The Voucher/Band-Aid Problem

And now, on to a less controversial topic, but a nonetheless very present one:

Vouchers.

What are vouchers, you ask?

Well, I'll tell you.

The voucher system was designed to help improve the education of children in failing schools districts, particularly in troubled inner-city environments. Vouchers, generally of a value between $2500 and $5000, are given to parents of school-age children in these districts to be used toward the tuition of a private school.

This may sound like a potentially beneficial way to give economically disadvantaged parents more options with their child's schooling, but in actuality, it only makes things worse.

Let's look at the system's disadvantages.

• Most state voucher systems are thoroughly random, thereby ignoring academic achievement, and without emphasizing academic achievement, the public schools will never improve.
• In areas in which vouchers would be awarded to the highest achievers, it would potentially remove the majority of the good students from the public schools, thereby reducing the quality of the public school as a whole and removing the incentive of "catching up" to the best students on an academic level.
• Student recipients of vouchers have shown little or no improvement academically after several years in the program, and occasionally even a downward trend in their academic achievement.
• The idea that vouchers increase school choice is faulty at best; public schools accept all students, but private schools can turn students away. More options may seem to be available, but in actuality, it's not much of an improvement. Allowing school choice within the public school system would be more effective.
• Public schools receive funding relative to the number of students they have. Removing students from the worst schools would reduce their funding--the opposite of what needs to be done.
• The funding already given to schools may be enough to improve the school, but perhaps it's just not being spent as efficiently as possible. Vouchers remove the incentive to improve budget responsibility.
• Awarding vouchers randomly via lottery decreases the equality in education for all children.
• Most (85%) private schools are a religious setting; sending children to private schools with public funding is a backwards step in the separation of church and state.
• The money given to fund vouchers--often millions of dollars--would be better spent on improving the current public school system rather than pulling away from it.
• Vouchers don't decrease public educations costs, but increase them instead because taxpayers still pay for public education on top of the private school tuition.
• Vouchers don't cover nearly the full tuition necessary for most private schools; giving an already economically disadvantaged family $3000 to help with a $5,000 per year tuition puts them $2000 further into the economic hole every year.
• Public schools cannot discriminate in the admission process, but private schools can--and do. Giving public funding to potentially discriminatory schools will not require them to change their admissions policies; while all public-funded institutions must adhere to equality laws, vouchers are given to parents before going to the school and therefore do not qualify as "public funding" for the school. Vouchers would mean roundabout public funding of discrimination.

Overall, vouchers may help a few individual students, but do nothing to help students as a whole; in fact, they detract from the quality of the education system, creating a disadvantage for those not lucky enough to receive a voucher and be able to afford the remainder of the tuition.

It puts a tiny Band-Aid onto a big wound.

Improving education can't begin with taking away; only with adding or improving on what is there. If you want school choice, allow parents to send their kids to a different public school within the district. If you want school improvement, ensure budget responsibility.

Vouchers will not improve education.

Peace, love, and public schools,
~ RaeAn

Does life begin now? ...or now? ...or now?! ...oh, wait, NOW! I get it.

Since I started on an abortion rant, I'll continue on that vein before I move onto another topic.

Abortion is a complicated issue. My last post was a bit scatterbrained at times, but that happens when the blogger writing it is amid finals and such. It got its point across nonetheless, I think.

However, on to an issue within the issue:

When does life begin?

The theories that I hear the most tend to be...

• Conception
• Heartbeat
• Third trimester
• Birth

With a couple others occasionally sprinkled in between.

This post will be less numbers-based, and more LD-debate form based.

For those of you not fortunate enough to have been on a high school debate team, LD stands for Lincoln-Douglas, the two presidential candidates known for starting the whole presidential debate phenomenon. It's the only official form of debating (correct me if I'm wrong, I might be, I was only on the team for two years) that has a functional basis in morality rather than legality. For instance, the given topic is phrased in terms of "ought" and "should," rather than in "is" and "is not," for the most part. Legal terms and facts are certainly useful in argument--but the topic, and therefore the attempted end point, is related to what should or ought to be the case. An LD topic would not be "This chair exists," but rather "This chair ought to be labeled as existing." I hope you get the gist.

Rae's topic: "Life ought to be considered to begin at birth."

First, semantics.

Life is the state of living. Seems like a simple statement, but it must be said.

Medically, all that being alive requires is a heartbeat and brain activity.

Philosophically, being alive requires much more than that. I'm not talking carpe diem philosophy--I'm more referring to the idea of having quality of life being more important than being technically alive. Quality of existence over quantity of beats per minute.

I would argue that being alive requires:

• Heartbeat
• Ability to think
• Ability to interact
• Ability to survive independently

Fetuses may have a heartbeat. Fetuses may have thoughts. Fetuses may even interact with their mothers through intrauterine movements. But before a certain point, a fetus could not survive independently of its mother.

I'm not saying that the premature babies who would die outside of the incubator aren't alive. They are. They're breathing, they're interacting, their hearts are beating, they are surviving an existenct that is more than what could be considered (I wish I could find a less caustic way to put this) a leech off of a mother's body. Once outside the womb, the heartbeat and brain activity qualifications can be used. (I won't go into vegetables. I don't talk about Terri Schiavo in my abortion posts. Onward.)

As soon as a fetus has a high chance of surviving on its own, away from the umbilical cord, then that fetus could be considered alive.

Small contradiction, you may say: How can you know whether a fetus could survive outside of its mother at, say, x number of weeks?
My answer: You can't, without taking the thing out and seeing if it lives. Sure, you could take case examples, and say that at 32 weeks, a baby could more likely survive than at 30 weeks, but every fetus is different; take two babies born prematurely, both at 28 weeks, even with the same medical treatment, and one may live, the other may not. You can't know.

Let's even take a phrase that the pro-lifers like to throw around: a fetus is a potential life.

I agree. (Don't gasp too hard--it's bad for your lungs.)

However, let's look at semantics yet again.

This time, let's get some help from good ol' Merriam-Webster.

Potential: adj : existing in possibility; capable of development into actuality

Something that is potential exists in possibility, not in actuality. It is capable of developing into actuality--but not actuality yet. It isn't, until it is. And while it still has the label of "potential," it isn't. Only when the label is dropped--then it is.

A potential problem isn't a problem. A potential profit isn't a profit. A potential skill isn't a skill. A potential house isn't a house.

A potential life isn't a life.

A problem isn't a problem until it's a problem. A profit does you no good until it's a profit. A skill won't get you a job until you have it. You'll be homeless until the house is actually there.

Life isn't life until it's a life.

Therefore, until you can know for a fact that a fetus could survive independently--independently meaning without umbilical cord, i.e. without direct nourishment from a mother, even if respirators and such are needed occasionally--then it is not independently alive. You can't know until it happens. Until it is actually on its own, it is a part of the mother, just like a finger or toe or nose or shoulder is part of the mother.

And yet no one raises hell when a woman wants to amputate a finger.

Conclusion: Life begins with the ability to be independent from the umbilical cord, which is unknown until such independence is gained. Therefore, life ought, no, can only be considered to begin with birth.

And that's your Rae of Light for the moment.

Peace, love, and "potential,"
~ RaeAn

Students for Life.... or not.

Before I begin, background info: I'm a college student, I go to UMD in CP, we're generally a liberal campus (as with most campuses) for the most part, though we're a bit more classically liberal in some senses--we let everyone say what they want, even if most of us disagree. Voltaire was a good guy in our eyes. This, of course, as a generalization, will have exceptions, but it works for most of us.

On to my story, and the official rant #1 in A Rae of Light.

So the other day (last Thursday, I believe), I was walking to class in the BioPsych building. As a liberal arts major, I don't go there often, but gen-ed requirements get me there every once in a while. In the courtyard in front of the building, I saw a bunch of those lawn markers in blue and pink on every spare inch of grass. I had seen these before, all over the mall in the middle of campus, and knew what they were for that time.
I checked the area and quickly recognized that the same group had put them there. I saw a bunch of posterboard signs stuck into the ground proclaiming various statistics, such as:

• 3500 abortions occur daily in the US
• 1.3 million abortions per year in the US
• almost 1 in 4 (22%) pregnancies end in abortion
• etc.

To illustrate the magnitude of such, they have 3500 pink and blue lawn markers. An effectice tactic, I must admit--if you think of each flag representing a potential baby, it creates significant food for thought.

I have no problem with such statistics being publicized. They may very well be true, and I believe that they are, since I have no proof otherwise, and they do sound about right, in my humble opinion.

However, just because those are correct doesn't mean that they're enough to convince me, or any other informed person, to be "pro-life" (as they tend to call what I prefer to call "anti-choice").

They try to pull people to their side with statistics, so I will rebut with the same, plus commentary, which I assume they also give when a student actually stops to talk to the kids flyering around the display (I always end up being in a rush to class--the next display, I intend to stop and chat a bit, and you'll hear from me again then, I'm sure).

Abortion was legalized in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. The decision, contrary to popular belief, was made not based on the morality or how "right" abortion is or ought to be, but rather on the issue of privacy: what a woman, especially over the age of 18, chooses to do with her child is between her and her doctor, and due to patient confidentiality laws, the government may not interfere.

Enlightening Rae Fact #1: as far as the government is concerned, abortion is a privacy issue, not a morality issue

There are conflicting statistics, but from what I can gather, before 1973, between 1.2 and 1.4 million abortions occured each year illegally in the US, with several hundred thousand American women who could afford it also going to another country for abortions, though thse numbers are less known. Illegal abortions in this country often involved unsanitary conditions and instruments, untrained practitioners, and a fatality rate of about 3 (reported) deaths per 100,000 abortions (the numbers are very unclear online, so I had to do the math myself: 39 reported deaths due to illegal abortions in 1972, with an average of 1.3 million illegal abortions a year = 3 per 100,000). Of those who survived, the permanent infertility rate was ridiculously high (no clear authoritative statistics available that don't conflict way too much for me to feel good posting here--if you find some, please let me know), almost all due to infection.

Enlightening Rae Fact #2: Abortions occur whether they're legal
or not, the main difference being that illegal abortions have a
significantly higher infection and mortality rate than legal abortions.

In comparison: Post-Roe, as the UMD Students for Life proclaim, 1.3 million abortions occur annually in the US. Also, according to other sources, fatality rate of legal abortions was 0.7 deaths per 100,000 abortions, while the maternal fatality rate was 7.8 per 100,000 live births. Among the legal abortions, Dr. Bohumil Stipal, a "pro-life" supporter, says, "Roughly 25% of the women who interrupt their first pregnancy have remained permanently childless." However, that 25% also includes those women who chose to remain childless for whatever reason in addition to those who became infertile as a result of complications from an abortion.

Enlightening Rae Fact #3: Abortions didn't lessen with legalization.
What did lessen were mortality rates and infertility rates as a result
of such abortions.

As far as the number of pregnancies resulting in abortion, 22% according to our beloved SFLs, you must consider the reasong behind these abortions. This is where I, unfortunately, must drift away a bit from hard fact and go with my own knowledge, because heaven knows where I'd find statistics on this--I can't imagine abortion clinics would go through the trouble of creating a survey for their patients, and if they do, I wouldn't know where to find the results of said survey.

Here are some reasons I personally can think of for wanting an abortion:

• Rape resulting in unwanted pregnancy
• Incest (forced or consentual) resulting in unwanted pregnancy
• Consentual sex resulting in an unwanted pregnancy while the mother would not be in the best situation to bear a child for one of the following reasons:
• Unable to support the child financially
• Unable to bear the emotional roller coaster of giving a child up for adoption
• Discovering the child will have a genetic disease such as Tay-Sachs which would result in young death or a severe lifelong handicap that would greatly decrease the child's quality of life and expensive medical bills that the mother may not be able to afford
• Being in school (high school or college) and realizing that having the child would mean leaving school without a degree and probably not going back, resulting in a life of low-paying blue-collar jobs and a poor quality of life for both mother and child
• The mother having a health condition that would make giving birth more risky than aborting the pregnancy
• Bad timing of the pregnancy as far as the mother's relationship status, lifestyle, education, or something else
• Simply not feeling emotionally or otherwise ready to bear a child

There are lots more, those are just a sample.

Now, the question comes up: which is these are good reasons, and which are not?

Being Jewish, I feel obligated to answer that question with another question:
Who are we to judge?

Cultural relativism would argue that what one culture (or religion, in this case) believes is moral may not agree with what another culture (religion) believes is moral, and that's okay. You can believe that all of those reasons are morally wrong for whatever reason, but I can believe that they're all legitimate and morally acceptable, and we can both be right.

You may believe that abortions are morally unacceptable.
However, I believe that letting women die over 3 times more often during a procedure they would be having anyway due to unsanitary conditions and reducing the quality of life for unprepared mothers, regardless of their reason for their lack of preparedness, is beyond morally unacceptable, but a total affront to our society as a whole.

So say whatever you like, UMD SFLs, so long as you don't actually end up succeeding, only to find that you're causing more deaths than you're saving. I wish you would acknowledge that of all those blue and pink flags, for every pink one is a mother who would have complications with her abortion if it were illegal--because every single flag, both pink and blue, would still be there if abortion were no longer legal.

Just to end on a more humorous note: if there are 3500 abortions a day in the US, and we're overpopulated as it is, can you imagine how much it would suck if 3500 more babies were born every day than there already are? I can only imagine the price of real estate in 25 years when they're all trying to buy houses to raise their own families... Though on a positive note, if more pro-choicers had those kids they were aborting, then we'd have more voters on our side in 18 years since most kids end up with the same or similar political alignment as their parents on such issues...

I believe thats enough light for the day.

Peace, love, and babies (or not),
~ RaeAn

Welcome, and Intro. I'll be more creative with titles later. I promise.

Welcome to A Rae of Light. I'm RaeAn (pseudo-pseudonym, of course... i.e. not my real name, but derived from it), and I will be your host for your journey through the workings of minds--perhaps mine, perhaps not, I suppose we shall see as this blog develops. I've pretty much shied away from the whole weblog phenomenon thus far, thinking that they tend to be venting mechanisms more akin to LJs and Xangas, but I recently realized that, while often still venting mechanisms, they can be more like platforms for communication and common-thought-sharing than diary-bitching, per se.

I have always been a proponent of the theory that we all have something to say, some of us are just much better at portraying it than others. You know the whole "I think, therefore I am" thing? I believe it's biconditional, or iff in logic terms--"I am, therefore I think." It's the getting the thinking to the saying well process that presents a handicap for many of us.

So with that logic, I must have opinions that bear sharing.
I'm also a writer--I won't list qualifications for such here, in case you're a random stranger who wants to stalk me because you think I'm cute or something (not that you'd know, since I haven't posted a picture yet, but hey, whatever, you'll just have to trust me on that one, I guess).
Therefore, as a trained writer, I ought to be able to form these opinions into a good formation of words worthy of blog-publication.

Et voilà, thus came into being the idea of A Rae of Light, which shall spread the light of my infinite wisdom, sarcasm, and otherwise highly informative thoughts unto all of you.

Though, of course, as a writer, my availability of funds is.. well, minimal. Hence blogspot, and not a fancy mine-all-mine domain name. *praises the free-webspace gods*

Erm.. I'm not blasphemous. Promise.

Actually, I shouldn't promise that. I get controversial at times.
How controversial?
I'll let you find out as the blog develops.

Off for now to continue my brainstormed list of random commentary ideas.

Over and out,
~ RaeAn