The Army announced Friday that soldiers under Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, who commands forces in northern Iraq, would be subject to prosecution if they became pregnant. Male soldiers who impregnate female service members could also be court-martialed. The rule is apparently aimed at reducing attrition, since pregnant soldiers are usually sent home within 14 days. Army spokesman Maj. Lee Peters says, "The redeployment of the pregnant soldier creates a void in the unit and has a negative impact on the unit's ability to accomplish its mission. Another soldier must assume the pregnant soldier's responsibilities." And Cucolo himself adds,

I've got a mission to do. I'm given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them. So I'm going to take every measure I can to keep them all strong, fit and with me for the twelve months we are in the combat zone.

But as military law professor Eugene Fidell points out, "Here you really have issues that go to the core of personal integrity: reproductive rights." In addition to the basic issue of whether pregnancy should ever be a criminal offense, the policy has a number of upsetting implications. Enforcement will likely disproportionately affect women, as it's much easier to tell who's pregnant than who impregnated her. And there's no apparent provision for women who are raped. Add this to the fact that military bases aren't required to provide emergency contraception, and that abortions are banned at military hospitals, and you have an environment where women are both forced to remain pregnant and punished for doing so.

Of course, the solution the military would like to encourage is total abstinence for all service members. Cucolo's policy also prohibits soldiers from having sex with Iraqis, or from spending the night with a member of the opposite sex unless married or granted explicit permission. But across-the-board abstinence is just as unrealistic for soldiers as it is for anyone else, and the military might want to provide reliable access to birth control and, yes, to abortion if it really wants to encourage responsible family planning among soldiers. Another way to lessen military attrition, ThinkProgress points out, would be to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. But for now, sex in the military is only okay if you keep it a secret — because apparently a few horrific amateur abortions and the loss of thousands of gay service members are a small price to pay for the illusion of purity.

U.S. Personnel In Iraq Could Face Court-Martial For Getting Pregnant [Stars and Stripes]
Top U.S. Commander: Women Who Become Pregnant While On Active Duty Face Jailtime [ThinkProgress]
Pregnant G.I.'s Could Be Punished [AP, via NYT]
Pregnant US Troops In Iraq Could Face Jail Time [Sphere]
Military Abortions: No Good Choices [Broadsheet]
Tell Congress: Protect The Health Of Servicewomen Abroad [NARAL Pro-Choice America]

In an op-ed in Salon (which appears in slightly abbreviated form in the LA Times, Ehrenreich writes that women's response to the Stupak Amendment, which "will snatch away all but the wealthiest women's right to choose," has been "muted" compared with the outcry against the new mammography guidelines. This is despite the fact that mammograms for women under 50 haven't been shown to decrease breast cancer mortality, and some evidence suggests they may even increase cancer risk. Ehrenreich writes,

It's not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it's "woman friendly," what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I've even seen a bottle of Shiraz called "Hope" with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women's rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but "breast cancer awareness." In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.

On the one hand, Ehrenreich's comments seem like a somewhat heavy-handed indictment of modern feminism. She says, "Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, 'Squeeze our tits!'" But just as not everything a woman does is empowering, not every extra-scientific position a group of women takes is a blow to feminism. Also, plenty of us have been far from muted on Stupak.

That said, however, there's good evidence that the breast cancer awareness movement as it currently exists isn't necessarily good for women. Though many fear that the new guidelines are simply an attempt by insurance companies to save money, Ehrenreich argues that the old guidelines actually pumped money into the pockets of oncologists, who offered chemotherapy for mammogram-detected cancers that might never have needed treating. Unfortunately, we don't yet know how to distinguish these cancers from those that do merit aggressive treatment — and the treatments we do have could be a lot better. Ehrenreich says,

What we really need is a new women's health movement, one that's sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer's progression from "early" to "late" stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don't need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies' auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.

Ehrenreich's language is harsh, but as someone who suffered breast cancer herself, she knows whereof she speaks. And while research into cancer treatment is ongoing, the focus of breast cancer awareness could use a shift. Much of the focus is on women themselves — their responsibility to schedule regular mammograms, to lead a healthy lifestyle, and to perform self-exams (a practice also jettisoned under the new guidelines). It makes a certain amount of sense — individual women want to feel that they can have an effect on their health. But there may be systemic factors, like additives and pollutants, that contribute to breast cancer, and the pink-ribbon movement might do well to advocate for more research into those. And although mammograms can save lives, new screening options might be even better — cutting-edge research deserves just as much support as awareness and prevention currently get.

The "pink-ribbon breast cancer cult," as Ehrenreich calls it, may not be the sign of a large-scale failure of feminism. But women are being asked to accept a lot of symbolic gestures — like Sen. Dick Vitter's superfluous mammogram-access amendment — instead of the reproductive rights and truly life-saving treatments they actually need. Ehrenreich argues persuasively that rather than getting angry about new guidelines for a useful but flawed procedure, women should save their anger for what really matters — that we still don't know how to heal our breasts, and that the government is trying to control our wombs.

Slap On A Pink Ribbon, Call It A Day [Salon]
Can Mammograms Increase Cancer Risk For Some Women? [Time: Wellness Blog]
Annual Screening With Breast Ultrasound Or MRI Could Benefit Some Women [EurekAlert]
Targeted Breast Ultrasound Can Reduce Biopsies For Women Under 40 [EurekAlert]
David Vitter Will Protect Ladies From Medical Recommendations [Wonkette]

I've had the unenviable task of reading both Prejean's Still Standing and Palin's Going Rogue in the last couple of days, and I gleaned the following striking similarities:

Both were self-described "jocks" turned beauty queens.

Palin: "I thought it was a horrendous idea, at first. I was a jock and quite square, not a pageant-type girl at all. I didn't wear makeup in high school and cut my hair short because I didn't like wasting time primping. I couldn't relate to the way I assumed most cheerleader types thought and lived, and figured it was those girls who were equipped for the pageant thing.
On the other hand, there was the scholarship money."

Prejean: "When I told my parents and my sister about it, they looked at me like I was crazy. They knew me as the girl who scraped her knees sliding into second base, who got a fat lip jumping up for a rebound in the midst of flying elbows at a basketball game. But a beauty contest?"

Both were accused of skipping public appearances, but say they had good reasons.

Palin: "My opponents and the press had a field day with that one: "Palin a No-Show at Chamber Of Commerce Luncheon Debate." [...] I couldn't make the media understand why I had chosen to skip another rubber-chicken campaign stop and instead attend this significant military exercise. I tried to explain: the Chamber of Commerce be here next week; our troops would not."

Prejean: "The reason I was not at the press conference is that I had not been invited to be at the press conference. The first I heard of it was when a reporter asked me to comment on it a few days in advance. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. [...] This was the second time in about a week that he and Shanna had "scheduled" an appearance for me (the other was the pro-gay marriage public service ad) when in fact they had never invited me at all and knew I would be out of town — and then portrayed me as running out on them!"

Both say they have the same views on gay marriage as Barack Obama.

Palin: "I explained to Schmidt that I oppose homosexual marriage, but that didn't seem too controversial in the campaign since the Democrat candidate for president held the same position."

Prejean: "When I later googled "Obama," "marriage," and "man and a woman," I found that Barack Obama's answer was almost identical to my own, although he managed to work in opposition to Proposition 8."

Both say they resisted pressure to give "safe" answers.

Palin: "The bottom line was that these were political answers — and I couldn't force myself to play it safe and sound like a politician. On top of that, there were probably ten cards for a single topic with a different set on nonanswers on every one. So in the end I'm thinking, Okay, which nonanswer do you want me to give?

Prejean: "Roger wanted me to reinforce the first part of my answer, and buck the whole question back to the right of states to regulate marriage. He wanted me to punt."

Both feel persecuted by the liberal media.

Palin: "Reporters from across the nation camped out at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home. [...] Every once in a while a friend or family member would think they could trust a reporter, and so they'd talk to them. And almost 100 percent of the time Todd and I would get a call later from a panicked loved one saying, "Geez! We can't win! That reporter took what I said all out of context." Or even worse, "I never said that!" We assured them we knew, it was okay, it was just the unproductive game some chose to play."

Prejean: "Somehow the liberal media can get away with these degrading, disgusting jokes about a conservative woman, while still touting themselves as open-minded and tolerant. What is Sean Hannity or some other conservative media figure (male or female) had said something like this? Especially if he said it about a liberal woman? But for some reason it was perfectly acceptable for these men to belittle me on live television. Laura Ingraham pointed out the one-sidedness of "tolerance" in her television debate with Gloria Feldt (a liberal feminist who said I — another woman! — needed a "heart transplant" instead of breast implants). Laura commented — quite rightly — that she would be taken off the air if she spoke of liberals the way these media figures were speaking about me."

This last illustrates the most fundamental similarity between the two women: they believe that they are special, and have been singled out for special scrutiny. As we mentioned before, the conservative media is every bit as prone to attack journalism as the much-maligned liberal media, and Hannity, Ann Coulters, and others have said plenty of nasty things about liberal women. Palin and Prejean have both experienced sexism — Perez Hilton's post-pageant comments about Prejean
were a particularly noxious example. But instead of making them more sensitive to the problems of other marginalized groups, like gays and non-conservative women, their difficulties have only served to heighten their exceptionalism.

Still Standing is actually a more enraging book than Going Rogue, in that it deals more closely with its author's upsetting views on social issues. Prejean writes,

If it isn't right for the public schools to teach a single faith perspective, how can it be right for them to teach an anti-faith perspective, to teach that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle, when to faithful Catholics and Evangelicals and others who support traditional morality, it isn't? This sort of double standard in our public life is dangerous, but it's what political correctness is doing to us: it is putting just not just our freedom of speech, but our freedom of conscience at risk.

She also says,

I think my whole ordeal reveals just how the culture of political correctness uses shaming, blackmail, and other forms of emotional abuse to force people and organizations to either stick to our beliefs and suffer the consequences, or throw away our beliefs just to be left alone.

What she doesn't acknowledge is that people with beliefs the exact opposite of hers have been facing this choice for decades. Neither Palin nor Prejean seem to understand that while they ask America to sympathize with their victimization, they're also asking us to support policies that victimize others. Prejean's views on gay marriage and Palin's beliefs about reproductive rights (and welfare, and healthcare reform) aim to restrict people's freedom to live the way they want. To espouse these views while complaining about handlers who try to rein them in and reporters who criticize them reveals a staggering egocentrism. This is just one more thing Palin and Prejean have in common, and perhaps the reason both of them are still appearing on television long after each has arguably lost her relevance: both of them are tireless promoters of themselves.

Still Standing: The Untold Story Of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, And Political Attacks [Amazon]
Going Rogue: An American Life [Amazon]

Pro-choicers had a signature drive, which allowed them to physically stack admissions of women's support and deliver it to the White House:

NARAL Pro-Choice America delivered a petition to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Monday urging him not to include controversial anti-abortion language in the Senate bill.

The group gathered 97,218 signatures in a 72-hour drive over the weekend imploring the senate majority leader not to include the Stupak-Pitts amendment in his final version of health care reform. The amendment, initially offered by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), would prevent private insurers from offering abortion coverage to anyone who receives government subsidies through a new insurance exchange.

Stephanie Simon of the Wall Street Journal committed a Guttmacher faux pas by using the organization's research to say that this change will not have a major impact on women:

Restrictions on abortion coverage approved in the House version of the health-care bill likely will affect the affordability of the procedure for only a small minority of women.

Although the bill has stirred passions on both sides of the abortion-rights debate — which are likely to be echoed when the Senate takes up its version — the practical effect of the restrictions will be limited, statistics suggest and some experts in family-planning issues say. [...]

Just 13% of abortions nationwide are billed to private insurance, according to a 2001 study by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights but is cited as a reliable source of data by both sides in the abortion debate. An unknown number of people might seek reimbursement from their insurance company after the procedure. Applying the 13% figure to the most recent abortion data available suggests that fewer than 160,000 women a year rely on insurance to cover the cost of an abortion upfront.

As a reminder, the Institute has stated very clearly:

Among the many arguments being made in the debate over health care reform is the claim that because very few women use private insurance coverage to pay for abortion services, loss of this coverage would have minimal impact. Those making this argument cite a Guttmacher Institute statistic showing that 13% of all abortions in 2001 were directly billed to private insurance companies (see Table 3, page 20, here).

However, that statistic alone misrepresents the situation on three counts:

* Our study included all women who obtained abortions in 2001, including women on Medicaid and those who are uninsured. If one looked only at privately insured women, the percentage of procedures billed directly to insurance companies would be substantially higher than 13%.
* Perhaps even more importantly, the 13% statistic does not include women who pay for an abortion up front and then seek reimbursement from their insurance provider. This is common when a medical provider does not participate in a patient's insurance plan, as is often the case with small, specialized providers, including abortion providers.
* Lastly, some of the women whom our study identified as paying out of pocket likely had insurance coverage for abortion care, but may not have known they had it or chose not to use it for reasons of confidentiality. Given the stigma that still surrounds abortion, many women might not have wanted their insurer or employer-or their spouse or parent who may be the primary policyholder-to learn that they had obtained an abortion. That antiabortion activists who have worked for decades to perpetuate that stigma are now turning around and using it to argue why women should not be able to purchase insurance coverage for abortion is deeply cynical.

Over in Massachusetts, the Stupak-Pitts amendment galvanized the senate race, with each entrant trying to out-maneuver the other:

State Attorney General Martha Coakley, the front-runner in the Dec. 8 contest, laid down the first marker by declaring soon after the House vote last week that she would have voted against the bill because of the amendment restricting the sale of insurance policies covering abortion through the proposed national health insurance exchange - or to women who receive health care subsidies from the federal government.

Asked in an interview with a Boston radio station whether she would have voted for the bill, Coakley said, "I believe that I would not."

"I think that this particular amendment that was put in is really a poison pill for that bill, and it's taking two steps back," she said.

Massachusetts Rep. Michael Capuano, who is also seeking the Senate seat and who was one of 219 House Democrats who voted for the bill, quickly seized on her comment, calling it "manna from heaven" for his campaign.

"I'm proud that my vote helped keep health care reform with a public option alive, so that the fight for health care reform will go forward," Capuano said in a statement. "I believe it's what the people of Massachusetts expect and what Ted Kennedy would have demanded."

In essence, Coakley is arguing that she would have voted no outright, in protest of Stupak, while Capuano said he voted for a bill to keep dialogue going, while voting against the final bill if Stupak is still in there.

However, there is some hopeful news. It looks like some of the Dems are hatching a plot to preserve the public option:

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who requested the meeting with Reid, said progressives believe they have compromised enough on the public option – from a Medicare-for-all proposal to Reid's proposal to create a national government plan with a provision for states to opt-out.

"Most of us in the caucus want a strong public option, support the Reid way of doing it," Brown said. "And we're confident that over time, as the debate unfolds and we take amendment after amendment after amendment, that we can get 60 votes."

He acknowledged several moderates need convincing, but said there is little willingness among progressives to back down. [...]

A Senate aide said there were plans to discuss passing the health care bill through a procedural maneuver known as reconciliation – which favored by progressive activists because it would allow Democrats to circumvent the 60-vote filibuster threshold. A majority of the Democratic caucus supports the public option, and only 51 senators would be needed to approve the legislation under reconciliation.

Max Baucus is one of the moderate Dems that seems to believe that no matter what's in the bill, the most important thing to do push the Frankenbill to Obama:

"They wanted to talk about the importance of the public option being in the bill, which I understand," Baucus said. "But the main point is that we must pass health care reform hopefully by the end of this year. But we must pass it."

But as the public outcry over the Stupak-Pitts amendment has shown, the citizenry is becoming increasingly more concerned with the content of the bill, not just its existence.

NARAL delivers petition to Reid [Politico]
Limited Effect Seen in Abortion Clause [Wall Street Journal]
Misuse of Guttmacher Statistic on Insurance Coverage of Abortion [Guttmacher Institute]
Abortion key issue in Massachusetts race [Politico]
Senate liberals press Reid on public option [Politico]

[Washington, D.C., November 5. Image via Getty]

WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 05: Anti-abortion demonstrator Diana Roccograndi of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, wear a paper mask of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) while protesting outside the Cannon House Office Building November 5, 2009 in Washington, DC. The protesters were voicing their opposition to Congress' health care reform legislation, saying it supports government funding of abortion. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The evening seemed to focus on how we talk about feminism, perhaps because it's what all three panelists (that's not them in the pic) do in their jobs, but also because issues of language and rhetoric are a really important part of being a feminist in the larger world. The conversation touched on blog comments — which all three agreed were like a more public version of 1970s consciousness-raising groups — before zeroing in on the word "feminist" itself. Valenti said she embraced the word, and that there was no point in picking another, less loaded term because "I think any word you use to talk about women's rights is going to become a dirty word." Feldt concurred: "the first thing people do to you when they want to diminish you is they diminish you with language."

Unfortunately, the panelists seemed to feel that a successful diminution had occurred in the linguistic fight between words "pro-choice" and "pro-life." Harris said she had stopped using the term "pro-choice" in writing because "we lost that rhetorical war" — because anti-abortion advocates had successfully cast "life" as representing the moral high ground, and "choice" as somehow frivolous. I get what she was saying — I, in fact, stopped using "pro-life" in writing a while ago, in response to a consciousness-raising comment on this blog, no less. But I still use "pro-choice," because even though the opposition tries to frame the term as superficial — like choosing between different flavors of gum — I think it still stands powerfully for a woman's right to self-determination and autonomy. And I think that any substitute term — Harris mentioned "pro-abortion rights" and "pro-reproductive rights" — will be demonized just as "pro-choice" has been. To paraphrase Valenti, any word you use to talk about a woman's control over her own body is going to become, for some people, a dirty word.

In some ways, the highlight of the evening for me was when a college student asked how she could explain her views to her non-feminist friends without "coming off as a caricature of myself." I'm a lot older than her, and this is something I still struggle with. It's also something I feel a little bit guilty about — now that I'm a professional feminist, maybe I shouldn't be worrying about how I come off. But Valenti took her question seriously, saying it was actually one she was asked all the time. She told the young woman that "pop culture is a great entry point for these conversations," and she's right — as a shared language, movies and TV and even gossip can be a way not only for feminists to start a conversation with not-yet-feminists, but for young people still experimenting with feminism to hone their views. When I first started blogging, I wrote a lot about Kate Moss and the Olsen twins, and although most of what I wrote looks sophomoric now (and sometimes, unfortunately, mean), it was a way for me to get comfortable having opinions and making them public. I still don't like making a harsh distinction between "fluffy" and "serious" subjects, and I think Valenti's right that an ostensibly superficial conversation about some celebrity or movie can actually lead into a real discussion of values.

Harris, too, had a suggestion for the student — "be yourself." She apologized for the cheesiness of her tip, but she had a good point — teaching your friends about feminism can be as much about modeling behavior as it is about explicitly explaining your political views. Just by admitting that you're mad when you're mad, and not saying you agree when you don't, and refusing to body-snark on yourself and other women, and generally standing up for what you know is right, whether it involves women or not, you can show everyone you know that (to quote a T-shirt Valenti name-checks in Full Frontal Feminism) "this is what a feminist looks like" — and you'll make feminism look pretty good. In fact, even though I still have it from time to time, I do think the worry about looking like "a caricature" comes from feminism's enemies, from people who think a woman criticizing anything is cartoonish and shrill. For these people, just as "feminism" and "pro-choice" are dirty words, speaking up may be a dirty act, no matter how you do it. But for, I hope, a larger number of people, women and men, speaking up is just something they aren't familiar with yet, something they haven't quite learned to do. I hope the college student who so handily voiced my worries last night keeps on showing them how.

Planned Parenthood NYC Action Fund [Official Site]

Says The New York Times:

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a supporter of abortion rights, has little choice but to heed the concerns of members of her caucus who oppose abortion. As many as 40 House Democrats, a potentially decisive bloc, have threatened to oppose the bill without tighter restrictions on abortion.

This is why we can't have nice things, people. Under the bill as written, "health plans are neither required nor forbidden to cover abortions" and federal funds cannot be used for abortion. But that's not good enough for the numerous anti-choice Democrats we've gone and elected, so, as Lynn Harris put it at Salon, "Long story short, there's the Stupak amendment, which hardcore abortion opponents love, and there's the Ellsworth-DeLauro 'compromise' amendment, which everybody hates."

Timothy Noah at Slateexplains the Stupak amendment, which he characterizes as "a crowbar to pry abortion coverage from private health insurance plans offered in the exchange":

The Stupak amendment stated, "No funds authorized under this Act … may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan [italics mine] that includes coverage of abortion," with exceptions for rape, incest, or a threat to the mother's life. Stupak claims that all he was doing was repeating the language of the Hyde amendment, but the italicized language quoted above does not appear in the Hyde Amendment. (And besides, even if that were all Stupak was doing, his amendment eliminates the possibility that future repeal of the Hyde Amendment might liberate health reform from its prohibition.) "Stupak is basically saying you cannot even participate in the exchange unless your plan does not cover abortion," Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told the Los Angeles Times.

The Ellsworth-DeLauro "compromise," on the other hand, says that "if the public plan decides to cover abortion, it would have to hire private contractors to handle money that might be used for that purpose," according to The Times. Laurie Rubiner, Planned Parenthood's vice president for public policy, says the amendment will "tip the balance away from women's access to reproductive health care," while Douglas D. Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, calls it "a phony compromise" and "a money-laundering scheme." Common ground in the abortion debate, ladies and gentleman: This amendment sucks.

Furthermore, it's "an exercise in sophistry" according to a memo written by Harvard professor Laurence H. Tribe and quoted in the Times. Once more with feeling:

Under the House bill, he said, abortion services could be financed 'only by special private premiums that are segregated' from other money. Thus, he concluded, the House bill, "as it currently stands, does not authorize governmental funding of abortion."

But the important thing now is making sure the same thing is spelled out in even more ways, ideally making access to a legal medical procedure even more difficult — not, you know, passing a desperately needed bill. If they just went ahead and passed it as is, it might seem like we have a Democratic majority in Congress whose priority is the health of all Americans or something. Nobody wants that.

Abortion Deal in Health Bill Sets Off Haggling in Congress [NY Times]
"Do-or-die moment" for abortion coverage [Salon]
Don't Be Stupak
[Slate]

For a primer on why parental notification laws suck, check out this article at RH Reality Check. Some highlights:

While parental notification laws are intended to protect young women, they assume that all young women can safely involve their family in the decision to terminate a pregnancy. Ideally, young women would freely inform their parents or other trusted adults. And most do...

However, the government cannot mandate good family dynamics or strengthen a family's ability to engage in effective and positive communication. Interestingly enough, parental notification laws mandate family involvement only after a young woman already has become pregnant.

...[M]ore than half of young women who do not involve a parent in their decision to seek an abortion cite fear of abuse or eviction. The American Medical Association (AMA) reports that some young women will go to extreme and unhealthy lengths to keep pregnancies secret, including running away, obtaining illegal abortions, or self-inducing abortions.

The AMA and other medical organizations recommend against parental notification laws. Research in Texas, which has required parental notification since 2000, has shown that it increased the likelihood that a girl would undergo a second-term abortion, which carries greater health risks. So, to recap, the majority of pregnant girls voluntarily tell their parents before seeking abortion, and those who don't probably have a good reason for keeping quiet — like fearing abuse or being thrown out of the house. Girls will risk their lives with illegal abortions rather than risk telling their parents, which might suggest that they know something about their own family dynamics we don't. Major medical organizations think it's a bad idea. And so... Illinois is about to become the 35th state to go ahead with it. Of course.

If you haven't had your fill of depressing reproductive rights-related news from Illinois yet, take a gander at the story of Donna Quinn, a Dominican sister who's been volunteering as an escort at a Chicago-area clinic. Quinn, who's in favor of contraception and women's ordination as well as being pro-choice, has been caught in the Vatican's dragnet and is giving up her work as an advocate for women at the clinic. Although her order, the Sinsinawa Dominicans, have supported her in the past, the recent increased scrutiny of women religious in America seems to have led them to reprimand her and release a statement saying, "her actions are in violation of her profession" and expressing regret over the controversy. Nevertheless, Quinn maintains that stopping her work as an escort was her own decision, made in part to protect the patients. She told The Chicago Tribune:

As a peacekeeper, my goal is to enable women to enter a reproductive health clinic in dignity and without fear of being physically assaulted. ... I am very worried that the publicity around my presence will lead to violations of every woman's right to privacy and expose them to further violence.

Now, on the one hand, it's no secret that the Catholic Church is anti-choice and anti-contraception, so what did you expect? On the other hand, as someone who attended both a summer camp and a college run by the Sinsinawa Dominicans (and worked one summer at the former), I can tell you the scuttlebutt was always (at least in the '80s and '90s) that a lot of the old girls were only semi-secretly pro-choice. Some are openly in favor of gay rights and many are generally way more feminist than you'd expect. Quinn's been more vocal about her church-challenging views than most, but for a long time, the sisters have basically been left alone to do their thing, which includes community service and educating young people, primarily girls, with enough of a focus on both social justice and critical thinking that some of us inevitably grow up to be atheist, homo-loving, pro-choice feminist bloggers. And basically, that kind of thing is exactly why the Vatican is cracking down now, trying to force American women religious in line and out of public life. If people can see them out there in the community, doing actual good for actual human beings instead of just judging their sex lives — well, that gives entirely the wrong impression of the church's priorities!

If there's a silver lining in all this depressing news, I guess it's just that Donna Quinn exists. And she may be quitting her volunteer work, but she's not shutting up about the need for women to have unhindered access to reproductive health services. "I take this opportunity to urge those demonstrating against women who are patients at the Hinsdale Clinic, whom I have seen emotionally as well as physically threaten women, to cease those activities," she told the Tribune. "I would never have had to serve as a peacekeeper had not they created a war against women."

Vote clears way for Ill. abortion notification law [Chicago Tribune]
Parental Notification Law Will Only Harm Illinois' Young Women [RH Reality Check]
Nun decides to suspend activism for abortion rights after a rebuke by her order [Chicago Tribune]

Earlier: Vatican Attempts To Erase Images Of Modern Service To God

In the Daily Beast, Danielle Friedman shares the story of Joy Szabo, a woman so frustrated with her recent hospital experience, she took to scrawling a message on her car:

In bright-yellow paint, Joy Szabo wrote: "Page Hospital, enter my body without permission... Sounds like rape to me." She began driving that minivan around her small, rural town as often as possible-attracting the attention of her local paper, and this week, the country. [...]

To make a long, complicated story short: In June, Szabo's hospital adopted a policy prohibiting women who had prior C-sections from delivering vaginally-from having what's technically known as a VBAC, for "vaginal birth after Caesarean." While two of Szabo's kids were born vaginally, her second child was delivered via emergency C-section.

At one time, vaginal delivery was deemed too risky for women who'd had C-sections. Today, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially supports VBACs, but stipulates that an OB and an anesthesiologist must be in the hospital during the entire procedure. As a result, many financially strapped or small hospitals-like Szabo's-can't offer VBACs. And that has many moms and natural-birth advocates up in arms.

Much of the controversy revolves around a mother's right to choose what happens to her body in the process of giving birth to child. However, as doctors and hospital administration face tough decisions trying to balance budget constraints with the needs of patients.

For many women, having a C-section "feels out of their control-like there's nothing they can do, and it doesn't matter if they say no," says Desirre Andrews, president of the International Caesarean Awareness Network, known as ICAN, an advocacy group that helps moms have VBACs. Over the past six years, the number of ICAN support groups has ballooned from fewer than 30 to 112 chapters, in 43 states. "I think that's why, to them, it feels like an extreme physical assault."

And these women do have a point - the article goes on to point out c-section rates have skyrockets, and estimates about half of the procedures are medically unnecessary. And while there have been reports of women scheduling C-sections due to busy lifestyles (though that idea has been disputed), the fight for reproductive choice extends far past abortion rights and into the treatment of mothers. After all, as Michelle Demont, the creator of BirthCut.com notes:

"Healthy babies matter, of course, but mothers matter, too," Demont says. "We're not just vessels for babies to be born."

The C-Section Backlash [The Daily Beast]
The Risks of Early C-Sections [Time]
Can We Please Stop Blaming Women for C-Sections? [RH Reality Check]
Official Site [BirthCut]

Earlier:

Mad Men: Blood, Sweat, And Tears

When I write about Parker, it's almost always hard for me to choose which inflammatory quote to begin with — and indeed, today I'll start with two.

When a happily pregnant woman loses her pregnancy, she says she has lost her baby. Casting that painful episode as of no greater consequence than missing a lunch date should repel any beating heart.

And:

Regardless of one's moral position, it can't be convincingly argued that abortion and miscarriage are mere medical conditions like any other, as Trunk asserts. They both can involve medical procedures, but there's a life force at work that no woman who aims to give birth will deny.

From these lines, it appears that Parker is either being completely disingenuous or has not done as much research into her subject as I did to write a snarky blog post about it. Because if you read what Penelope Trunk has to say on the matter, you will learn that she has herself had:

• 2 miscarriages
• 2 abortions
• 2 children

Imagine if Kathleen Parker had read those two old posts — one about the painful and tragic miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, one about Trunk's belief that her reasons for having abortions were ill-considered — without knowing about the infamous tweet. Except for the fact that Trunk expresses no shame about her abortions (or even regret, precisely), Parker probably would have approved. Trunk believes miscarriage is a tragedy! She's advised her numerous working female readers that career concerns are no reason to have an abortion! Two for two!

So here's what Penelope Trunk really did "wrong": She had the nerve to feel different about each one of her six pregnancies. She didn't automatically regard each embryo as a wanted child, as a blessing from a god she may or may not believe in, as a lifetime obligation she contracted to fulfill by choosing to have sex. She looked at each pregnancy in the context of her own body and her own life at the time it occurred, and made the decision that felt best for her. Three times, she chose to continue the pregnancy, and when one of those ended in miscarriage, she grieved. Three times, she chose to end the pregnancy, and when one of those ended in miscarriage, she was relieved. And tweeted about it.

The possibility that the same woman could have different feelings about being pregnant at different times in her life — that this is one of the reasons why so many people are pro-choice — is not something Parker allows for, even as she's writing about a woman who has experienced the joys of motherhood and the grief of a lost wanted pregnancy as well as the relief of terminating and losing unwanted ones. In Parker's universe, it seems, there is only one way to feel about pregnancy (happy), one way to feel about miscarriage (bereaved), and one way to feel about abortion (appalled). If you have what she considers the correct feelings about only 50% of your pregnancies, screw you. There is no partial credit.

According to the Guttmacher Institute (PDF), "About 60% of abortions are obtained by women who have one or more children." And that's not even counting the ones who, like Trunk, will later go on to have children when they feel ready. Which means, as reproductive rights activists have been saying forever, the majority of women who choose to end pregnancies at some point will also choose to continue them at other points. Now, take this with a grain of salt, since it's well-known that I'm a murderous, baby-hating feminist, but to me, that suggests that a hell of a lot of women feel different about different pregnancies at different times.

Parker's having none of it: "One might wish that Trunk were an anomaly, but one would be disappointed. To those for whom abortion is a correction, miscarriage is just a messier month."

Penelope Trunk is a woman for whom abortion has been "a correction," a woman who publicly tweeted that miscarriage was a relief. Penelope Trunk is also the woman who wrote this:

I am four months pregnant. But the baby is dead, inside me, and must be removed. I am devastated. I always knew this could happen, in the back of my mind. But you are never prepared for something like this to happen.

When I first heard the news, I did nothing. Cancelled every plan I had. Sat in chairs staring at walls, laid in bed hoping for sleep, and cried.

Unable to reconcile those two things, Parker simply leaves out the second part, placing Trunk squarely in the category of those too selfish and heartless to appreciate the "life force at work that no woman who aims to give birth will deny." Never mind that Trunk did indeed aim to give birth three times. And never mind that when her body had a different idea one of those times, she wrote publicly about her devastation. Penelope Trunk is the self-styled "brazen hussy careerist" whose tweet trivialized "not only the miscarriage but what little remains of our humanity" — ergo she could not possibly be the same woman who wrote, "On the day I found out the baby was dead... at the doctor's office, when I was crying so loudly that I was taken to a room farthest away from the waiting area so as not to scare already jittery expectant mothers, I didn't care if the interviews got done." That would suggest that women are complex human beings who feel different things at different times or something. The facts just don't fit!

And yet, they are the facts. Facts that take about 30 seconds to find if you ask yourself one question: "What does Penelope Trunk have to say on the matter of her own body, choices and feelings, in more than 140 characters?" Kathleen Parker, to her credit, must have asked that question, since she links to Trunk's blog more than once, including to the post that refers back to the previous miscarriage story. Nevertheless, she completely ignores the answer, because it doesn't support her casting of Trunk as the other kind of woman, the kind for whom "miscarriage is just a messier month." If you can only be one kind or the other — and clearly, that's the prevailing wisdom on Parker's planet — then any woman who's ever felt relief after a miscarriage, or after an abortion, is that kind of woman. The kind who doesn't get motherhood, who doesn't get loss, who doesn't get humanity — no matter how much personal experience she has with all three.

Regardless of how you'd characterize The Tweet, condemning Trunk as a woman who simply can't grasp the gravity of a lost pregnancy, some "grotesque" and "freakish" monster who misrepresents how real women feel about miscarriage, is the height of intellectual dishonesty. And it does a disservice to the millions of real women who have felt conflicted about unintended pregnancies (which about half of us will have before we're 45) and/or felt different about one pregnancy than another, by propagating the myth that wanting or not wanting children is a constant in each woman's life, never subject to her particular circumstances at the time. That there are "bad" women who choose abortion and "good" women who choose to be mommies; "bad" women who are grateful to miscarry, especially in states where obtaining an abortion is difficult, and "good" women who grieve for their lost pregnancies. It's pure bullshit to discuss Penelope Trunk's body, life and use of social media without acknowledging that she is all of those women in one. And she's far from alone.

Image from Penelope Trunk's blog.

A Miscarriage Of Propriety [Washington Post]
You Can't Manage Your Work Life If You Can't Talk About It [Penelope Trunk]
Sometimes Work Is A Welcome Distraction [Penelope Trunk]
What's The Connection Between Abortion And Careers? [Penelope Trunk]

Earlier: What Was Penelope Trunk Thinking Twittering About Her Miscarriage?
A Reconsideration Of Penelope Trunk, The Miscarriage-Tweeting Career Advisor

52% of the 947 women surveyed (PDF) report being worse off financially than they were a year ago, 75% are more concerned about money, and "Sixty-four percent of women agree with the statement, 'With the economy the way it is, I can't afford to have a baby right now.'"

But while 29% agreed with the statement ""With the economy the way it is, I am more careful than I used to be about using contraception every time I have sex," 8% sometimes skipped birth control altogether to save money, and 18% of women on the Pill reported using it inconsistently to cut costs. 23% are having a harder time affording birth control than in the past, and that "rises to one out of three among financially worse-off women."

Beyond the bullet points, the survey shows, as the report puts it, that "Family planning and childbearing decisions are not made in a vacuum, but have always been influenced by broader economic and other external forces." It's hard to believe we needed a survey to demonstrate that, but apparently, it still needs to be said. And while healthcare reform is the issue of the hour, let's not forget what Amie Newman notes over at RH Reality Check:

Pregnancy and cesarean sections can both be considered "pre-existing conditions" for which women are denied coverage. According to Think Progress, most individual health insurance markets don't cover maternity care services either. All of these kinds of policies leave women struggling to pay for the reproductive health decisions they make – in more ways than one.

I spent my entire adult life in Canada until 2005, and when I moved back to the U.S., I started looking at the cost of private health insurance, since coverage doesn't come with a freelance writing career. That was the first time I realized that a "maternity rider" costs a lot extra, and the expense was already so great I chose to gamble and skip health insurance entirely. (I went without it for three years until I got married last winter. Lucky me, being allowed to get married.) I had no desire to have a baby any time soon, but that was the first time it really hit me: I could neither afford to get pregnant by accident nor to be insured just in case. In Canada, I'd taken it for granted that if I got knocked up, my decision about whether to proceed with the pregnancy would be entirely based on my feelings about raising a child. Crossing the border meant I suddenly had to consider the cost of prenatal care and giving birth, let alone keeping the kid in food and shoes. And even for someone financially stable, those costs were great enough to potentially be a dealbreaker. It's ridiculous.

So it's nice to see a report like this highlighting the role economic considerations play in family planning. Now it would just be nice if we could get it together to address the problem with a more workable solution than "If you can't afford to get pregnant, don't spread your legs."

RECESSION HAS DRAMATICALLY RESHAPED WOMEN'S CHILDBEARING DESIRES [Guttmacher Institute]
To Have A Child or Not? Sometimes It's All About the Economy Finds Guttmacher Institute [RH Reality Check]

This isn't the first time some bullshit right-winger pulled this Communist theory out of their ass. So, a few thoughts.

• Tucker Carlson and all the rest of these assholes are avowed free-marketeers and capitalists. Many of them have opposed health care reform for more than a decade, in part because they don't want to see doctors be able to successfully monetize their educations. That is, of course, unless those doctors are performing abortions, in which case they should be poor.
• Most people who've studied economics understand the theory of supply and demand: when supply goes down and demand remains the same, prices go up. Anti-abortion activists have spent more than 35 years trying to drive abortion practices out of business through extra-legal harassment, intimidation, murder, assault, over-regulation (again, exposing the limits of their love of a free market) and attempted bans on abortion providers and abortion clinics. If abortion providers are getting rich off of their practices — and they've got no evidence other than Tiller's profits, which he had to plow back into providing security for himself, his employees and his patients — they've got no one to blame but themselves.
• The whole stupid concept rests on the idea that since Carlson and his ilk think abortion is immoral, the people who think they're providing a legitimate, necessary and legal medical service for women have no right to make money. I don't think Tucker Carlson would like to be on the receiving end of a national debate over how much money he should be compensated for spewing conservative bullshit and amoral hot air from his piehole.

Now, mind you, Tucker Carlson's compensation for being a conservative talking head isn't a matter of public record, but let's guess he easily makes over $150,000 a year (and likely much, much more) for his work. Technically speaking, then, Tucker Carlson, while appearing on Fox News yesterday as a compensated contributor, just made money off of abortion. And he's not the only one.

While Operation Rescue's non-profit status was revoked by the IRS in 2006 for illegal political activities, it meant that its donors couldn't legally take a tax deduction for their donations — though its website helpfully promises confidential "advice" about nonetheless making suchdonations. What this means is that, unlike much of its competition, it don't have to disclose how much money they pay their directors or staff. But if it's anything like its competition on the right, it's pretty substantial.

Take Focus on the Family, headquartered in Colorado Springs (median household income: $51,227). its employees do pretty well for themselves — hell, you might say that they're "enriching" themselves by advocating abortion. For instance, the organization's president, James Daly, is paid $240,000 per year by its political action arm (which allows it to lobby). Its CFO, Wade Crow, makes $136,000 and Senior Vice President Thomas Minnery makes $150,000. From the strict non-profit side, Senior VP Bufford Tackett pulls in $180,000 every year; COO Glenn Williams $172,000, and 10 other senior VPs make between $120,000 and $147,000. Its 5 highest paid employees that aren't considered officers make between $116,000 and $137,000. That means Focus on the Family has at least 20 employees who make more than $100,000 every year.

Over at the Family Research Council in DC, its President, Anthony Perkins, makes more than $200,000 each year, while its Executive Vice President Chuck Donovan makes $175,000 and its VP of Administration, Paul Tripodi, makes $125,000. Its top 5 employees who aren't officers pull down between $117,000 and $138,000, given them at least 8 employees that make more than double the median household income in the United States today — and that's not including the former board member their political arm continues to shell out more than $100,000 a year to.

In a shining example of the wage gap, the American Life League only pays its President, Judith Brown, $127,000 each year. Her husband, like Todd Palin, is the uncompensated EVP, and no other director makes over $100,000 — but 3 of its top 5 employees do. David O'Steen, Executive Direction of the National Right to Life Committee, and his second-in-command Darla St. Martin both make over $100,000, though they don't pay O'Steen's mother, who serves on the Board.

More amusing is the compensation structure over at the Concerned Women of America, where Board Chairwoman Barbara LeHaye's son, Lee, serves as CFO and makes $115,000, and President Wendy Wright makes $121,000. Barbara LeHaye is the only compensated Board member, pulling in $26,000 herself. But the male Executive Director George Tryfiates, makes $129,000 and the male Director of Development pulls in a cool $135,000 each year ( i.e., more than the female President). In fact, of the top 5 employees outside of the directors, only one is a woman — and she makes under $100,000. No wonder the wage gap isn't on its agenda.

This, by the way, is just a sampling of the people (and the ways) that anti-abortion advocates enrich themselves while serving God's supposed will. Conversely, the mean annual wage for all obstetricians and gynecologists is about $200,000 — and most of those people don't have to hire armed body guards and buy bulletproof vests and armor their cars to go to work. So, maybe people like Tucker Carlson ought to stop getting paid for flapping their lips about how doctors have the audacity, in a capitalist society, to make money for providing a legal and demanded medical service, or stop bitching about how other people make their money doing things they disagrees with.

Tucker Carlson Decries Doctors Who "Get Rich Performing Abortions" [Huffington Post]
Focus on the Family 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Focus on the Family Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
American Life League 990 2008 [GuideStar]
National Right to Life Committee 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Concerned Women for America 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2008: 29-1064 Obstetricians and Gynecologists [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Related: Video of Jon Stewart's Epic Takedown of Crossfire [About.com]
Operation Rescue [RH Reality Check]
Donate [Operation Rescue]
Colorado Springs, Colorado [US Census]
Undermining Women's Choices [Concerned Women For America]

Earlier: How The Anti-Abortion Movement Demonized George Tiller

First off, anti-choicers started in on Dr. Tiller immediately, and didn't let up.

Pickets first showed up in 1975, two years after he performed his first abortion. Years later, an anti-abortion group put him on a "wanted" poster of prominent abortion providers and offered $5,000 for information leading to his arrest. When an abortion provider in Florida was assassinated in 1994, Dr. Tiller spent the next few years under the protection of federal marshals. By 1997, he had been labeled "the most infamous abortionist in the United States" by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.

They picketed his home, they protested at his church, disrupting services, they went to his place of business day after day for decades.

They told outright lies and tall tales about him.

"If I can't document it, I don't say it," Mr. Newman of Operation Rescue said, moments before suggesting without any proof that Dr. Tiller had bought off the local district attorney, Nola T. Foulston, by giving her a baby for adoption. He referred a reporter to a Web site that vaguely asserted that Dr. Tiller "may have delivered the ultimate bribe to Nola Foulston." A spokeswoman for Ms. Foulston declined to discuss the accusation.

Anti-abortion activists routinely portrayed Dr. Tiller's campaign contributions as "blood money" that co-opted politicians. "He owned the attorney general's office," Mr. Newman said. "He owned the governor's office. He owned the district attorney's office."

Which is, I'm sure, exactly why he was prosecuted for 17 misdemeanor counts of not having a second doctor without a financial interest sign off on his decision to perform late-term abortions despite virtually no evidence.

The trial so long sought by abortion foes took place this March. It quickly became clear that the case was far from ironclad. The prosecutor produced no evidence of shared fees, partnership agreements or kickbacks. He was reduced to pointing out that Dr. Neuhaus had hugged Dr. Tiller before testifying.

Worse still, there was evidence that an official for the Kansas Board of Healing Arts had suggested the arrangement with Dr. Neuhaus, who had closed her own women's health clinic to care for her diabetic son. There was also evidence that several times a year Dr. Neuhaus disagreed with Dr. Tiller about whether an abortion was necessary. As for Dr. Neuhaus examining women at his clinic, Dr. Tiller told jurors that was done to spare patients repeated confrontations with protesters.

Protesters also hauled him in front of two citizen-driven grand juries, initiated confrontations intended to end with someone getting hurt and, you know, shot him twice.

In April 2006, though, a volunteer spotted an opportunity for confrontation in one small strip of pavement that he thought had been overlooked: the gutter running between the street and the clinic driveway. The volunteer knelt in the gutter to pray, placing himself in the path of vehicles entering the clinic.

According to the "incident report," a clinic nurse pulled up and "laid on her horn repeatedly." When the volunteer "acted as if he did not know that she was there," the report continued, a clinic guard told him that he was reporting him to the police.

The next day, Mr. Gietzen was standing in the gutter with his volunteer discussing the new tactic when Dr. Tiller pulled up in his armored S.U.V. In another "incident report," Mr. Gietzen wrote: "Tiller floored his accelerator, and aimed his Jeep directly at us!"

Mr. Gietzen claimed that Dr. Tiller's vehicle hit him, causing bruising. He promptly filed a police report, generating more news coverage. He then wrote to Dr. Tiller demanding a $4,000 settlement. When that went nowhere, he sued. He also demanded that Ms. Foulston prosecute Dr. Tiller for attempted murder.

The protesters were doing this even as they decried the fact that Dr. Tiller made money on his services, as though they're not the same right-wingers who are all for profit-driven health care to the point they're attempting to scuttle Obama's attempts at reform because of the future availability of government coverage today. Apparently, they felt Tiller and his family should have lived in poverty — although the happily ignore the fact that a large part of his profits were spent securing himself, his employees and his patients from harassment and often-violent confrontations.

Instead he dug in, pouring his considerable profits into expanding his clinic and installing security cameras, bulletproof glass, metal detectors, fencing and floodlights. He hired armed guards, bought a bulletproof vest and drove an armored S.U.V. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on some of the state's best lawyers and recruited an intensely loyal staff that dubbed itself Team Tiller.

His staff, of course, was loyal because they, too, were subject to extrajudicial and often-violent harassment.

Every vendor who showed up at the clinic was warned that if they continued to do business with Dr. Tiller they would be boycotted. Those who ignored the threat were listed on anti-abortion Web sites. "We had nobody in town that would deliver pizza," said an employee, Linda Joslin.

Protesters confronted his employees, demanding that they quit. If they refused, activists passed out fliers in their neighborhood accusing them of working for a baby killer.

And for all their claims of trying to "help," patients, too, were subject to harassment.

They would see a "Truth Truck," its side panels displaying large color photographs of dismembered fetuses. Over the clinic gate, strung between two poles, they might see a banner, "Please Do Not Kill Your Baby." Planted in the grass by the sidewalk were 167 white crosses, representing the average number of abortions that protesters said were performed there each month.

Protesters approached patients' cars, offering them baby blankets and urging them to visit an anti-abortion pregnancy clinic they had set up next door. Sometimes they followed patients to their hotels and slipped pamphlets under their doors. A few years ago anti-abortion campaigners spent weeks in a hotel room with a view of the Tiller clinic entrance. Using a powerful telephoto lens, they took photographs of patients, which were posted on a Web site with their faces blurred.

The anti-abortion folks didn't stop there, either: they used the court system to violate patient confidentiality rules and they even broke the confidentiality awarded them by the courts. They attacked individual patients' decisions as fundamentally flawed and selfish on the Internet and on the air without disclosing the circumstances (like incest or age) that prompted women and girls to seek the abortions in the first place.

Noting that the files "could hardly be more sensitive," the court ordered identifying information redacted and warned both sides to "resist any impulse" to publicize the case.

Mr. Kline's investigators tried to identify patients anyway, court records show. Mr. Kline also hired medical experts recommended by anti-abortion groups and gave them access to the files without requiring them to pledge confidentiality.

One expert, Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, then discussed the files - though not identities - in a videotaped interview arranged by anti-abortion activists that quickly made its way to Mr. O'Reilly and others in the news media.

And, of course, they portrayed Dr. Tiller as an abortionist and an abortionist alone, despite his support for adoption, and strictly a late-term abortion provider, despite evidence to the contrary.

Based on Dr. Tiller's sworn testimony, his clinic grossed at least $1.5 million in 2003 from late-term abortions, a small fraction of the total number of abortions his clinic performed.

And after all this, including Tiller's murder, none of them feel particularly sorry. Mark Gietzen, chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life, initially put it this way.

"God has his own way," Mr. Gietzen replied, "but you can't say our prayers weren't answered."

Gietzen decries the fact that Scott Roeder killed Tiller, in part because he wrestled with whether Tiller's murder would be justified (and decided it wasn't) and partly because of the damage done to the anti-abortion movement among centrist Americans, who now think they're possibly all a bunch of wack-jobs.

In an accompanying audio piece, Gietzen — with no apparent sense of irony, given his years of harassment and legal wars against Tiller — says this:

Does the end justify the means?...The means become the end. There is no end.

Gietzen thinks every one of the campaigns against Tiller, from the blockades to the false signage to the harassment of patients and pizza stores (though not murder), are justified means to a righteous end. But, like Roeder, he's become the means: the person who has to spend years trying to determine if a murder is justified. Just because he came to a different conclusion than Scott Roeder did, doesn't end up making him fundamentally different because he still considered it.

An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death [NY Times]

Bazelon's interview — which reads more like a fascinating conversation than a boring profile or Q&A — jumps all over the map from Roe v. Wade to Sonia Sotomayor and what women bring to the court, the bench and public discourse. She's also really stoked about the number of women on the Canadian Supreme Court (where the Chief Justice is also a woman), but blames the difference, too kindly, on the low attrition rate on the American one and not on the fact that dudes keep getting replaced with dudes.

Bazelon asks Ginsburg about the two main criticisms leveled at Sotomayor: her supposed abrasiveness on the bench; and the "wise Latina" comment. Ginsburg dismisses the latter as a combination of imperfect speech and an acknowledgment that judges do bring their own experiences to the table. On the former, though, she's got a story of her own.

Once Justice O'Connor was questioning counsel at oral argument. I thought she was done, so I asked a question, and Sandra said: Just a minute, I'm not finished. So I apologized to her and she said, It's O.K., Ruth. The guys do it to each other all the time, they step on each other's questions. And then there appeared an item in USA Today, and the headline was something like"Rude Ruth Interrupts Sandra."

Just the thought of someone calling her "rude" is kind of upsettingly hilarious, but it also does point to the way sexism manifests itself in terms of how women are expected to behave.

Ginsburg also takes on the idea that Sotomayor, as a beneficiary of affirmative action, is thus unqualified for the bench (and provides an interesting history lesson about affirmative action).

Q: What do you think about Judge Sotomayor's frank remarks that she is a product of affirmative action?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: So am I. I was the first tenured woman at Columbia. That was 1972, every law school was looking for its woman. Why? Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was enforcing the Nixon government contract program. Every university had a contract, and Stan Pottinger would go around and ask, How are you doing on your affirmative-action plan? William McGill, who was then the president of Columbia, was asked by a reporter: How is Columbia doing with its affirmative action? He said, It's no mistake that the two most recent appointments to the law school are a woman and an African-American man.

Q: And was that you?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: I was the woman. I never would have gotten that invitation from Columbia without the push from the Nixon administration. I understand that there is a thought that people will point to the affirmative-action baby and say she couldn't have made it if she were judged solely on the merits. But when I got to Columbia I was well regarded by my colleagues even though they certainly disagreed with many of the positions that I was taking.

How many Republican Congressmen do you think know that Ginsburg got where she did because of the efforts of the Nixon Administration to force universities to implement affirmative action?

One thing Ginsburg is somewhat less enthusiastic about than Sotomayor is the idea of women's-only associations and groups.

I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women's organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man's world. If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both all-female networking groups and, more implicitly, to same-sex education.

She's also fairly resistant to the idea that women inherently judge differently than men and encourage all men to judge differently, which tends to be code for "more liberally."

I'm very doubtful about those kinds of [results]. I certainly know that there are women in federal courts with whom I disagree just as strongly as I disagree with any man. I guess I have some resistance to that kind of survey because it's what I was arguing against in the '70s. Like in Mozart's opera "Così Fan Tutte": that's the way women are.

The idea that women are generally more liberal or empathetic than men and encourage men to be so does seem relatively rooted in gendered stereotypes that are harmful to women's progress.

An interesting thing that comes up in the discussion of the recent ruling in favor of the reverse-discrimination case among firefighters in New Haven is Ginsburg's assertion that unions have been the source of a great deal of gender discrimination.

I don't know how many cases there were, Title VII civil rights cases, where unions were responsible. The very first week that I was at Columbia, Jan Goodman, a lawyer in New York, called me and said, Do you know that Columbia has given layoff notices to 25 maids and not a single janitor? Columbia's defense was the union contract, which was set up so that every maid would have to go before the newly hired janitor would get a layoff notice.

By the way, the AFL-CIO is poised to elect Elizabeth Shuler treasurer-secretary — which would make her the highest ranking woman in its history. One assumes that having more women in leadership roles in unions could make a difference in men's ability to collectively bargain away women's jobs.

And, of course, Bazelon and Ginsburg get into abortion rights, which Bazelon argues — and Ginsburg agrees — may eventually become rooted in constitutional law about equal rights rather than the right to privacy. Ginsburg also thinks it's becoming more and more of an issue of economic discrimination.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. 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.

She's also not keen on abortion restrictions, like waiting periods, that pass the Court's "undue burden" test even when they are.

In the interview, which lasted 90 minutes, Ginsburg comes across as sharp, funny and completely as awesome of you'd hope she'd be. More, please?

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

Related: Woman to Seek High Labor Post [New York Times]

Joining him on his likely futile tour of churches and Senatorial offices will be the original Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey, who went from being the poster child of the pro-choice movement (outing her identity of her own volition and even penning a book about her experience) to being the poster child of the abortion-regret movement... despite never having one. She was lured away from the pro-choice movement while working at a women's health clinic when Operation Rescue moved in next door and its volunteers behaved nicely to her. It's obviously not an oft-used tactic with them — and wasn't in keeping with their initial campaign of harassment and vilification of McCorvey, though they've now convinced her that the pro-choice movement was behind it all.

Mr. Terry's 12-city tour against Sotomayor amounts to little more than an effort to publicize certain American Catholic bishops' decisions to continue offering the sacrament of Communion to pro-choice politicians, including Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, and to try to encourage an unlikely group of Democratic Senators to support their efforts to portray Sotomayor — whose stance on the kinds of abortion cases the Supreme Court tends to hear is not particularly clear — as a baby-killer.

Terry's main concern is that Republicans will "refuse" to filibuster Sotomayor — which, without one Democratic Senator refusing to support cloture, they can't. He says.

"To refuse to filibuster is to bow in abject obedience to the Angel of Death"

Perhaps with more of Terry's thoughtful rhetoric put on display for the masses, he can reverse the supposed trend of more people identifying as pro-life?

Randall Terry Launches "Defeat Sotomayor" Tour [Feministing]
'These Steps Are Covered With Blood' [The Guardian]
Terry Launches 12 City "Defeat Sotomayor" Tour [Right Wing Watch]

Earlier: Songs In The Key of D(efensiveness)
Has A Pro-Choice President Made More Americans Pro-Life?

The video, which is currently being hosted on the New York Times site, features Waldman and Saletan discussing the idea of promoting adoption over abortion by providing a financial benefit to women who choose not to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. The conversation, part of the "Bloggingheads" series, is meant to appear quite casual and off the cuff, but one gets the sense that both men knew exactly what they were going to say beforehand, especially Waldman, despite his "I'm just coming up with this now" routine that he pulls before making statements such as this:

"Now I wonder, I know this is dangerous territory here, but I'm just kind of thinking out loud...I wonder if we should start thinking about financial incentives or help for women who decide to carry the baby to term."

And this:

"So maybe we ought to be saying to them, if it's officially important for us as a society to reduce the number of abortions...maybe we should pay her a thousand dollars, uh, I don't know what the right number is, because you don't want to create a financial incentive for, uh, making babies."

Right! Because it's only money that women are after, and it's only money that causes women to terminate a pregnancy. I'm really glad these two men could sit down and figure this out for us.

Jill at Feministe has a few choice words on Waldman's proposal: "The whole thing is so infuriating I'm having trouble coming up with a coherent response. Steven Waldman from Beliefnet suggests paying women some amount of money to not have an abortion - not just because women who continue pregnancies often undergo tremendous financial strain, but as an incentive for her to give the baby up for adoption. Nowhere does he suggest that maybe we should provide economic support for all women, before and after birth, so that they can choose to maintain their pregnancies and raise a child if they wish; the whole idea is to bribe women into giving birth so that they'll give the baby to a nice family."

The conversation takes a creepier tone when Saletan compares Waldman's idea to surrogacy, and Waldman says, "exactly." When Saletan calls this idea, "icky," Waldman then backtracks a bit, and again mentions that "if you make the amount too much, women might get pregnant, in order to get payment." He then continues to push the idea that if we "help out" birth mothers financially (good luck with a thousand bucks, btw), we'll save the world from women and their abortions and everyone will end up a winner.

In five minutes, Waldman pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with the anti-choice movement: he's all about the fetus, treating the mother as a carrier who can be appeased or paid off in order to fit his agenda. And as Jill notes above, he never once mentions continued financial support after the child is actually born. He then makes a point to mention—twice—that some women might just start having babies for the money, and we can't have that! Women can only choose to have babies if it fits Waldman's view of what the "right" thing to do is. So to sum up: women's choices are always influenced by cash, and nothing else.

Thanks, New York Times! It's always great when two men get to discuss what's best for the ladies. And to think, all this time walking around with an actual uterus didn't give me or any other woman in the universe the insight that Steven Waldman and William Saletan could provide.

Bloggingheads: Cash For Babies [NYTimes]
Cash For Babies [Feministe]

Saletan writes:

If you talk to pregnant women or read accounts of what they say to friends and counselors, you'll notice a pattern. Those who are happy to be pregnant and expect to give birth describe what they're carrying as a baby. Those who don't want to be pregnant and are seeking or contemplating abortion avoid that word. Given the same thing at the same stage of development, we see what we want to see: a child if we want a child, an unformed embryo if we don't.

I like to think this subjective mentality is confined to the pre-viable fetus, or at least to pregnancy. But what if it isn't?

Basically, ladies, when you want to be pregnant, it's a kid and when you don't want to be pregnant, you deny that reality to enable yourself to have an abortion. It's a baby! It's always a baby! Baby baby baby! Now you'll never have an abortion. Which is good, because — as Saletan explains — aborting a fetus baby is just one short step from smothering it outside the womb.

For evidence of that, Saletan links to a Washington Post story about Véronique Courjault (who Sadie wrote about earlier this week), who is being tried in France for secretly giving birth to and then murdering shortly after their birth three children (in 1999, 2002 and 2003). Courjault — who, one assumes, is probably not quite right in the head — said this about her motives:

"For me, those children did not have a real existence." Asked how she could carry the children for nine months and still feel they had no existence, she said, "I knew it, and then I no longer knew it."

Saletan continues:

This is the danger of denying that what you're carrying is a developing baby. Is your denial based on the undeveloped state of your pregnancy or on a determined refusal to see what you don't want to see? If it's the former, then at some point, if you continue the pregnancy, you'll start to see a baby. But if it's the latter, you might not. Your denial might extend all the way to birth, or even beyond it.

If you refuse to call a fetus you wish to abort a baby, you're a danger to any child you bring into the world! You'll be incapable of loving your baby! You might kill it! Your baby! Baby! Baby baby baby!

To prevent the unspeakable horror that will result from not always referring to a fetus as a baby, Saletan recommends all women have ultrasounds before they have an abortion.

It will make you face what's growing inside you and the urgency of deciding whether to terminate it, even if termination is still the right choice. Otherwise, you risk sliding into the mentality of denial. And there's no telling where that ends.

Except Saletan knows: you "might" end up killing your baby!

William Saletan is full of shit. He took an interesting kernel of an idea — the power of language to impart meaning to a pregnancy — and turned it into an indictment of women who choose one word over another, and drew a direct causal link to a disturbed woman who killed three of her kids. It's like a primer on how to shut down intelligent conversation.

The Psychology of Infanticide [Slate]
Infanticide Case Mesmerizes France [Washington Post]

Earlier: French Woman Who Allegedly Froze Babies Goes To Trial

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