, it needs to be easily available to them. Thus access
is critical. For many – including but not limited to teens – access is,
instead, very limited, and there are ongoing efforts in Congress and in many
states to further restrict it. Particularly onerous and vile is the effort of
the Trump administration to roll back the ACA’s mandate for insurers to cover
birth control, pandering to the religious right.
A terrific piece by Aaron Carroll
on October 10, 2017 in the NY Times, “Doubtful science behind arguments to restrict birth control access”, details and refutes the bogus claims made by
those who want, bizarrely, to do so. These include the idea that access to
contraception has not reduced unintended pregnancy (it absolutely and most
assuredly has, and greater availability would further reduce it). The Trump
(and at the time, Tom Price-led) Department of Health and Human Services used
cherry-picked and archaic data to support its tortured argument. Carroll notes
that “In 2011, the unintended pregnancy rate hit a 30-year low. And the
teenage pregnancy rate and teenage birthrate right now are at record lows in
the United States. This is largely explained by the use of reliable and highly
effective contraception.”
HHS also argues that there are
health risks, especially from hormonal contraceptives. There are, of course,
but there are health risks and side effects from any drug treatment, and the
risk of harm from the treatment has to be weighed against the probability of
benefit. Ironically, in the care of hormonal contraception, the most
significant side effects (both symptoms and even blood clots) are similar to
(if generally less severe than) those from the condition contraception is
designed to prevent – pregnancy. That is, not using contraception
because of concern about these side effects and then getting pregnant increases
the risk of these adverse events!
The bugbear for religious
conservatives in this debate is their fear that contraceptive availability will
increase people – especially teens -- having sex, but for the rest of us the
concern is how this would impact the unintended pregnancy rate. Carroll cites a
“2016 study in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that the
unintended pregnancy rate among women who earn less than the federal poverty
line was two to three times the national average in 2011. An earlier study showed that in the
years before, that rate was up to five times higher.” From a cost point
of view, the study’s author, Jeffrey Peipert, notes that “Every dollar of
public funding invested in family planning saves taxpayers at least $3.74 in pregnancy-related costs.” For women (and their partners), especially those
who are low-income or teens, the direct cost for contraception is sometimes
prohibitive, especially for the most effect type of
contraception, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), IUDs and hormonal
implants, that have a high one-time up-front cost. It is the programs to make
these more affordable and available are exactly the ones being targeted for
major cuts. And, in the “adding insult to injury” department, the justification
for cutting some programs is sometimes the existence of other programs, which
are also being targeted for cuts!
The use of junk science, sadly but
unsurprisingly, is not limited to contraception, abortion and even climate
change. In a Viewpoint piece published in JAMA, October 10, 2017,
“Flawed theories to explain child physical abuse”, John Leventhal documents a new trend in legal
cases of child abuse. Defense attorneys bring in “medical experts” who testify
that something else could have caused the child’s injuries. These include real
diseases that could cause the findings but are both uncommon and can be ruled
out with proper workup, real diseases that are very uncommon and unlikely to
cause the findings, and essentially made-up conditions to explain the findings.
Since child abuse is generally not a controversial area (nobody claims to be in
favor of it!) the reasons for this seem to be mainly personal gain – such
“experts” make big money for this testimony. There are not that many real
experts in child trauma willing to offer absurd pseud-explanations for the injury,
so there will be fewer of you willing to testify in defense of the
perpetrators, so you again stand to make a lot more money.
In any case, the use of fake or
fraudulent science and fake facts to support political agendas is one of the
many bad things growing in the fertile “don’t try to tell me the facts” environment
in Trumpian politics. The administration is now allied with “traditional”
Republicans to facilitate rape of the planet in pursuit of gains for the
wealthiest, and with “populists” in pursuit of social repression. There is some
irony in that these advocates for “freedom” (e.g., from gun control) are so
intent on denying it to others (e.g., gays, women, poor people, children), but
apparently this is a long-standing US tradition (see: slavery), which inspired
Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote “Those who deny freedom
to others deserve it not for themselves,”
There is also irony in the pursuit of the cloak of (fake) scientific facts to
facilitate an anti-scientific agenda.
But the irony is not nearly
sufficient satisfaction to mitigate the terror.
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