With all due respect to Slate's Christopher Beam, I don’t agree that the "botax" tucked into the Senate health care bill is a bad idea. Much as it pains me to swallow conventional wisdom, the obvious conclusion in this case—that taxing elective cosmetic surgery is a great way to raise revenue for health care reform—also happens to be the correct one.

Tax-policy buffs generally analyze taxes along three dimensions: equity, efficiency, and economic stabilization. Beam goes for the triad, arguing, first, that a tax on elective plastic surgery would unfairly penalize the lower-middle-income consumers who make up the bulk of the market. (Though, with the prevalence of cosmetic procedures among teens and young adults whose parents foot the bill, I question the persuasiveness of his statistic that one-third of plastic surgery consumers earn less than $30,000.) Second, the tax would harm the cosmetic surgery industry and dampen its stimulating effect on the economy. Third, due to the hazy boundary between “reconstructive” and “elective” plastic surgery, high administrative costs would render its enforcement economically inefficient.

These points would be valid for an income or payroll tax. They are almost entirely irrelevant when scrutinizing a sumptuary, or “sin” tax, which is what this one is. The point isn’t to make wealthier people pay more. It’s to discourage some morally questionable or socially harmful behavior. Cigarettes are the paradigmatic example.

One could also argue that the surprisingly paltry average income among plastic surgery recipients actually presents a more potent argument for the botax. This is one instance of paternalism where father Obama knows best. If the majority of those going under the knife cannot afford to do so, the government should dissuade its low-earning citizens from frittering away their scarce resources on larger breasts and firmer calves and encourage them to invest in education instead.

Tags: cosmetic surgery, health care reform, plastic surgery, taxes

An essay jumped out at me in the new collection Migrations and Mobilities, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (whom I know). It's by Jacqueline Bhabha, and it made me think in a new way about a rule I'd taken for granted: Children can't confer citizenship on their parents. Bhabha points out that this makes children "constructively deportable." They can't really stay, whatever their citizenship by birthright, if no one can take care of them.

Bhabha takes us on a tour of some fascinating cases. In an important one from 1988, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a Moroccan father who'd been stripped of his residency permit to live in the Netherlands, after his marriage to a Dutch citzen ended, could stay based on his "right to respect for family life." The man had a long track record of seeing his daughter several times a week and helping to pay for her upbringing and education. The court honored this evidence of his involved fatherhood. By contrast, a different body, the European Commission, ruled against a Kuwaiti father who had to leave the U.K. after his divorce from a British citizen. He, too, had a child he would leave behind, and with whom a court welfare report said he had a "strong and affectionate bond." But because he had a minor criminal conviction, was unemployed, and hadn't consistently been in contact with his son, the commission decided that his right to respect for family life wasn't violated by his removal from the country. Bhabha writes, "The decision has strong moral overtones about the father's less than exemplary conduct; the rights of the citizen child to continue his strong and affectionate bond with his father were not addressed."

Ruth Padawer's NYT magazine piece on fatherhood and DNA wrestles with the significance of the genetic tie v. the best interests of the child, as KJ and Amanda have already pointed out. This is another part of the picture—a corner in which courts tend to care a lot less about what's best for the child than about protecting the borders. Bhabha describes an American case in which a U.S. district court judge ruled on behalf of a Trinidadian father who challenged his deportation order based on his strong relationship with his 6-year-old daughter, who was a cititzen. The decision was reversed on appeal.

Tags: berrehab v. netherlands, citizenship and gender, jacqueline babha, judith resnik, migration, seyla benhabib, yousef v. united kingdom

Depressing poll numbers from Gallup and USA Today (via Instapundit): Seventy-six percent of women say they disagree or strongly disagree with the recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to delay mammograms to age 50. And 84 percent ages 35 to 49 say they plan to get the screenings anyway. Why? Because they're suspicious and confused: "Seventy-six percent of women said they believe that the panel based its conclusions on cost, even though the task force's report included only scientific studies. Women also perceive their breast cancer risk to be higher than it really is."

Terrific: We're having another death panel moment. The promise of sensible cost-cutting, grounded in evidence-based medicine, gets plowed under. Blame the bad presentation of a task force taken by surprise, and the exploitation of that opportunity by the opponents of Obama's healthcare bill.

Tags: breast cancer, mammograms, u.s. preventive services task force

The Baltimore City Council has passed legislation that would, if enacted, require crisis pregnancy centers to display signs saying that they don’t offer birth control or abortions. This measure is annoying on a number of levels, as the libertarian in me generally supports a business’ or charity’s prerogative to operate according to its own mission and guidelines and beliefs. I mean, it’s a bit like telling a Catholic church it must post a sign saying there are no Torahs or Qurans in the pews: Duh. It’s also insulting to the women who go to these centers: Aren’t they smart enough to figure out pretty quickly what a place has to offer? If they wanted an abortion, wouldn’t they have sought out Planned Parenthood or an abortion clinic?

Also, if you’re really pro-choice, as compared to pro-abortion, shouldn’t you want women to be able to get the help they need to bring their children into the world in a warm and secure environment? Shouldn’t you want to work with and encourage people who are trying to help these women? Laws like this send a message that crisis pregnancy centers are the enemy and set up adversarial relationships between the centers and the cities that so desperately need their services.

But, as much as it pains me to say it, the pro-life movement kind of had this coming. If you want to require doctors to recite statements about abortion that they don’t believe or force them to conduct and “describe” ultrasounds for women seeking abortions (laws in South Dakota and Oklahoma, respectively, that have been struck down), you’re opening yourself up to this kind of restriction. Neither side is going to reduce the number of abortions or unintended pregnancies by telling the other side how to deal with the women who come to them.

Tags: abortion referrals, Baltimore City Council, crisis pregnancy centers

Bill Bennett has a post up at National Review demanding that Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 people be deemed “terrorism.” Forty-nine percent of Americans apparently prefer the phrase “killing spree.” This, we are to understand, is the terminology of the morally unserious, the purveyors of “psycho-babble,” the “politically correct” masses who prefer the “language of mush.” Avoidance of the word “terrorism” is taken to be an avoidance of clarity.

Whether you want to use the word terrorism probably depends on whether you see Hasan’s actions as the isolated ravings of a madman or as part of some larger ongoing struggle. But “coordinated” versus “isolated” hardly maps onto the difference between “clarity” and “mush.” Bennett seems to want to use the word differently; as a kind of practice in line-drawing, a signal of shared seriousness. In this use, “terrorist” is the opposite of “freedom fighter.” It clarifies nothing about the act itself. It merely indicates the speaker’s adherence to a certain world-view, a taking of sides.

I was thinking about so-called "clarity" as I read Emily Y.’s post on some deeply embarrassing e-mails stolen from Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. The e-mails uncovered an attempt to keep unfavorable research out of peer-reviewed journals. ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" reads one particularly charming exchange.) A fellow climate researcher then took to the New York Times not to worry over this suppression of honest and open debate, but to declare his allies victims of “cyber-terrorism.” Pay no attention to those incriminating emails; are you with us or against us? Terrorism! Bad guys!

“Is there anything more important than the issue of terrorism?” Bennett asks in his post. It’s meant as a rhetorical question; the obvious answer is supposed to be no. And that’s absurd. Lots of things, like hernias, are more “important,” or at least more deadly, than terrorism in the United States. But you see where Bennett is going: Hasan’s atrocity was terrorism. Nothing is more important than terrorism. Any rights abridged along the way to prevent another act of terrorism must be justified, because ... nothing’s more important than terrorism. There is a kind of bright, shining clarity in that, an invitation not to muddy the waters with too much thinking.

Tags: climate, maj. nidal malik hasan, Terrorism

In the world of adoptive parents (I am one), there is one golden truth that stands out above all others: Your true family is the family that raises you. Mothers, fathers, sliblings, grandparents—these are not ties of blood and biology, but ties of love and history. Relationships transcend genetics. But the issue here, of course, is that these fathers thought they had both. What must it take to become, in essence, the adopted father of a child you thought carried your genes?

The brilliance of that NYT article on biological paternity is that it took the most extreme possible case—that of a man whose ex-wife has actually married the biological father of a child he thought was genetically his, but is still required to pay his full child support—and let us see that even then, the answer isn't easy. This guy—"Mike L."—loves his daughter. She spends every other weekend with him. "Just because our relationship started because of someone else's lie doesn't mean the bond ... isn't real," he says. He's right, but who wouldn't feel his outrage? The court said that its hands were tied. State law in that case didn't allow for the recognition of two fathers of the same child. It was all or nothing for Mike L., and the court felt that by continuing to parent his daughter—and she is his daughter—he'd made his choice. A man can no more be "a little bit dad" than a woman can be "a little bit pregnant." Maybe that's the court's way of trying to even the biological score.

But of course, it's not that simple. Nothing about parenting, or love, or families, is simple. The judge in Mike L.'s case is part of a group petitioning his state legislature to let courts consider all the messy evidence in these cases, to treat custody, paternity and support separately where appropriate. As hard as it is to figure out what the "right thing" would be for Mike and his daughter, the court wanted to get there. It didn't want to define fatherhood as a DNA contribution, but it also didn't want to leave the fact of that DNA contribution out of the picture.

One commenter on Amanda's post reminded us that women arguably now have more legal choice than men when it comes to child-rearing (or at least, they get to make their choice after a pregnancy is discovered, not before they have sex). With varying political goals coming from both sides of the aisle, there's been much recent effort to ensure that biological fathers take at least fiscal responsibility for children born outside the boundaries of a relationship, whether it would have been his choice or not. If nothing else, one goal is to put two people on the hook for a child's welfare. But—"mother's baby, father's, maybe"—some of the time that second person isn't, biologically at least, the "right" one.

To some small and maybe frightening degree, parenting is about choice. We choose how we parent, and sometimes we choose whether to parent. Mike L. stepped up, and he's effectively being punished. On the other hand, thousands of step-parents, lesbian nonbiological mothers, and adoptive parents have stepped up, too, and when a court recognizes that their status as parent has nothing to do with blood ties, that's their reward. It's not that courts are behind in dealing with the wonders of DNA testing, it's that they've already put aside the idea that biology is all-controlling, and are now realizing that neither nature nor nurture holds all the answers.

The law is trying to deal prophylactically with this problem, proposing infant DNA tests or clear limits on the timing for challenging paternity, at least as it relates to child support. But until the dust settles (if it ever does) around this issue, courts stuck with wrestling with the impossibly difficult issues that arise when family ties begin to unravel should be allowed to consider everything from DNA to carpooling to sliced bread, if it helps them to move mothers, fathers,and children past the disputes and back into doing the best they can to lead their lives.

And to Mike L., if the facts of that article are correct, both sympathy and congratulation are in order. He's being screwed, but (unlike some of the other men profiled) he's a big enough man not to screw up his daughter in the name of fai

rness and revenge. May he and his get some sort of happy ending.