Your body, your Gestational Certificate application

I’m just going to let this one speak for itself:

Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant “by means other than sexual intercourse.”

According to a draft of the recommended change in state law, every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through assisted reproduction therapy such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and egg donation, must first file for a “petition for parentage” in their local county probate court.

Only women who are married will be considered for the “gestational certificate” that must be presented to any doctor who facilitates the pregnancy. Further, the “gestational certificate” will only be given to married couples that successfully complete the same screening process currently required by law of adoptive parents.

As it the draft of the new law reads now, an intended parent “who knowingly or willingly participates in an artificial reproduction procedure” without court approval, “commits unauthorized reproduction, a Class B misdemeanor.” The criminal charges will be the same for physicians who commit “unauthorized practice of artificial reproduction.”

The change in Indiana law to require marriage as a condition for motherhood and criminalizing “unauthorized reproduction” was introduced at a summer meeting of the Indiana General Assembly’s Health Finance Commission on September 29 and a final version of the bill will come up for a vote at the next meeting at the end of this month. [link]

The draft of the bill is available in pdf. Leaving aside Laura McPhee’s hyperbole here–there’s a difference between a condition for motherhood and a condition for fertility treatment, although single mothers in general will probably be the next target and DuctapeFatwa may be onto something with the assertion that “Considering the plans to dump Roe vs Wade and ban Plan B, this is essentially an Unauthorized Sexual Intercourse bill.”–this is probably the most vile, disgusting to come out of a legislative assembly yet this year. And it’s been a bad year.

Condemned to repeat

Americans are losing the vast majority of their aural history according to a new study commissioned by the library of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board. on a small scale, we’re all familiar with the problem: what to do with the cases of vinyl and 8-tracks in the garage now that turntables are hard to come by and expensive, and 8-track decks are entirely a thing of the past? For most of us, this situation is a nostalgia-inducing nuisance. When your reason for existing is to archive and make available centuries’ worth of information for the general public, things are a little more dire. You can archive old recording, alright, can you archive the machinery? And if you can’t, what good is archiving the media? Moreover, when it comes to audio and video recordings, what you really want is the sounds and images, not the media…although having the original media is fine, too. So what are you to do? The answer is apparently nothing. In 1972, Congress extended the copyright for 95 years for all recordings made prior to the effective date of the law. The hope was (ostensibly) that the extended copyright would encourage copyright holders to rerelease old recordings for profit and shift the burden of preservation to the private sector–think of it as welfare reform for wax cylinders. However, the 1972 copyright act has backfired, as everyone except the recording industry thought it would, and our aural history is getting harder and harder to find. THe recording industry hasn’t had the financial incentive to step up to the plate, long tail or no, and even libraries’ hands are tied when it come to making usable copies. It’s too bad this report wasn’t commissioned before the DMCA. Then again, I’m not sure the Distinguished Gentlemen from from Sony and Disney would have cared:

The copyright status of historical sound recordings is unique among the creative arts in the United States. Federal law did not protect recordings until February 15, 1972. In fact, federal copyright law states that pre-1972 recordings will be protected by state and common law copyright until the year 2067. Although other copyrighted works routinely enter the public domain, this is not the case for recorded sound. With the exception of recordings of a few companies whose assets have been abandoned or donated to the public, there are virtually no public domain U.S. sound recordings. This includes many of the very first recordings, which were published as early as the 1890s. The usual allowances for copying or distributing given to older works by federal law under the orphan works clause do not and will not apply to pre-1972 recordings, further impeding public access. Because only the copyright owner can legally make old recordings available, historical recordings are at risk of physical loss as well as of passing, unnoticed, from the nation’s aural memory.

One consideration by Congress in extending copyright protection to owners for such a long period was to give those owners an incentive to reissue, and thereby preserve, older recordings. How successful has this incentive been over time? This report answers that question by quantifying the commercial accessibility of recordings published before 1965. Recordings, like other publications, do not usually remain in print in perpetuity. On the basis of statistical analysis, this report shows that most pre-1965 recordings have not been reissued for public sale and are accessible only to those who visit the institutions that archive historical recordings or to individuals with access to private collections. Today, pre-1965 recordings usually can be found only in large research libraries. Smaller institutions that still hold pre-1965 recordings rarely have the playback equipment needed to provide access to the recordings, and patrons of most public libraries do not have the equipment needed to listen to long-playing (LP) discs or 78­‑rpm recordings.

Because state and federal laws that give copyright protection for recorded sound are complex and can vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another, there is widespread uncertainty about what the law allows libraries and archives to do to preserve their collections. There is even greater uncertainty about how libraries can legally and cost-effectively provide offsite access to the recordings that they have preserved. Particularly for those media for which preservation can be costly and many original sources are rare, such as analog audiotape and disc, it is difficult to justify the expense of preservation without a view to near-term access. [link]

Well, home of the brave, anyway. Your papers, please!

As usual, I don’t really know whether David Gratton’s latest post makes me want to laugh or cry…or just scream.

David is off to the Web 2.0 conference in SF this week, and on the way he had a little run in with the U.S. Border Patrol, and not his first. Fortunately for him, he flew and didn’t try to cross the vigilante-guarded 49th parallel in his car. Anyway, the story goes something like this: he couldn’t find his passport as he was getting ready to leave, so he scraped together as much ID as he could find (except for his birth certificate, D’oh!) and ran off to catch his plane. The ploy worked, and the pile of documentation combined with the apparently magic words “Web 2.0 Conference” got him in. Whether the airline will let him back on an international flight without papers remains to be seen, but that’s a question for Monday. I have to hand it to him: trying to cross the border without a passport was a gutsy move. I remember when all it took to cross the Detroit/windsor border was a driver’s license, but those days are long gone. This time, though, so far, so good. What really made me sit up, though, wasn’t this trip–he knew what he was in for and got off relatively easily–but that apparently the Border patrol in Vancouver has been in the habit of harassing Canadians for years, even during the days of the “world’s longest (supposedly) unguarded border”:

First let me explain. I’ve never had a great experience crossing the border to the USA. Pre-911, I was styling a post-grunge-long-hair-hangover. So naturally, I was pulled aside almost every time I flew to the USA for questioning and a search of my bags. Once I even got denied access because I had a video camera on they way to attend a conference in San Francoisco no less. I was going to post some clips from the conference to the Web – not unlike a video blog. This was evidently taking a job away from someone in the USA, since the video clips would be posted to my company’s Website. This was clearly commercial use. I was told I needed to hire an American to do the work, or apply for a work permit. I missed the conference. That is the truth! I may be prone to exaggeration but not with that story.

I really don’t know whether to laugh or not. The Border Patrol spends years harassing a guy when the border is supposed to be open, and then lets him in with barely a glance once security is stepped up. On the one hand, I think it’s great: attempting to close the border with Canada, which has been basically unguarded since the war of 1812, may be the Bush administration’s saddest legacy, when all is said and done, the most visible sign on a daily basis to Americans and Canadians who live along those 5,525 miles of the extend to which we’ve alienated even our closest allies with our paranoia an xenophobia.

On the other hand, I think it’s sad–and hysterical–that despite all the hype about security a reasonably well groomed, well dressed, well spoken person can still talk his way across. And of course it’s sickening to realize that if his skin color or name were just slightly different, the institutional racism that is the policy of the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security would have kicked in and he’d probably be sitting a jail cell right now, denied even a phone call because he’s not a U.S. citizen, instead of at the conference.