New York Times scribe Monica Davey had this to say about how many anti-abortion Roeder supporters were in evidence at Tuesday's hearing.

But only a small cluster of observers sat in the courtroom on Tuesday, and at least seven were uniformed law enforcement authorities in the tightly screened gallery. Dr. Tiller's family was not seen there, nor were the best-known leaders of Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups here, which have denounced the killing.

Upon reading that, I had the impression that the law enforcement presence — and Tiller's absent family — were part of an overabundance of necessary caution, but that the crazies and the antis were avoiding.

But Amie Newman hears from Carolyn Marie Fugit of The MAD Voter something rather different, in the comments of RH Reality Check:

I attended Roeder's hearing yesterday, and while Operation Rescue was not officially in attendance, I can say people who support [Operation Rescue] were. They talked casually about Troy (Newman, pres of OR) and Mark (Gietzen, Kansas Coalition for Life). And just as casually about knowing "Scott" for several years and reading "Paul's" book (first names, no last). I was sitting amongst the groupies! One even shouted out for a wave from Roeder. At least one traveled from out of town, and they all seemed to have known each other for years. It was mortifying, to say the least.

Fugit, by the way, is a local political blogger in Wichita (and one of the ones followed by the Wichita Eagle as one of their favorite area Twitter users).

So, Roeder has a fan base, and they're at his trial to support his murder of George Tiller, which is probably the biggest reason for the overt police presence and the obvious familial absence. But any trial lawyer will tell you: for the sake of a prosecution, you want the jury to be able to see the victim's grieving family in the gallery. How safe are Tiller's relatives going to feel knowing the audience is full of people that feel the murder of their father is justified, and who are glorifying the actions of his murderer?

Shocker! Tiller's Murderer Going to Trial [Feministe]
Roundup: Scott Roeder is Going to Trial [RH Reality Check]
Witness Tells of Doctor's Last Seconds [NY Times]

Related: The MAD Voter
The Eagle On Twitter [Wichita Eagle]

Earlier: The Devil, The Details

When Klonick felt done with the Pill for a variety of reasons, she, too, went shopping for something that would give her equal contraceptive control with as little hassle as possible.

That was my question when, after eight years and more than a dozen different incarnations of oral contraceptives, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I had never been good at taking the pill every day, and while my doctor suggested the patch and the ring, both were still under patent, making them more expensive than my monthly grocery bill. I needed something cheap, un-mess-up-able, and, ideally, hormone-free. So I did what any modern girl would do: I Googled. And thus began my research into the IUD and its mercurial history in the U.S. market.

Notably, her gynecologist didn't suggest an IUD — a relatively common experience for childless women our age. One reason is its association with infertility, stemming from a specific device no longer on the market and a lack of STD testing protocols prior to insertion."The major reason why women in the United States aren't using IUDs and doctors aren't recommending them is due to the erroneous belief that they're highly dangerous," says Dr. Katharine O'Connell, a gynecologist at Columbia University who specializes in contraception.

Many in my mother's generation remember the IUD's heyday, when the contraceptive was linked to the horrors of pelvic infection, hysterectomy, and possible death. That negative rap stems from a particular device known as the Dalkon Shield. Heavily marketed in the early 1970s, it was the most popular model in the United States until a number of deaths from septic miscarriages caused the manufacturer to halt sales.

A study at the time linked the shield and other IUDs to pelvic inflammatory disease, and lawsuits were promptly filed.

But, Klonick points out, research since (as well as the experience of women in other countries) has shown those beliefs to be invalid.

Eventually, stateside science caught up to the IUD witch hunt. In the early 1990s, a study in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology challenged the validity of the research that had condemned the IUD. It's now generally understood that the problems in the 1970s were due largely to the Dalkon Shield's faulty design, which made users more susceptible to infection, as well as a lack of testing for sexually transmitted diseases before insertion, says O'Connell.

One thing Klonick doesn't mention — though it's important, as it comes up often at my gynecological exams — is that routine STD-testing, rigorous condom use (outside of a committed monogamous and STD-tested relationship) is still important for IUD users, as there is evidence that women with IUDs who contract (or have) particularly chlamydia are at increased risk for Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, which can cause infertility. This, too, is one reason that gynecologists often don't recommend IUDs for women outside of monogamous relationships.

On top of that, as with too many women's health issues, medical schools seemingly ignore teaching students about IUDs.

Many medical schools limit their classes on contraception to one lecture, says O'Connell, leaving insertion and removal of an IUD to be taught during rotation, if it's taught at all.

This lack of training can leave many doctors feeling uncomfortable recommending the once-controversial devices to their patients, which might explain why only 58 percent of family-planning clinics in the United States offer the IUD.

Some doctors are also not keen to recommend IUDs to patients who've never had children, in case they are unknowingly infertile and might later sue alleging their infertility is the fault of the doctor and the IUD.

Certain doctors who do know how to insert and remove an IUD still refuse to recommend it to childless patients because of the device's checkered history.I experienced this with the first two doctors I visited. Though recent scholarship shows that the risk of an IUD creating infertility is almost nonexistent, some doctors prefer to insert them in patients already known to be fertile-so the IUD (and the doctor) can't be blamed for any future infertility.

Although my gynecologist at the time I chose an IUD was both knowledgeable and willing to provide me with one (possibly due to her medical training outside of the United States), we actually drew up and notarized an agreement that if I did later turn out to be infertile, I wouldn't sue her — without it, she would not have agreed to do the procedure.

While Klonick may have had an easy insertion — she doesn't say — she brings up the discomfort only in passing.

Though the insertion hurt and her periods were heavier and more crampy for a few months afterward, she describes it as a "very small price to pay for the peace of mind, money, and time" she saves with the IUD.

While I agree with the sentiment that it was worth it, I would like to highlight something: having the IUD inserted was exceedingly unpleasant. If you are squeamish about your vagina or your cervix (you have to check for the presence of the string once a month), or you are a wimp about pain and discomfort or pain or discomfort in your genitals is triggering to you in some way, having an IUD put in might not be a good idea for you (despite it being good for Klonick, her friend and I).

The Best Birth Control [Slate]

Related: Appropriate Use of the Intrauterine Device [American Academy of Family Physicians]

Earlier: My IUD: How I Learned To Stop Pill-Popping & Love My Cramps

[Image via Liz Henry]

Gomperts is the head of a program called Women on Waves, which operates the Aurora under provisions in Dutch law (and a waiver from the Dutch Minister of Health) that allow doctors, like Gomperts, to distribute abortion pills. Recent changes to Dutch law restrict women's access to medical abortions to specialized clinics, meaning that Gomperts and her patients could be prosecuted, according to The Independent.

Previously, Dutch women could obtain abortion pills from their doctor and bring on a miscarriage at home in the first two weeks of pregnancy. This is also legally possible in France and several other EU countries. But under a law passed by the Dutch coalition government in May, the prescription and use of abortion pills has been limited to approved clinics.

"The change in the Dutch law means that women in other countries would no longer be protected and could be prosecuted if they came to our ship," Dr Gomperts said yesterday. "We do not want to take that risk. We have suspended the voyages that we planned this year off the coasts of Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil and Argentina."

In Nicaragua this is particularly problematic, as a recent Amnesty International study shows that women and doctors are actively being prosecuted for abortions and even medical treatments intended to save the lives of mothers.

Interestingly, though, Gomperts uses the opportunity to debunk the biggest myth of her abortion ship: she's never performed a single surgical abortion on it. She tells the NRC Handelsblad:

Gomperts' dream of a fleet of abortion boats never materialised. It took until October 2008 for the organisation to get permission to use a converted sea container to perform curettages under certain conditions (up to 12 weeks pregnancy). Boats were used for campaign purposes, but no abortions were ever carried out there.

"The abortion boat is a myth," says Gomperts. "There are people who think we provide practical help all over the world. Of course it's a pretty sight: a ship entering a harbour full of women saying: abortion is a right. And then there will always be people wanting to stop the boat. The result is a symbolic fight that speaks to the imagination."

Reality is more prosaic. "Our only real strategy is letting women know that there is such a thing as the abortion pill. They have to know that there is medication available for pregnancy termination."

Gomperts tells The Independent that they did, however, distribute the pills to trigger a medical abortion on the ship, for the women brave enough to cross barriers and even picket lines to reach them.

Gomperts, however, hasn't simply given up. She's involved with a new organization called Women on Web, which operates in Canada and under Canadian law and uses online interviews to prescribe the abortion pill to women all over the world who otherwise lack access to it. She tells The Independent:

Dr Gomperts is also involved in another organisation, the Canadian-registered Women on Web, which makes abortion pills available by mail – sometimes for free – to women in countries where it is illegal. A doctor asks 25 questions over the internet to check for counter-indications. The pills are then sent in a plain envelope.

"For many women this is huge progress," Dr Gomperts said. "Women in countries where abortion is illegal live under tremendous stress. They go to unreliable websites where they are offered fake pills. There is also a [Women on Web] help desk where women can talk about their worries. There are no taboos online; there is no shame to talk."

Online counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals — especially from companies pretending to be in Canada — is a big problem, as some (one could even say most) often don't contain the advertised active ingredients. Both of Gomperts' sites warn women about the problems with buying counterfeit pills.

Having been a pro-choice activist for more than a decade, Gomperts doesn't plan to allow changes to Dutch law — or a threatened legal investigation — to force her to stop her work. She's taking legal action over the new law, and devoting more time to Women on Web in order to see that women the world over have safe access to the medical procedure they will, regardless of its legality, continue to seek.

'Abortion Ship' Sails Into Christian Storm [The Independent]
Dutch Abortion Boat To Sail No More [NRC Handelsblad via Feministe]

Related: Nicaragua Abortion Ban 'Cruel And Inhuman Disgrace' [CNN]
Women on Waves
Women on Web

[Image via Willem Velthoven]

Both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movement are upset about the potential inclusion or exclusion of abortion funding in the upcoming health care reform bill, though neither side agrees whether it's definitely going to be excluded or definitely included. The National Review's K-Lo thinks the funding will be in, and that will be the end of the world as we know it.

But Obama is now pushing a health-care plan that in its various congressional iterations could "result in the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade," according to the National Right to Life Committee.

This plan, and the president's record - which errs on the side of death when it comes to international abortion funding and embryo-destroying stem-cell research - aren't the only signs of a deadly change in Washington. A shameful acceptance of abortion as a fact of life is creeping into mainstream establishment culture.

Because, obviously, not accepting the existence of abortion kept women from doing it for thousands of years.

K-Lo's piece ignores what the President said last week: namely, that since Congress has generally agreed not to appeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicare from covering abortions, he assumes that an appeal of that amendment won't be on the table.

"I'm pro-choice, but I also think we have a tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded healthcare."

Mind you, the debate about abortion funding in the bill isn't actually about the Hyde Amendment of Medicare funding of abortions. The debate in Congress is whether abortion coverage will even be allowed to be considered by the Department of Health and Human Services as part of the public option — which is to say they one that, if you don't have employer-sponsored health care, you would be able to buy into with your very own money and which would not be government funded.

Frances Kissling at Salon at least knows the difference between abortion coverage in the public option and the Hyde Amendment, though her piece assumes K-Lo and her ideological colleagues will be successful.

The healthcare plan has now been delayed. The longer it takes to pass a plan the more momentum against including coverage for abortion — and possibly contraception — will build. If the past is any predictor of the future, then there is a good chance there will be limits on government funding for abortions in the healthcare package, if not outright exclusion.

Now, there's no evidence that there's a grassroots movement to eliminate birth control coverage from the public option — in fact, increasing contraceptive access is part of Obama's common-ground-on-abortion bill recently introduced in Congress, so it seems unlikely that eliminating it from the public option will come to pass. Whether the bill will remain silent on abortion coverage or not is an open question, and that the bill won't revoke the Hyde Amendment on Medicare funding for the abortions seems likely. But the sky-is-falling rhetoric from both sides does make it clear that advocates really, really want their grassroots supporters to weigh in with Congress and are willing to play a little loose with the rhetoric to make that happen. And that seems less than helpful.

Human Life Is More Than A Distraction [National Review]
Obama Abortion Backtrack Shows He's All Rhetoric, No Fight [US News & World Report]
The Feds Should Fund Abortion [Salon]

Related: Culture of Death [Slate]

Earlier: To Conservatives, Not Banning Abortion Is A "Hidden Abortion Mandate"
Health Insurance, Anti-Abortion Amendments, & Howard Dean's Big Brass Balls

Ginsburg first noted two levels of concern with the Supreme Court's abortion rulings. The first was that the "undue hardship" provisions disproportionately affect economically disadvantaged women by limiting their access.

There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don't know why this hasn't been said more often.

The second was that Roe itself (and many of the other rulings and laws) are inherently paternalistic. She said:

It will be, it should be, that this is a woman's decision. It's entirely appropriate to say it has to be an informed decision, but that doesn't mean you can keep a woman overnight who has traveled a great distance to get to the clinic, so that she has to go to some motel and think it over for 24 hours or 48 hours.

And this:

The poor little woman [in Kennedy's opinion on the partial birth abortion case], to regret the choice that she made. Unfortunately there is something of that in Roe. It's not about the women alone. It's the women in consultation with her doctor. So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him.

Both of which are interesting analyses of who the anti-abortion movement is preventing from exercising their constitutional rights and why the ways in which the Court and lawmakers view women when it comes to abortion are inherently paternalistic and condescending.

In the context of the statement that the "undue hardship" test is actually systematically disadvantaging poor women, Emily Bazelon asked Ginsburg about the Hyde Amendment, which was originally passed in 1976 (3 years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade) and which originally prohibited Medicaid recipients (poor women) from being able to use their government health insurance to pay for abortion services at all — it was later modified to make exceptions for the life of the mother or women whose pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. As we know now, the end result is that one in four Medicaid recipients is compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because of the law, while others delay their abortions at further risk to themselves.

The Hyde Amendment was the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by Norma McRae, a pregnant New York Medicaid recipien. In a 1980 Supreme Court decision in Harris v. McRae — before Ginsburg was a judge — ruled that the federal government had no obligation to fund abortions for women on Medicaid. The opinion, given by Justice Potter Stewart said, in part that the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade did not confer on McRae (or anyone else) "a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices."

In response to Bazelon's question, Ginsburg cites Harris v. McRae, and says she found the decision surprising, but not for the reasons one might assume.

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn't really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

This is, obviously, been the subject of some misreading.

I asked Emily Bazelon about it, and she said:

The main thing I'd say about this is that it was clear that when Justice Ginsburg said "we," when she was talking about populations that we don't want to have too many of (you can get the exact quote from the piece), she meant some people in the world, not herself or a group that she feels a part of. That's not how she sees the world, as you I'm sure know. Her point was about other people's conception of who they thought should be encouraged to have children and who shouldn't be, not her own.

In other words, Bazelon is saying the we should have been in quotes, like this:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that "we" don't want to have too many of.

This, of course, hasn't stopped any right-wingers from assuming that Ginsburg was admitting the pro-choice movement was all about eugenics or others who were convinced that her use of the word "we" was something more nefarious than a reference to "some people."

The reproductive choice movement — and particularly Planned Parenthood — is often derided by the anti-abortion movement as nothing more than a cover for eugenics, due in no small part to founder Margaret Sanger's well-publicized written works on the subject. While her conception of eugenics wasn't inherently race-based, it was very much economic-based — which, of course, had strong and has strong correlations to race in this country. Sanger's commitment to eugenics, regardless of whether it was a deeply-held belief or a political tactic to gain support for a movement that was struggling for oxygen and legitimacy, left a stain on the reproductive choice movement it was yet to fully expunge.

And that stain isn't visible only to conservatives. Feminists from Germaine Greer to Linda Gordon to Betsy Hartmann to Andrea Smith (and beyond) have been openly critical of Planned Parenthood's roots and as suspicious of some of its activities — like trying to get the government to pay for poor women's abortions, feeling that whether one can afford the procedure and whether one can afford the child are equally economically coercive, and a government which provides abortions for poor women but not economic assistance for pregnant ones isn't necessarily the best thing, either. There were feminists — radical feminists, in particular, and feminists of color — who wondered aloud whether a group like Planned Parenthood, with its sordid roots in the eugenics movement, should be pushing for more abortions for poor women, and why they were.

So when Ginsburg said "we," she could have been talking about the Republican establishment in the 1970s — although, as she noted in her interview, it was the Nixon Administration that first set about enforcing affirmative action laws — or she could have been noting that there were plenty of feminists in the 70s worried that the abortion-rights movement wasn't necessarily compatible with the larger aims of a social movement for equality.

That argument, if you ask anti-abortion feminists, is still ongoing.

The Place of Women on the Court [New York Times]

Related: Ginsburg: I Thought Roe Was To Rid Undesirables [World Net Daily]
Hyde Amendment [Wikipedia]
Harris v. McRae [Wikipedia]
Restricting on Medicaid Funding for Abortions Forces One In Four Poor Women To Carry Pregnancy To Term [Guttmacher Institute]
People & Events: Eugenics and Birth Control [PBS]
The Ethic of Control: Margaret Sanger, Eugenics, and Planned Parenthood [Inside Catholic]
Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility [Amazon]
A Companion To American Women's History [Google Books]
Battleground [Google Books]
Conquest [Google Books]

Earlier: Awesome, Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg Explains It All To You

On the surface, it already seemed like a great second wave vs. third wave caricature just waiting for Katha Pollit to deconstruct. Let's meet the contestants, courtesy of Salon's Judy Berman. First up, outgoing President Kim Gandy's choice, Latifah Lyles:

Gandy, who is stepping down after eight years of presidency, is endorsing Latifa Lyles, who has spent the past four years as NOW's Vice President for Membership. At 33, Lyles would be NOW's youngest president. She and her supporters argue that Lyles' age and race — she's African American — will help the organization connect with two demographics it sorely needs help reaching: younger women and women of color.

She was running against former NOW President Patricia Ireland's choice (and the winner) Terry O'Neill.

Lyles' competition is Terry O'Neill, a 56-year-old white activist who held Lyles' position at NOW between 2001 and 2005. O'Neill's endorsers include Patricia Ireland, Gandy's predecessor and one of NOW's highest-profile past presidents, and another of the group's current vice presidents, Olga Vives. "There is a role that requires us to take unpopular stands and push on our friends," Ireland told the AP. "That's what I think Terry really gets. She's the one I believe will be very willing to use a wide array of tactics — not just traditional letters and e-mails, but also engage in civil disobedience, organize fasts, be at some congressman's district office."

So, you've got the young vs. old feminist trope and a feminist of color vs. a white lady: it's a ready-made fight about the Future of Feminism!

Lyles' supporters argued that she would be more able to effectively utilize social networking technology and rally young feminists to the cause; Ireland focused on O'Neill's willingness to rely on letters, fasts and Congressional office meetings as evidence that her leadership was needed, subtly suggesting that Lyles wouldn't be willing to provoke this Administration or certain Congress members to achieve NOW's agenda. They couldn't have played more into the outdated stereotypes about feminism if they tried — and, as mentioned, O'Neill won, playing into some people's stereotypes about NOW in the first place.

One of those people is Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors who writes:

Out of all the many women I know, I can't name five who are members of NOW. Or if I do know five NOW members, their affiliation has never come up in conversation. Why is that? Is it because NOW is still dominated by feminists over 50? Is it because NOW isn't visible in my part of the country? (I live in New York City.) Is it because NOW's advocacy is more "high-level" than grass roots, so NOW's work is not as visible as some other groups' work?

Ouch. If NOW isn't visible among feminists in New York, where the hell are they? I mean, they're not grassroots-visible in D.C. either, having just moved away myself.

Who they were, apparently, very visible to were the P.U.M.A.s, who supported Clinton during the primaries and still abhor Kim Gandy (and Ellie Smeal, who's not at NOW, by the way) for having the audacity to ever support Barack Obama. "Dr. Violet Socks" says:

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you already know that many of the leaders of the feminist establishment in this country behaved shamefully last year. (And if you don't know it, read this and this and this and this). If life were an Akira Kurosawa movie, Ellie Smeal and Kim Gandy would commit ritual seppuku in public to atone for the grave dishonor they did to the feminist movement. But lo, dig it! Life is not an Akira Kurosawa movie! And so instead of graciously offing themselves or at least promising to stop being dishonest Obama-enabling hacks, Ellie and Kim and cohorts keep doing shit.

Because, of course, voting for a man is an anti-feminist act.

Voting for an anti-abortion woman — as the PUMAs constantly tried to remind us — was a feminist one. Which takes us to the NOW election, where Sarah Palin supporters apparently swung the vote. Veronia at Viva la Feminista who attended the event, explains:

The Sarah Palin supporters swung this election. The election was certainly close enough - less than 10 votes separated the two slates. Then again, if Latifa's supporters had been able to bring just a handful of additional supporters, we'd have an entirely different picture to discuss. The Palin people out organized us, plain and simple.

Earlier, she touched on a little unfair campaigning done by those supporters on O'Neill's behalf.

But because apparently, from what I gather, Kim Gandy was asked about a handout that was circulating that showed NOWs finances plummeting. She said that it was a product of Sarah Palin followers.

She explains why they seem to care so much about NOW and Kim Gandy:

I do know that there is enough evidence in the blogosphere, which I won't link here, shows that there were Palin supporters supporting O'Neill's campaign. Does that make O'Neill the Palin campaign? No. But it does mean that the Palin supporters are still angry that NOW and Kim Gandy did so much to elect Barack Obama.

But, why would Republican Palin supporters care about NOW? Unless, of course, they're really just PUMAS, who we think need to be re-named from "Party Unity My Ass," since they're the only ones still trying to stick it to Democrats.

NOW Elects Maryland Woman Its Nex President [Associated Press]
Change Feminists Can Believe In? [Salon]
Did Palin Supporters Swing The NOW Election? [Salon]
Ho-hum … NOW Elects A New President [Feminist Law Professors]
Why NOW Needs New Leadership, And Why You Should Care [Reclusive Leftist]
Sunday At NOW 2009 [Viva La Feminista]
Live blog: 2009 NOW Natl Conference - Plenary V [Viva la Feminista]

Related: Amber Waves [The Nation]

The interview, which lasted nearly twenty minutes, was heavily edited for broadcast, so Stewart encouraged people to watch it in its entirely on the site. It's broken up (relatively poorly) into three segments.

In this first segment, Huckabee states that his position on abortion comes down to his respect for human life and his belief that every human life has value. If you're curious, Huckabee — by his own admission — authorized more executions than any other governor in Arkansas' history. When asked to explain his feelings about executions, he said:

I authorized other executions after that one, but it never became easier. If it had, there would have been something wrong with me or the process. To this day I am confident that I did the right thing—"right" defined against moral absolutes in the midst of an imperfect world.

He added that he felt that God, not taxpayers, should judge his actions.

Stewart asked Huckabee if he really believes that pro-choice advocates don't value life. Huckabee agreed that they're not necessarily callous, but that they haven't thought their position through enough.

For example, if we tell the generation coming up after us that it is okay to take a human life because that life represents to us an interference or an interruption to our lives, either economically, or socially, or whatever the reason — and, by the way, 93 percent of abortions are elective abortions. It has nothing to do with the health of the mother, it has nothing to do with the health of the baby, and it's not a matter of rape...

Actually, Huckabee is completely incorrect on that last point — abortions in the case of rape and incest are still generally classified as elective abortions. But, more to the point, Huckabee has also made a great argument against the death penalty, which he supports and acted out.

Huckabee goes on to make the argument that life begins at conception, and that, since a fetus is a cluster of human-DNA- containing cells (and not another species) it is therefore a human life. His final point is that he wouldn't want his children to be able to determine his life in old age based on their convenience.

I do not want to give my kids the opportunity to say, "Dad, you are an interference. Coming to see you in the nursing home is messing up my social life. You are very expensive, Dad. Your long term care bill is breaking us."

Yeah, no shit Huckabee doesn't want his kids determining his fate — at age 18, his son David found a skinny dog with a rash, tortured it and hung it at a Boy Scout camp to "put it out of its misery." Stewart, thankfully, pointed out there's a bit of a difference because Huckabee wouldn't be living inside the bodies of his children.

In segment 2, Huckabee and Stewart got into the current debate about abortion reduction. Huckabee went straight to the idea of parental notification — because, as is the anti-abortion movement's biggest canard, if you can prevent access to abortion, you're preventing abortion, full stop. Who cares about preventing unwanted pregnancies, if you can just force women to keep the babies?

Stewart countered with the crazy idea that maybe women don't want the government telling them what they can — and what they should have to — do with their bodies. Huckabee had an answer for that, though.

See, Jon, I don't know of a pro-life person that believes if the mother's physical health is in jeopardy that you just let the mother die in order to save the child. Your ideal would be to save both.

For one thing, in fact, there are plenty of people in the anti-abortion movement who deny the fact that pregnancy carries dangers for the mother or that, when it does, abortion is truly justified — Amanda Marcotte found that out from one of the movement's campus advocacy handbooks not too long ago. For two, the GOP's own Presidential candidate dismissed the idea that abortion could be necessary for the health of the mother in a televised debate less than a year ago with a spectacular application of "dick fingers." So, actually, there are plenty of people in the anti-abortion movement who could give a shit about the health of the mother.

Stewart attempted to bring the discussion back to abortion-reduction strategies other than access-reduction. Huckabee, however, refused to get drawn into a debate about contraception education and started talking about the recent Gallup poll seized on by anti-abortion advocates in order to "prove" that the United States is a pro-life country.

Failing to draw Stewart into that discussion, Huckabee — in his gentle, folksy, not-crazy-sounding way — hit on the final, most absurdist talking point on abortion: he compared women who have abortion to slave holders.

I think one of the fundamental questions that we would have to come to is does a person have a right to own another person. That really is the issue. Can a person own another person? Can a mother totally own the child? Can the father totally own the child?

The abortion-as-slavery comparison isn't new. What is scary about Huckabee, though, is he managed to convey the exact same points as other anti-abortion conservatives without resorting to the kind of scare rhetoric that soothes the base and inflames the rest of us. Instead, he came across sounding thoughtful...if you didn't think too hard about what he was saying. He even quoted the Declaration of Independence in support of his point — if you define a fetus as a human, then, according to Huckabee, fetuses are entitled to the same right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as the rest of us. Maybe we ought to stop calling it abortion, and start calling it "fetal liberation"?

Huckabee continued with his oblique slavery references in the third segment. He said:

The question is, is that life inside the mother a human life? If it is, then that human life has equal value to the 70-year-old man, to the 7-year-old child. There is no point at which human life loses its intrinsic worth and value. Do we have the right to own another person?

What Huckabee was doing is taking part of the reasoning of Roe v. Wade (that as the fetus approaches viability, its rights increase in relation to the mother), throwing in a little science (the fetus has human DNA, therefore it is human), mixing it up with the rhetoric of our forefathers and pouring listeners a strangely vomit-flavored concoction based on the idea that the uteruses of American women are carrying their country's citizens.

Unfortunately, after this, Stewart went off the rails, using language about stem cell research to try to draw Huckabee into a debate about IVF treatment, which Huckabee used to turn into a debate about "snowflake babies" (kids born from frozen embryos designated for destruction) — which is, after all, already on the anti-abortion movement's agenda.

Stewart did, however, finally get back to the idea of abortion-reduction through education, which Huckabee expressed limited support for before returning to the abortion-as slavery analogy.

The problem with Mike Huckabee is that, despite his fundamentalist Christian beliefs and strong social conservative streak, he comes across sounding so damn reasonable. Luckily for us, fiscally conservative Republicans hate him even more than John McCain meaning he probably couldn't be able to could pull something off in 2012.

Related: Mike Huckabee on Crime [OnTheIssues]
Can a Naughty Boy Bring Down a Wannabe President? [Wonkette]

Earlier: Stop The Presses: Abortion Protesters Are Disingenuous?
John McCain Spews Rhetorical Chunks Into The Lap Of America
Has A Pro-Choice President Made More Americans Pro-Life?
Abortion Is The Same As & Cause Of Everything: Obama Edition
When Viability Starts Earlier, When Does The Right To Abortion End?
Nadya Suleman Is The New Poster Girl For Restricting Reproductive Rights

Over the course of the past week, Lisa Belkin's "Motherlode" blog on the New York Times has featured the story of "Emmie," who, at 22, found herself single, pregnant, on her way into a competitive graduate program that would leave her little opportunity for motherhood. She asked Belkin's readers for advice.

Do I really want to have a baby at 22? Do I really want to have this guy's child? Can I finish my master's and raise a newborn? Can I do it alone? Will I be happy?

I know that mothers come in all shapes, sizes and ages. I would like to ask you and your readers for their input. I don't know what I'm up against. Maybe a good mother knows when it's time to terminate, for her sake and for her child's.

Belkin's readers responded, mostly politely, with advice that Emmie took to heart.

It's nice to hear other people's experiences and ideas, especially when the world feels so incredibly small. The one thing that has helped is to just listen to other people. It doesn't matter what their advice is, whether or not I would have agreed with them a week ago, I just want to hear other people's ideas. I'm also really glad that I'm getting advice from complete strangers. I've realized that getting advice for your parents or relatives carries a certain weight that doesn't always feel so helpful.

Yesterday, Emmie updated the world with her decision. Having visited an adoption agency, Emmie decided that she couldn't let go of a child she carried to term. In talking with her parents, she realized they didn't particularly want her to give up her academic and professional dreams for a grandchild — and having talked to the school, she realized it would mean exactly that. While commenters suggested she look to her friends for assistance, she realized they'd backed away; when commenters suggested she look to the government, she realized that she wasn't poor enough to qualify for any assistance. The only person who stood by her, despite longing for her to abort the pregnancy, was her lover. Emmie wrote:

Once I came to the decision to terminate the pregnancy, so much of the guilt and sadness I'd been feeling melted away. I felt happy for the first time since finding out and I feel like my family is supportive of my decision. I'm focusing on the child I'll have in a few years from now with someone I feel safe with and supported by. The life of that child will be infinitely better than this one and, sometimes, I wonder if such a miserable, lonely woman could even have a healthy child.

Emmie's tale of inadequate social services, partners who don't want the responsibility, parents who think she'd be better off without it and a lack of financial wherewithal and support systems for a child isn't an uncommon story — even if the graduate school part of the scenario does leave the tale with just a whiff of class privilege. It's these factors — particularly the economic ones — that statistics show drive a lot of women to consider and choose abortion. For this reason, many people expect that Obama's thus-far-secret legislative package on abortion reduction will contain provisions designed to mitigate these factors for women that wish to keep their children but don't see how.

On the other side is Brazen Careerist's Penelope Trunk, who is so burdened by class privilege and her own two economically-driven abortions that she seems blind to why all women can't just chose to carry their own unwanted pregnancies to term. Of her first abortion, she writes:

The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball.

This isn't exactly, as a friend of mine put it, working at McDonald's for minimum wage and trying to make ends meet. It's also rather reminiscent of Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh, who won the gold medal in beach volleyball last year and announced her 16 and a half week old pregnancy about 16 and a half weeks later (it was a boy).

Trunk discovered her pregnancy at 14 weeks and faced incredible pressure from her mother and friends to terminate the pregnancy for the sake of her career. She faces down the end of her first trimester in a Planned Parenthood clinic.

When I went back, I had a panic attack. I was on the table, in a hospital gown, screaming.

The nurse asked me if I was a religious Christian.

The boyfriend asked me if I was aware that my abortion would be basically illegal in seven more days.

I couldn't stop screaming. I was too scared. I felt absolutely sick that I was going to kill a baby. And, now that I know more about being a mother, I understand that hormones had already kicked in to make me want to keep the baby. We left. No abortion.

She doesn't sound like anyone who ought to be having an abortion. But after repeated social pressure, she caved and had her then-second-trimester abortion.

I went to sleep with a baby and woke up without one. Groggy. Unsure about everything. Everything in the whole world.

People think abortion is such an easy choice–they say, "Don't use abortion as birth control." Any woman who has had one will tell you how that is such crazy talk. Because an abortion is terrible. You never stop thinking about the baby you killed. You never stop thinking about the guy you were with when you killed the baby you made with him. You never stop wondering.

But rather than listen to her own feelings about her pregnancy, her situation or what she apparently actually believed about abortion (that it's killing babies), she proceeded to have a second one.

I hated that I put myself in the position of either losing all that or killing a baby.

I didn't tell anyone I was pregnant. I knew what they'd say.

So I completely checked out emotionally. I scheduled the abortion like I was on autopilot. I told my boyfriend at the last minute and told him not to come with me.

He said forget it. He's coming with me.

I remember staring at the wall. Telling myself to stop thinking of anything.

The doctor asked me, "Do you understand what's going to happen?"

I said yes. That's all I remember.

Trunk says now that she "bought into" the idea that being childless was the only way to have a career, so she had two abortions, neither of which she apparently wanted or thought was a good idea.

It now probably doesn't surprise you that Trunk doesn't think others ought to have abortions.

But also, here I am with two kids. So I know a bit about having kids and a career. And I want to tell you something: You don't need to get an abortion to have a big career.

Uh, right. I'm sure having to quit a graduate program she can't go back to will nonetheless leave Emmie completely financially stable and fulfilled. I'm sure the woman who can barely make ends meet on her own will have no problem having a "career" — let alone a steady job — and having a baby on her own. And I'm sure Trunk herself, despite laying her two abortions on the altar of her career, would nonetheless have the life she has now if she'd carried those pregnancies to term.

Trunk goes on:

It doesn't matter whether you have kids now or later, because they will always make your career more difficult. There is no time in your life when you are so stable in your work that kids won't create an earthquake underneath that confidence.

It's nice that Trunk lives in a world in which the biggest impact of an unwanted pregnancy (and child) would assert itself in her confidence about her ability to have a career. In the world in which many of the rest of us live — single and married — a child has pretty significant economic, job, career and social impacts beyond our self-confidence. Studies show that mothers always make less (and are less likely to be hired) than childless women and men. Parental leave laws in this country still suck, leaving many parents — including single women — without much in the way of paid leave, if they get any at all. There are nearly 9 million uninsured children in this country, and the number of uninsured young adults continues to rise every year. There are dozens and dozens of good economic and social reasons that women choose to terminate pregnancies that have nothing to do with expanding their "careers" — which is something not everyone in this country has the privilege to be able to aspire to. Too many women are too often just trying to scrape by, and an unwanted pregnancy (or child) is just going to add additional strain that it's entirely possible they can't handle. That's the whole purpose of the Obama Administration's purported focus on reducing the economic consequences of child-bearing, not to help women better shape their lucrative careers.

Young, Single And Pregnant - What Now? [Motherlode]
More Young, Single And Pregnant [Motherlode]
Choosing Not To Keep The Baby [Motherlode]
What's The Connection Between Abortion And Careers? [Penelope Trunk]
Obama Seeks Common Ground On Abortion [US News & World Report]

Related: Kerri Walsh Announces She's Pregnant [USA Volleyball]
Walsh, son 'happy and healthy' [ESPN]
Census Bureau: Number of U.S. Uninsured Rises to 47 Million Americans are Uninsured: Almost 5 Percent Increase Since 2005 [Medscape]

Earlier: Working Moms Still Getting The Shaft
A Reminder: Parental Leave Laws Still Suck

Terry was 40 when she became unexpectedly pregnant; she had one miscarriage behind her, an 18-month old son and a lot of love for the child she was expecting. At 12 weeks, given her risk factors, they had an early ultrasound to check the child's nuchal fold measurement, a measurement of the translucency of the space at the back of a fetuses neck. In cases of normal fetal development, it appears as a black bar; in abnormally developing fetuses, it indicates a damaging fluid build-up. In Terry's case, the problem was obvious even to her at a glance.

What should have been a tiny line of darkness looked like a deflated balloon stretching from the baby's neck down its back to its rump. I simultaneously noticed that it looked wrong and immediately deleted the thought from my mind, asking instead about the profile, the legs, the hands.

The technician leaves, and a doctor comes in to inform Terry and her husband of their suspicions.

He told us that instead of the two millimeters they expect to see, our baby's nuchal translucency measured 76 millimeters, off their charts. He suspected Trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder that kills most affected children before birth, and the remainder a few days or weeks after. The rare child who survives more than a few months with Trisomy 18 will be profoundly mentally retarded and painfully physically disabled. Virtually none survive more than a year or two.

Once it was confirmed with a genetic test, Terry and her husband had no doubt of what they would do.

We agreed we would almost certainly terminate the pregnancy, we would say goodbye to this very much wanted, very much loved child.

Although it seems like an obvious decision to Terry and her husband, some in the anti-abortion movement decry even these abortions, despite the fact that a continued pregnancy is likely to result in miscarriage or stillbirth, both of which carry risks to the mother.

Terry ends up at the A Heartbreaking Choice website, reading the Kansas Stories that drew so much attention last week. She realizes that, in some small way, she was lucky.

Reading their stories, I realized I was almost lucky; I live in a state where insurers cover the nuchal fold test, I was old enough that it was recommended. If my situation had been different, I might have found out about this baby's condition when they did, at the 20-week ultrasound - after feeling the baby move, after weeks in maternity clothes, in the midst of shopping for cribs and bibs.

Terry goes through with the termination, under sedation. And while some of her friends euphemistically refer to her miscarriage, Terry calls it by its name: her choice.

But when your pregnancy takes the kind of turn mine did, all your mothering boils down to one choice - and I chose to spare my child the suffering of a brief, painful life. Of all the million and one things I wished I could be doing for this child, the only act of love circumstances allowed me to perform was this one.

The only thing Terry doesn't acknowledge is that she made a second choice: to talk, without shame, about the love it took to make the first one.

The Hardest Choice [Babble]

Earlier: Tiller's Patients Speak: The Tragedy Of His Death, The Inspiration Of His Life

It's not just because the anti-abortion movement will seek to use this information and medical advances in service to its political agenda, either. It's because Roe v. Wade specifically makes reference to fetal viability as the point at which states are allowed to more stringently restrict a woman's right to obtain an abortion, including prohibiting her from doing so if there's an except for her life and health.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life [410 U.S. 113, 165] may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.

In other words, states cannot interfere with the manner in which women choose to have abortions during the first trimester; they are allowed regulatory powers (but can't ban the procedures outright) during the second trimester until fetal viability; and they can prohibit them after viability if they want, as long as there's an exception for the life and health of the mother. When viability can be expected between 22 and 26 weeks, the first-second-third trimester distinctions that currently hold sway in most people's minds when they think of abortion are rather limited.

And if you think the anti-abortion groups won't get around to challenging Roe and trying to push for new legislative restrictions or eliminations on second trimester abortions, you haven't been paying attention very well.

More Premature Babies Surviving [BBC]
Roe V. Wade [FindLaw]

The handbook, some of which Marcotte scanned in for our edification, teaches anti-abortion activists how to counter the arguments of the pro-choice movement with a variety of obfuscations, lies and pretenses about their empathy for women seeking abortions. One instance is chronicled by Marcotte:

In the section titled "Why Don't You Pass Out Condoms and Promote Birth Control?," the authors tacitly admit that sensible people might be put off by the anti-choice movement's willingness to increase the abortion rate by standing as firmly against contraception, especially the birth control pill, as they do legal abortion. So instead of allowing members to admit their hostility to all forms of contraception, they instruct them to conceal their beliefs until a target has been softened up to hear about their true message—sexual abstinence for all not trying to procreate—through a series of dodgy, misleading arguments, including misinformation about how the birth control pill works.

In another, activists are given a variety of statistics and misleading information about risky pregnancies to counter the idea that abortion is ever medically necessary.

Conveniently, the one dangerous condition they'll admit exists (and consider a justifiable reason for an abortion) happens to be the one that is most likely to threaten her future fertility—the ectopic pregnancy—so they can rest easy knowing that even if a woman's life is saved through abortion, she's paid a steep price. Other dangerous conditions caused by pregnancy—eclampsia and placenta previa being the two biggies—are dismissed as myths used to get away with abortions. Other life-threatening illnesses like cancer are ignored, and it's assumed that a woman's health is certainly an acceptable sacrifice for a pregnancy

The handbook makes no bones about the fact that anti-abortion activists are also generally opposed to birth control of all kinds, sex before marriage, and every single abortion, including ones involving non-viable fetuses, deathly ill women, or victims of rape and incest — despite their occasional attempts at tolerance on those points when attempting to pass legislation tolerable to the majority of Americans.

Marcotte is herself also really put off by the thought that activists are taught to fake empathy.

But I think the part that was honestly most telling was the strong, repeated instructions to practice showing concern for women. Readers are told that the big mistake anti-choicers make is railroading over women as if they don't matter, and you really lose credibility. You're given sound bites to show concern (their words), because, and this is important—-if you show contempt for women who die from illegal abortions, you lose credibility. They don't come right out and say to fake concern, but that's the gist of it.

Actually, they kind of do exactly that — they instruct people on how to appear concerned.

This manual was written by and for a movement that is attempting to exert control over women's bodies and women's choices. They've spent years and millions of dollars to claim that a two-celled zygote is legally equivalent to a human; to place restrictions on women's and doctor's medical decisions; to harass and intimidate doctors and health care providers out of performing abortions; to harass and intimidate women out of getting abortions; to throw up legal and logistical challenges to everything from Plan B to RU-486; to keep young men and women from getting an thorough education about their bodies and reproduction, to start with. And then they use people's lack of information and knowledge about the means of reproduction, contraception, pregnancy, birth control and abortion to their advantage in their war to change the law. It's quite a holistic approach for a movement that doesn't really value educating anyone.

The "Pro-Life" Movement's Hot Rhetoric and All-Out Lies [RH Reality Check]
Anti-Choice Handbook [RH Reality Check]
Just Be Normal Again [Pandagon]

Sociologist Amy Adamczyk finds, in fact, that being religious (or not) didn't make women any more or less likely to choose abortion — meaning that, overall, women were equally likely to have abortions if they were very religious as if they weren't. However, women that attended religious schools — particularly Protestant-denominated schools — were more likely to opt for abortion than even their Catholic school peers

.However, Adamczyk did find that women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

"The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older," Adamczyk said.

In Glamour's recent article about women who chose abortions, counselors strongly recommended that women who felt abortion was murder choose other options.

"If a woman truly thinks having an abortion is the same as murdering a child you might see on the playground, she should strongly reconsider and seek counseling and other alternatives, such as adoption," Baker says.

The study indicates, however, that some women likely go straight from the protest lines to the clinics... and then back outside.

Religious Devotion Does Not Impact Abortion Decisions Of Young Unwed Women [EurekAlert]

Related: Abortion: The Serious Health Decision Women Aren't Talking About Until Now [Glamour]

Earlier: Speaking Out About An Abortion Can Be Harder Than Getting One

It's a lesson we, as a species, learn and unlearn seemingly daily. We eschew traditional interrogation techniques in lieu of physical torture, believing the latter more effective, even as we run PR campaigns and write ad copy to convince our own people of the justification for war and of their supposed desire to enlist in the military to fight it. We mock and condemn the notion that Islamic jihadists believe there is a special reward awaiting them in the afterlife (how many virgins can a man really need?) for their supposed martyrdom as we eulogize our own service members and victims of terrorist attacks with talk of their special places in heaven. We learn about propaganda and yellow journalism and bitch about media bias as we increasingly consume media that agrees with and reinforces opinions we think we had before we began gorging ourselves. Entire professions and industries spring up dedicated to the cause of using language to convince millions (if not billions) of people to do things they wouldn't already do — but this product! vote for this candidate! believe in this cause! — and yet we all continue to believe our thoughts and actions are unique, unpolluted snowflakes.

Language is powerful because it is how we order our thoughts. Who among us really thinks in abstract concepts? But it is also a complex game of Telephone, in which messages are relayed, misinterpreted, misapplied, misrepresented and misunderstood. The use of language is fundamentally imperfect because one's listeners are always hearing it through individual filters.

Scott Roeder, who is being charged in the brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller, is obviously a deeply flawed person, but he is not alone in either his apparent beliefs or his willingness to break one of the most fundamental taboos of human society — killing other humans — in service to a political cause. For instance:

As news of Roeder's arrest traveled, Kansas City activist Regina Dinwiddie remembered the day a dozen years ago when Roeder hugged her in glee after trying to frighten an abortion provider by staring him down inside a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"He grabbed me and said, 'I've read the Defensive Action Statement and I love what you're doing,' " Dinwiddie said in a telephone interview. She was a signer of the 1990s statement, which declares that the use of force is justified.

"I said, 'You need to get out of here. You can get in a lot of trouble,' " Dinwiddie recalled.

Dinwiddie said she does not consider death of Tiller, the nation's most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, to be a homicide.

"I don't think he was murdered. I believe he was absolutely stopped in his tracks and it was long overdue," Dinwiddie said. She declined to say when she last spoke with Roeder.

But Dinwiddie isn't the only associate of Roeder's who reinforced his apparent position on violence against abortion providers.

Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.

"I met him once, and he wrote to me a few times," Leach said. "I remember that he was sympathetic to our cause, but I don't remember any details."

Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller.

Or there's this quote, from Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry:

George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God.

Even in rhetorically condemning Tiller's murder, some supposedly mainstream anti-abortion groups can't stop themselves when it comes to their own rhetoric (or self-interest).

The Kansas Coalition for Life Unequivocally Condemns the Shooting of Abortionist George Tiller.

Although at the time of this writing, it is not known who killed Abortionist Tiller, we do know for certain that this crime was NOT the work of any true proLife person. A true proLife person respects human life as a gift from God, and leaves all life and death decisions to God Himself.

This killing — if it is in any way connected to a genuine proLife group, has the potential to set back the proLife movement by 20 years or more.

One can even look to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly for examples of rhetoric calling Tiller a murderer himself, which are too numerous to list.

Calling abortion the murder of unborn children or referring to people who perform abortions or who are politically pro-choice as infanticide-perpetrators is a time-worn tactic of the movement to make abortion illegal in this country. It was a deliberate choice on the part of the anti-abortion movement, stemming from a growing public relations problem with referring to women that way.

These illegal tactics — denounced by many peaceful antiabortion activists — multiplied in the 1980s, as the broader movement shifted away from pressuring the women who were having abortions to the medical personnel providing them, according to Carole Joffe, a sociology professor at UC Davis.

The shift in emphasis was a smart public relations move for those who oppose abortion, casting women as victims while exploiting public uneasiness over doctors who performed the procedure. Those public sentiments stemmed, in part, from the existence of ethically sketchy, "back-alley" abortion providers in the era before the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, Roe vs. Wade.

It's a deliberate use of language to demonize a group of people that, for some, will inevitably translate to the demonization and dehumanization of individuals like George Tiller.

For many years, George Tiller was made the face of the small population of abortion-providers by the anti-abortion movement in part because he was openly willing to provide second- and third-trimester abortions to women who needed them, and because he wasn't willing to back down (or leave Kansas, where he was born and raised). His clinic was bombed in 1986; blockaded for a month in 1991; and he was shot twice by another anti-abortion (but not "pro-life") zealot in 1993. More recently, he was subject to judicial harassment by the state of Kansas, being hauled before 2 citizen-convened grad juries, charged with misdemeanors and finally acquitted. But not six weeks after his acquittal, his clinic was vandalized yet again, as if the anti-abortion movement was saying, "If we can't win in court, we intend to win regardless." Few, if any, of the right-wing groups now rightfully decrying his murder spoke out against the vandalism, and the clinic asked the FBI to take a more active role in the investigation, rightly fearing more violence to come.

And now it's come, from a fellow Kansan named Scott Roeder, whose ex-wife says he sought martyrdom. A former colleague in the anti-government militia movement says — who was arrested with and convicted of having bomb-making materials but whose conviction was overturned on appeal — Roeder was more obsessed with abortion than anything else. He reportedly posted on Operation Rescue's site about tracking down Tiller at his church two years ago — a kind of (legal, First Amendment-protected) harassment Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups regularly condoned as part of their campaigns to intimidate medical providers out of the mission of providing reproductive health services.

Dr. Warren Hern, who is one of an even smaller group of doctors providing second- and third-trimester abortions to women that need them, says that the harassment is deliberate and pervasive — and that physical violence is the obvious end result of all the violent rhetoric aimed at providers.

"Every doctor that does abortions has been under an assassination threat for decades," Hern said. "The anti-abortion movement message is, ‘Do what we tell you to do or we will kill you,' and they do. This is a fascist movement."

Hern laid blame for Tiller's death at the feet of the anti-abortion movement's encouragement of violence against abortion providers and the Republican Party's "exploitation" of the extremist rhetoric.

"Dr. Tiller is dead by an anti-abortion assassin, and this is the absolutely inevitable consequence of 35 years of anti-abortion fanatic rhetoric and intimidation and assassination violence and exploitation by the Republican Party of this movement," Hern told the Independent.

Hern isn't one to mince words any more than the people who — on a daily basis — threaten him with assassination.

Words matter, and actions matter. Scott Roeder was reportedly inspired by people who think homicide in the pursuit of political goals is justified. In this, they feel backed up not just by Biblical writings, or Hammurabi's Code but by the actions of our government. Our government regularly executes people who it deems have committed crimes too heinous for society to endure — which is the rhetoric anti-abortion groups regularly use to oppose abortion. Our government executes wars with countries to unseat dictators for the supposed greater good and at no small cost to individuals' lives.
Every day, we're bombarded not by "Thou shalt not kill," but by the message, "Thou shalt not kill unless" — and there's no firm consensus on what "unless" entails. In the absence of that consensus, in the midst of that grey area in which societal justification meets individual circumstance meets human frailty and the easily-led, what we too easily find is the darkness of the human mind and what inhumanity humans are capable of when exhorted not by the barrel of a gun but by the power of words.

To hearken back to the Bible, it was words that led Abraham to the point of killing Isaac; that ordered the slaughter of Jewish boys in Moses' Egypt and then again in Herod's Israel; that exhorted the crowd against Jesus (and in favor of Barabbas) in Pilate's Jerusalem. Words have ever exhorted people to war — some considered more justified than others — and rarely stopped anyone from starting one. The Rwandan genocide was touched off by a radio broadcast; the rise of Nazism in Germany began like any other political campaign — with speeches and soaring rhetoric — and ended in the Holocaust euphemistically entitled "The Final Solution," to make its evil more palatable. The same hysterical, overwrought, violence-filled and justification-laden rhetoric that fires up a crowd outside a clinic to pray and scream and harass in order to supposedly effect judicial and legislative changes will cause - and has caused - some individuals to think that their violence is justified in achieving the ends (no more abortion) promised by a political movement that has, to them, frustratingly failed to deliver.

Suspect Held in Kansas Abortion Doctor's Slaying [Washington Post]
Far-Right Subtly Celebrates Tiller Murder [Talking Points Memo]
Suspect in Tiller's Death Supported Killing Abortion Providers, Friends Say [McClatchy]
Statements on George Tiller's Death [Witchita Eagle]
O'Reilly's Campaign Against Murdered Doctor [Salon]
A History of Violence on the Antiabortion Fringe [LA Times]
Slain Abortion Doctor George Tiller's Work Made Him a Target for Years [NY Daily News]
Ex-Wife: Murder Suspect An Aspiring Martyr [CBS News]
Suspect Jailed in Kansas Abortion Doctor's Killing [Associated Press]
The Anti-Abortion Campaign Against Dr. George Tiller [Rolling Stone]
Late-Term Abortion Doctor Decries Tiller Killing: ‘This Is a Fascist Movement' [Colorado Independent]

Related: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword [Wikipedia]
Abortion Provider Must Turn Over Files [LA Times]
George Tiller, Kansas Doctor, Acquitted In Late-Term Abortion Case [Huffington Post]
Tiller's Wichita Clinic Vandalized [Feminist Majority Foundation]
Wichita Clinic Vandalized [Feminist Majority Foundation]
Right-Wing Reactions to Tiller Murder [Time]
Scott Roeder on Operation Rescue's Site [Democratic Underground]
Pray in May to Stop Abortion, Wichita, KS, May 17-20, 2007 [Operation Rescue (cached)]

Earlier: Obama The Baby Killer?

Taylor caught conservative Robert Stacy McCain mid-masturbatory fantasy envisioning the consequences of a world in which a 17-year-old woman can get Plan B without a prescription:

Plan B - the drug that allows guys to breathe a sigh of relief the morning after using some chick for selfish pleasure-will now be available to 17-year-olds without a prescription.

Who cares that she's not even old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes legally? Get her drunk on wine coolers, get what you want, then the next morning, take her to CVS to get Plan B and make sure there's no chance the slut will show up in a few months talking child support payments and DNA tests.

So guys, if you screw a 17-year-old and "forget" to use a condom, remember: Nothing says "thanks a lot, you cheap whore" like the gift of Plan B!

Gross. In Robert Stacy McCain's world, women (and certainly those of the age of 17) have no sexual autonomy and the men who engage in sexual intercourse with them have no interest in them as people, no feelings for them as partners and no thought of protecting them (or themselves). On behalf of my high school boyfriend, fuck this guy.

Taylor's response, I'll admit, is somewhat more eloquent than mine.

While I'm never one to say inflammatory things, it seems that part of the reason that some women get abortions (which Plan B is not, mind you) is because of the overwhelming and disproportionate social shaming that comes with getting pregnant the "wrong" way. Women as baby-carriers must be virtuous, pure; to interfere with that image is to abandon their responsibility of stopping Raging Penis Monsters from getting in their panties. It turns a biological state into an ethical duty in the worst manner possible, either making a woman a bitch who ain't shit but a ho and/or trick, or into a shining Republican Christian beacon of responsible fertility and excellence in leadership, potentially up for Regional Vagina Manager of the Year.

Taylor hits the nail on the head. In the eyes of many Republicans, women who mistakenly get pregnant are stupid whores or out for the cash money (see also: welfare queens and pregnant teenagers) and those who "successfully" manage their fertility by not engaging in too much sex or contraception are to be commended.

Luckily, for the drunken 17-year-old sluts of Mr. McCain's fantasies, today's Onion presents Plan C.

Reduces the chance of aborting pregnancy after unprotected sex (i.e., if a regular birth control method succeeds and you have a sudden dramatic change of heart). Not intended to replace responsible choices in life.

It's always scary when The Onion's parodies sound a little too similar to real Republican ideas.

A Little Bit Weird About Sex, Just Saying [Pandagon]
Morning After Morning After Pill Re-Impregnates Guilt-Ridden Women [The Onion]

The University of Cambridge explains:

Although claiming to show the living fetus, [Lennart] Nilsson actually photographed abortus material obtained from women who terminated their pregnancies under the liberal Swedish law. Working with dead embryos allowed Nilsson to experiment with lighting, background and positions, such as placing the thumb into the fetus' mouth. But the origin of the pictures was rarely mentioned, even by ‘pro-life' activists, who in the 1970s appropriated these icons.

So, when anti-abortion activists are showing pictures of their "babies" to clinic clients, they're actually using pictures of aborted fetuses.

Nilsson's photographs aside, the exhibit itself is about the development of fetal imagery in science and popular culture over the last millennium, starting with the idea that fetuses were tiny — but fully formed — humans. Despite the imagery, abortion was common and accepted before the Enlightenment period until the point where the fetus started to move, as that was considered to only reliable sign of actual pregnancy.

Distinguished by their periodic discharge of fluids, especially blood, women in their fertile years were perched between good growth and evil stagnation. An interruption of the monthly course was variously interpreted as a harbinger of pregnancy or a sign of ill health: a woman might be expecting a child or need to take herbs to restore the flow. Something she passed could be the returned period, an abortion or a false conception.

Pregnancy remained uncertain even when the bleeding failed to reappear and the abdomen started to enlarge. The earliest reliable sign was ‘quickening', when a mother-to-be felt the child move in the womb-but in some cases pregnancy was revealed for certain only at birth.

Therefore, if you weren't yet pregnant, per se, abortion wasn't necessarily really "abortion"... or evil.

Some theologians placed ensoulment, or the acquisition of a God-given immortal soul, at conception. Yet from the late Middle Ages the Aristotelian view dominated. For practical purposes, quickening tended to be interpreted as coinciding with the entry of the soul. Understanding the early embryo as not-yet-human contributed to widespread tolerance of abortion. This would begin to change only in the Enlightenment.

So, the Enlightenment apparently had its flaws.

In fact, the Enlightenment — and thereafter the Industrial Revolution — led to governments thinking about maternal health and maternal care for even unmarried pregnant women (and the criminalization of abortion) for the good of the workforce.

In the late 1700s governments and medicine focused intensely on pregnancy because a healthy and numerous population was now seen as essential to a well-ordered, competitive state. The punishment and prevention of abortion and infanticide were hotly debated in legal and medical circles. New lying-in hospitals provided care, food and shelter for poor, unmarried women. They also trained midwives and the man-midwives, later called obstetricians, who were taking over childbirth among the upper classes. These institutions increased anatomists' access to embryonic and fetal specimens.

Access to specimens, from spontaneous abortion (miscarriages), induced abortions and cadavers led to a greater understanding of fetal development which, in turn, contributed to debates about (of course) evolution.

To produce a series, Soemmerring needed embryos that, hidden in women's bodies, were hard to obtain.

The main source was abortions, spontaneous or induced. Very occasionally anatomists carried out post-mortems of women who turned out to have been in early pregnancy. Some had committed suicide precisely because they feared a child. Soemmerring found a rich embryo collection already established in Kassel. Further specimens came through personal medical networks. The foundling house and the lying-in hospital there furnished the anatomical theatre with human material: corpses, still-births and abortions.

This led to drawings comparing human fetuses to other animal fetuses by Ernst Häckel, which showed many species were similar at the early stages of development and drew ire from creationists and others opposed to evolutionary science.

But it wasn't until the 1930s that a scientist, Arthur T. Hertig, collaborated with a technician, Miriam Menkin, and a gynecologist, John Rock, to view the first fertilized egg.

To ‘harvest' elusive embryos, Rock recruited married women under 45 with at least two children who were scheduled for hysterectomy. They were asked to keep diaries of their periods, body temperature and sexual intercourse. Rock's assistant Miriam Menkin admitted that she hinted to the patients that it would be helpful if they had sex before the operation, which was scheduled to follow ovulation closely. Data from the women's diaries were combined with the morphology of the embryo and changes in the uterine lining specific to each day of the menstrual cycle to date specimens unusually precisely. At the time, no one involved regarded the procedure as an artificial abortion; once it was seen in this way, the work became impossible to repeat.

Of course, the anti-abortion movement has never been shy about taking advantage of discoveries, technology and even photographic images they opposed, or would have opposed, for their own ends.

‘In our presentation, we would show the eighteen-week LIFE Magazine cover, and ask, is this being human? Subsequently, we will show very human looking babies at sixteen, fourteen, twelve, and eleven weeks (…) We will then show them one more visual at six weeks, and then we'll show no visuals under six weeks (...) We will not show visuals under six weeks, because we feel that if we do, the audience may change their minds', instructed the ‘pro-life' campaigner Barbara Willke in her 1973 manual, How to teach the pro-life story.

Yes, goodness knows, we wouldn't want people to have enough information to choose for themselves!

Making Visible Embryos [University of Cambridge via New Scientist]