The UK's Catholic Truth Society has produced the 64-page Prayer Book for Spouses, which, according to Kissling, "contains prayers about pregnancy, about caring for children and elderly parents" — along with one to be said before getting nekkid. Which goes like this:

Father, send your Holy Spirit into our hearts. Place within us love that truly gives, tenderness that truly unites, self-offering that tells the truth and does not deceive, forgiveness that truly receives, loving physical union that welcomes. Open our hearts to you, to each other and the goodness of your will. Cover our poverty in the richness of your mercy and forgiveness. Clothe us in our true dignity and take to yourself our shared aspirations for your glory, forever and ever. Mary, our Mother, intercede for us. Amen.

Whoa, is it getting hot in here? I know invoking a mother figure even more saintly and prudish than my own mom always gets me in the mood.

As Kissling points out, there's plenty of hot biblical poetry they could have worked with, if Catholics for Truth had any interest in presenting sex in a positive light. They could have drawn on the Song of Solomon, she suggests, referring to "fine wine, the nectar of the pomegranate, the 'waters that cannot quench love,' the 'floods that cannot drown it.'" But really, what did we expect here? "Even today," writes Kissling, "the Catholic Church does not accept sexuality separated from procreation."

Kissling goes on to detail how modern Catholics just go ahead and resist that teaching, with 90% of the American faithful using contraception and not many asking God to forgive them for it. Big news: The Church is out of touch with the people, who, instead of taking their cues from the Pope or Catholics for Truth, "follow their common sense and their conscience." Technically, that's even sort of allowed; the catechism has a lot to say about conscience, including that "Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters." Sure, that's pretty much there to say that if someone tries to convert you at swordpoint, you should go ahead and die. And sure, there's also a lot of other stuff telling you that if your conscience says something different from the Pope's, it's probably broken. But there is, at least in theory, a loophole to account for a la carte Catholicism. There's also a strong argument to be made that the church is its people, not just the hierarchy, so if 90% of Catholics are doing something, it probably qualifies as A Catholic Thing to Do.

But, as someone who spent a long time trying to reconcile my love of some aspects of Catholicism — the intellectual tradition, the social justice tradition (in some areas), the stories, the rituals, the art, the bugfuck crazy saints — with being a pro-choice, gay-friendly liberal who'd be reluctant to piss on the current Pope if he were on fire, I also feel like at some point, there must be a definition of "Catholic" that goes beyond "What my friends and I do, while self-identifying as Catholic." That's why I ultimately stopped identifying as such — well, that and the fact that, in my heart of hearts, I'm agnostic at best — so when I see people claiming that Catholicism (or any form of Christianity, not to mention many other organized religions) is not really about the corrupt, ultraconservative, punitive, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-sex stuff you always hear about, I get hung up on one question: "How do you know?" Because to be sure, those people are saying with just as much conviction that you're the ones who have the religion all wrong. And they've got just as much evidence in the Bible and church history for their position, if not more.

Writes Kissling:

If anyone needs to pray for forgiveness it is Popes and bishops for the pain they caused to children by scaring them into believing they'd go to hell if they masturbated, for the divorced and remarried Catholics who have been denied the sacraments, for couples who followed the teaching against contraception and had more kids than they could care for, for gay Catholics who have been denied the right to marry, and for infertile couples who are told they can't use modern fertility treatments.

Agreed. Heartily. But instead of joining in her prayer that more Catholics will tune out the most oppressive teachings to "follow their common sense and their conscience," I'd like to offer a different suggestion: Let's pray — or hope, for those of us who don't do that — more and more people will come to agree that religion has no place in free citizen's bedrooms, period.

New Catholic Sex Prayer — But Where's The Sex? [Salon]

The bill in question is called the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act. It provides funding for sex ed that teaches teens about both contraception and "delaying" sex, as well as increased financial support for pregnant women and new mothers, and money for "a national information campaign on adoption." The goal is both to prevent unintended pregnancies and, in the words of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (pictured), "foster an environment that encourages pregnancies to be carried to term." But should we be fostering such an environment? Kissling says no.

She marshals a disturbing array of statistics — 18% of American children live in poverty, and 8 million lack health insurance; of women who have unintended pregnancies, 13% are under 19, 16% of those over 20 have no high school diploma, almost a quarter live below the poverty line, and 30% are unmarried and not cohabiting. Of this last stat, Kissling says, "these women are on their own." She seems to be implying not only that they have no partners to help with child-rearing, but that they can't expect much from their government or community either. She says, "We do not see children as the responsibility of the community and we don't provide much help to parents or their children." And, in the crux of her argument,

It's outright obscene for a government that does as badly as ours in caring for children to even consider encouraging women to continue pregnancies. Benign neglect would be a less evil alternative. And, while encouraging women to have abortions is beyond the pale, we need to acknowledge that choosing abortion could be the most moral decision a woman can make.

The argument that having an abortion is a morally good, rather than, say, morally neutral decision has always been a complicated one. Some argue that the world population is in such crisis that it's morally preferable to avoid adding to it — and pro-life groups are making efforts to refute this claim. And while Kissling acknowledges the upsetting eugenicist flavor of encouraging poor women to have abortions ("Only unreconstructed racists and population control freaks, people who hate the poor and resent their sexuality, would possibly suggest that sometimes, perhaps many times, it is the morally best thing not to continue a pregnancy"), she also comes dangerously close to sounding eugenicist herself. She writes,

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 'Birth defects affect about one in every 33 babies born in the U.S. each year.' Some defects may be minor; others major, but most of these kids will require extra help. Ask educated, well-connected parents of disabled children how easy it is to get that help.

It's true that raising a special-needs child is expensive, but is Kissling really saying that it's more moral not to bring one into the world?

Is a little hard to tell, because Kissling seemed to be evaluating the morality of of choosing to have an abortion and of encouraging women not to. The second is actually much easier to evaluate. The Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act aims to convince women to carry their pregnancies to term — but it doesn't really provide for their children. Yes, a little more money for moms and kids is a good thing — but a lot more money, and a large-scale collective taking of responsibility for the nation's children — would be needed to lift those 18% out of poverty and give them the opportunities other kids enjoy. It's not fair to encourage child-bearing with a little help in the early years and then leave mothers and children "on their own."

Right-wing groups don't like DeLauro, the Act, or the "coalition of pro-choicers and pro-lifers" behind it, writes William Saletan, because they think anything that promotes contraception is "pro-abortion." The Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act isn't pro-abortion. But it isn't pro-child either.

Sometimes Abortion Is The Better Choice [Salon]
Rubber-Baby Money Lumpers [Slate]
The Overpopulation "Myth" [Daily Dish]

Obama has been much better at protecting women's reproductive rights than his predecessor — for instance, an administration official today refused to promise that the new health care bill would never allow federal funding for abortions, pissing off Republicans who would like to use prohibitive expense to force women to carry their pregnancies to term. Still, many anti-abortion advocates now support Obama, and consider themselves progressive. Kissling says the "new pro-lifers" are "anti-war, anti-capital punishment, pro-environment." "These new anti-abortionists," she writes, "say rather than prohibit abortion we should work to reduce women's use of abortion by making bearing and raising children or bearing children and placing them for adoption more possible." And they, like the old anti-abortionists, are missing the point. Kissling writes,

While the new anti-abortionists do not use the same words as their older counterparts, they are thinking the same thoughts. Pregnancy is natural and normal. It lasts for nine months and then it is over. Motherhood is part of almost all women's life plans. Many thrive on it. It is safe and results in a wonderful thing — a new person. It is not asking much of a woman who faces an unwanted, difficult or unintended pregnancy to shift the plan she had for this time in her life and continue the pregnancy. That's because the outcome — the new person — is obviously so much more valuable than whatever short-term loss or pain the woman might experience. A woman who does not accept this is lacking some core element of womanhood.

What the new pro-lifers, with their (potentially admirable) attempts to make child-rearing and adoption easier, don't understand is that the decision to go through with a pregnancy isn't just about economics or the availability of a nice adoptive family. It's about what a woman wants to do with her body, and with her identity. On the former, Kissling writes, "even in modern Western culture, in the high-tech U.S., every woman who agrees to be pregnant still risks dying if the pregnancy goes awry." And when a woman commits to a pregnancy, says philosopher Maggie Little, she commits, "blood, hormones, her energy, all resources that could be going to other of her bodily projects."

On adoption, Kissling writes,

If one takes gestation seriously, one must question the wisdom of asking women to alter their identity for not just nine months but forever in order to give a child to someone else. A woman who has had a baby is a mother, even if she places the child for adoption. For many, giving up a child becomes an unhappy part of their lifelong identity.

Kissling's piece hints at a fundamental contradiction within the progressive anti-abortion movement. She says the new pro-lifers (among whom she counts "evangelical thinkers and pastors like Joel Hunter [pictured], David Gushee and Jim Wallis and Catholics like Chris Korzen and Douglas Kmiec") see pregnancy as a mere nine-month commitment, whose impact on the mother is dwarfed by the importance of the fetus. Yet this little thing to be gotten over with also becomes, for anti-abortionists, an incredibly important moral test for a woman. Kissling writes,

In the anti-abortion movement there is a romantic thread about women and pregnancy that includes the notion of submission alongside of passivity. However difficult the pregnancy or the circumstances of a woman's life might be, the sign of a good woman is that she submits to the cosmic event. The alteration of her identity from self-identified autonomous person to pregnant woman and to mother are conditions she has no control over — other than to say no to sex.

The new anti-abortionists want to have it both ways — they want pregnancy to be both a trivial and non-life-changing period, and a sacred and unavoidable duty for women. This kind of doublethink just goes to show that anti-abortion advocates — new and old — fail to understand the importance of a woman's autonomy. Much as they may claim to be helping women, they are still presuming to determine what's best for them, using contradictory logic that suits their own aims. Until they realize that what's best for women is the freedom to choose what's best, we'll never have true common ground.

What's Wrong With The New Pro-Lifers [Salon]
Health Bill Might Direct Tax Money To Abortion [NYT]

Earlier: Should Pro-Choicers Embrace Abortion Restrictions?

Kissling starts out by saying that she feels doctors should refuse to perform abortions for reasons of sex-selection. She stops short of saying such abortions should be illegal, but she does say that pro-choice people need to consider the "morality" of abortion more than they currently do. She writes,

The thought of putting every woman through the indignity of meeting with an ethics committee, or getting a doctor to sign off on her reasons for abortion, has forced most of us to stick with the principle that women must be allowed to make their own private ethical decisions, without the state getting involved. But is it really leadership for us always to simply shrug and say: "Who knows whether that was an unethical decision for that woman?" Don't we express moral views about every other issue under the sun, from the number of embryos it is ethical to insert into a woman's uterus to the morality of bonuses for Wall St. executives who robbed us blind? Expressing our views about controversial issues is how society develops norms and shared values.

Her description of what those shared values might look like is the following:

I think it's important for us to be able to say: When a fetus reaches the point where it could survive outside the uterus, is healthy, and the woman is healthy, and she has had five months to make up her mind, we should say no to abortion. One can and should have compassion for the woman or girl who seeks to end a pregnancy at that late date, but absent severe fetal abnormality, a threat to her life or a clinical diagnosis of serious mental or physical health consequences of continuing the pregnancy, I believe we should say: "I am so sorry. You waited too long. I know this is a difficult decision for you to bear, but we cannot give you an abortion. I will help you any other way I can, but I cannot perform an abortion."

Again, Kissling refrains from bringing the law into it. Her words seem directed more at doctors than at lawmakers, more at the people in a position to personally refuse one abortion than at those with the power to prevent many. This may be due to Kissling's lingering ambivalence about the issue. She writes,

I still have a twinge of doubt when I write these words. For most of my years as an advocate of a woman's right to decide, I stepped back from this conclusion. I could not bring myself to say that there are circumstances in which I would force a woman to continue a pregnancy.

Now, however, she is comfortable writing a sentence like, "I have come to believe that women's autonomy does not require that all efforts be made to protect women from pain or from hearing the word 'no,'" and saying that, "President Obama was correct during the campaign when he said "mental distress" without clinical dimensions is not a justifiable reason for late-term abortion." She is comfortable using the fact that there are only two late-term abortion providers in the country as evidence that we should more severely limit late-term abortions, and the fact that Dr. Tiller sometimes refused patients as evidence that other doctors should. "What changed for me?" she asks. Her answer involves a fear of "a coarsening of our respect for both women and for life," but what really seems to have changed is Kissling's regard for a woman's own self-determination — and her understanding of what that self-determination means.

The right to choose isn't about being "protected from the pain of being told 'no.'" It's about having the right to decide whether or not you make your body home to another life. Kissling would call this "single value ethics," would argue that it ignores all the moral circumstances attendant on every abortion. And it does. Or rather, it places the responsibility for considering these moral circumstances on the mother, which is ultimately where it belongs.

It's not "coarse" or single-minded to say that the final choice about whether to have an abortion should rest with the woman, even if that choice displeases us. We aren't "simply shrugging and saying: "Who knows whether that was an unethical decision for that woman?" if we say that abortion is an ethical decision that woman have to make for themselves. Instead, we are giving them the power and the task of being the ones who determine if it is morally acceptable to end a pregnancy. It's not a comfortable power; it's not an easy task. It's not one that we, as a society, should wish to take upon ourselves. Instead, we should recognize that we're not protecting women or letting them off the hook by allowing them to choose whether to have an abortion. We're taking an often devastatingly difficult decision and setting it where it belongs: with them.

Can We Ever Say A Woman Can't Choose? [Salon]

Uh, right. The harsh reality, however, is that if access to abortion is further imperiled, the women who will truly suffer are the poor, not teens from Philadelphia suburbs with median incomes of $90,000. And although this is not a new revelation, several women have published specific anecdotes underscoring that point. Activist and Radcliffe fellow Kissling also writing in Salon, tells the story of Rosie Jimenez, a woman who died from a back-alley abortion in 1978 because Medicaid funds for abortions had been cut off. The botched abortion had caused an "infection that had turned her skin a dark greenish brown and caused blood to seep from her eyes." Rural women are affected deeply, too. Erica Sackin relates a story about a friend who " had to drive 15 hours and two states out of small-town Texas to an abortion clinic — a clinic that has since closed." Here at Jezebel we shared own stories of abortion, and asked you to share your own, in the hopes of lessening the stigma attached.

The message to be gleaned from today's anniversary is that the fight for our reproductive rights is not something that languishes in the distant past. It's a battle being waged every day by embattled abortion providers in Albuquerque who will only speak anonymously to the Washington Post about "Miffy" or mifepristone, the abortion pill, for fear of local retribution. An abortion ban is such a feasible reality that the NARAL pro-choice organization has developed a map showing which states are likely to outlaw abortion if given a chance to. (What would happen in your state?) On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and, in an election year with several geriatric Supreme Court judges on the verge of retirement, the least we can do today is remember that our reproductive rights aren't something to be taken for granted.

Abortion's Battle Of Messages [Los Angeles Times]
Anti-abortion Cause Stirs New Generation [Los Angeles Times]
Voices: A Real Anniversary Present [Metro]
Roe, 35 Years Later [Salon]
As Abortion Rates Drop, Use of RU-486 Is On Rise [Washington Post]
Map [NARAL]

Earlier: Unlike Alveda King, I Am Neither "Reformed" Nor A Murderer
Experts Don't Understand Why Fewer American Women Are Getting Abortions