Category Archives: abortion

Killer Law

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Last November, Nicaragua became the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalize all abortions. There are no exceptions; not for rape, not for incest, not for threats to the life of the mother.

So far, this law has resulted in the deaths of at least 82 women. Rory Carroll reports for The Guardian:

Abortion has long been illegal in Nicaragua but there had been exceptions for “therapeutic” reasons if three doctors agreed there was a risk to the woman’s life. Those exceptions were no longer necessary, said the Nicaraguan Pro-Life Association, because medical advances obviated the need to terminate pregnancies. “The conditions that justified therapeutic abortion now have medical solutions,” says a spokesman. Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the ban but added that women should not suffer or die as a result. “In this regard, it is essential to increase the assistance of the state and of society itself to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”

The “assistance” the state offers is to let women die. The article focuses on a young woman named María de Jesús González who was denied medical help for an ectopic pregnancy. These occur when the fertlized egg implants somewhere other than in the uturus, usually the fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancies occur from 1 in every 40 to 1 in every 100 pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies have no chance of ending in a live birth. Eventually the growing fetus will cause an internal rupture in the mother, leading to bleeding, shock, and death. The developing cells must be removed to save the mother’s life.

González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. … What González did next was – when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days – utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women – traditional healers – and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. “We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain,” says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.

According to the Nicaraguan health ministry it would have been legal for the doctors to remove the embryo growing in González.

But such is the climate of fear and confusion that the protocols are widely ignored and misunderstood. The doctors who turned González away from the hospital in Managua thought it was illegal, as did medical staff the Guardian interviewed in Ocotal, González’s home town.

“The ban has people frightened. You could lose everything – that’s the first thing on your mind,” says Dr Arguello, a leading critic of the ban. So far there have been no prosecutions but many doctors are unwilling to take the risk on behalf of women who are often poor, uneducated and from a lower social class.

No one knows how many other women have died.

The Pope seemed to acknowledge an increased risk to women’s health but Nicaragua’s government has made no formal study of the law’s impact. Women’s rights organisations say their 82 documented deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The Pan-American Health Organisation estimates one woman per day suffers from an ectopic pregnancy, and that every two days a woman suffers a miscarriage from a molar pregnancy. That adds up to hundreds of obstetric emergencies per year.

Human Rights Watch, in a recent report titled Over Their Dead Bodies, cited one woman who urgently needed medical help, but was left untreated at a public hospital for two days because the foetus was still alive and so a therapeutic abortion would be illegal. Eventually she expelled the foetus on her own. “By then she was already in septic shock and died five days later,” said the doctor.

The Catholic News Agency reports that last month Pope Benedict XVI praised Nicaragua for its policies “respecting” human life.

During his remarks the Pope praised Nicaragua for “the position it takes on social questions in the international arena, especially as regards the theme of life, and in the face of no small amount of domestic and international pressure.”

The Holy Father said it was very “positive that last year the national assembly approved the revocation of therapeutic abortion,” and he affirmed the “need to increase the aid that state and society provide to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”

American “pro life” organizations like Concerned Women for America also support the Nicaraguan abortion ban.

Shortly after the law was passed in November 2006, N.C. Aizenman wrote for the Washington Post:

Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua’s Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.

The mystery of what happened during the intervening 36 hours might not ordinarily have catapulted Bojorge into the headlines of a nation with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.

But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua’s legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.

“It’s clear that fear of punishment kept the doctors from doing what they needed to do to save her — which was to abort the pregnancy immediately,” said Juanita Jiménez of the Women’s Autonomous Movement, an advocacy group that is leading the campaign to reverse the ban. “This is exactly what we warned would happen if this law was passed. We’ve been taken back to the Middle Ages.”

So-called “right to life” advocates in the U.S. will tell you categorically that “There is no such thing as an abortion to save the life of the mother.” “Life of the mother” is not a valid exception, they say.

Of course, if ever their own sorry carcasses were about to be opened up by a couple of “traditional healers” without anesthesia in a last-ditch effort to avoid death by internal rupture and hemorrhage they might feel a bit differently.

Pills and Politics

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Via Media Matters, we find that Leslie Hanks, vice president of Colorado Right to Life, is worried about the addictive properties of birth control pills.

“Let’s face it, they’re [Planned Parenthood] in the business to kill babies for profit,” she said. “First and foremost, they get young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don’t work,” Hanks said.

Media Matters points out that birth control pills do work to prevent conception pretty reliably; “oral contraceptives work with 92 percent efficacy for the first year of ‘[t]ypical [u]se’ and are 99.7 percent effective with ‘[p]erfect [u]se,” MM says. So if Planned Parenthood is encouraging people to use contraceptives, which it does, then it really isn’t primarily “in the business” of abortion, is it?

Further, “Planned Parenthood® Federation of America, Inc. is a tax-exempt corporation under Internal Revenue Service code section 501(c)(3) and is not a private foundation. (Tax ID #13-1644147) Contributions are tax deductible,” their web site says. Strictly speaking, they are not “in the business” for profit at all. I believe it operates mostly on donations and endowments.

Regarding the abortion question, Eleanor Clift argues that Democrats should refocus the debate on birth control.

Family planning is an issue Republicans generally like to avoid because it threatens the coalition between economic conservatives and the religious right. Business types tend to be live-and-let-live, while a segment of social conservatives oppose birth control with almost the same fervor they oppose abortion. Family planning is such an under-the-radar issue for Republicans that Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says the Right to Life organization doesn’t advertise a birth-control position. “But you find in that movement—and they’ve become much more assertive about it—if you use birth control, you are stopping a life and that’s not acceptable,” she says. Listen to right-wing talk radio and you’ll hear how making birth control available or teaching sex-ed in public schools leads to sex. That’s an argument equivalent to believing that putting air bags in cars causes accidents, says Keenan.

The American public may be ambivalent about abortion, but I’m sure a whopping majority approve of birth control as an alternative. Cristina Page pointed out recently that there’s a strong, under-the-radar anti-contraceptive movement. Further, she says elsewhere, pro-choice politicians would do well to make contraception an issue.

Americans, pro-life and pro-choice, support contraception particularly because its the only proven way to reduce unintended pregnancy and abortion. (Only 11 percent of sexually active women don’t use contraception and from this 11 percent comes 50 percent of the nation’s abortions.) But very few voters are aware that not one pro-life organization in the United States supports contraception. Instead, pro-life groups lead campaigns against contraception. Ninety-one percent of the American public strongly favors contraception. When pro-choice presidential candidates make the discussion about prevention, contraception and results, they’ll win. No less than 80 percent of self-described pro-life voters strongly support contraception too.

The irony of the so-called (imagine my voice dripping with contempt) “right to life” position is that passing laws that ban abortions doesn’t stop abortions. This can be proved with solid empirical evidence; many nations that outlaw abortions have higher rates of abortion than nations with more liberal abortion laws. The one factor that, reliably, does lower abortion rates is access to and use of contraceptives. It is well documented that increasing the use of contraceptives correlates to lowering the rate of abortions within a population. You can’t say the same about passing laws prohibiting abortion.

You’ll never persuade the thick-headed Leslie Hanks of this, of course, but I think most Americans really don’t want the Morality Police to take away their contraceptives.

See also Susie at Suburban Guerrilla.

A Pox on All Pundits

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Melinda Henneberger is the political editor of the Huffington Post. I say this sadly, because I like the Huffington Post. HP could do a lot better.

Henneberger has an op ed in today’s New York Times titled “Why Pro-Choice Is a Bad Choice for Democrats.” This op ed is bad. It is profoundly bad. It is a near-perfect example of all that is bad, and stupid, and brain dead, and absurd, about those creatures we call “pundits.” And clearly the lady has a big future in punditry. This op ed reveals she fits nicely into the David Brooks – David Broder – Joe Klein mold, a mold with all the intelligence of Jello. For her, the sky’s the limit.

Henneger’s essential argument is that the Dems should back off a firm pro-choice position for the sake of winning elections. This opinion is based on her interviews of women “swing” voters who said they’d be more inclined to vote for Democrats were it not for their position on abortion.

I say you can take Henneberger article, redate it to 1963 or so, and change the words women to whites and abortion to desegregation, and it would be the same argument. In the 1960s and 1970s many whites bailed on the Democratic Party because of its stand on civil rights and racial equality issues. Using Henneberger’s logic, the Dems should have been softer on civil rights and more accommodating to the segregationists in their midst.

Henneberger is saying, in effect, that parties are wrong to take firm stands on the great moral issues of the day if it costs them votes. She’s telling the Dems to move to the right to pick up swing voters. Let’s not give the voters a clear choice; let’s be sure both parties support the same stuff in the mushy middle.

Did I mention that this dimwit is is the political editor of the Huffington Post?

Let’s take a look at the op ed.

Even in the real world, a pro-choice Republican nominee would be a gift to the Democrats, because the Republican Party wins over so many swing voters on abortion alone. Which is why Fred Thompson, who is against abortion rights, is getting so much grateful attention from his party now. And why, despite wide opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats must still win back such voters to take the White House next year.

She’s saying the Dems have to turn their backs on abortion rights in order to win back the White House in 2008. Let’s think about this. Yesterday the Christian Post published an article titled Survey: “Abortion Not Top-Tier Issue in White House Race.” A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll of May 4-6, 2007, asked the question “How important will each of the following issues be to your vote for president next year?” Abortion was 14th out of a 17-item list. And the list doesn’t distinguish between pro- and anti-choice voters who say the issue was “very important.”

According to this USA Today article from 2005, analysis of the 2004 election showed that Kerry’s stand on abortion cost him votes among white Catholic voters. This is hardly surprising, given the number of bishops who publicly denounced Kerry and ordered the faithful to vote for Bush. However,

Abortion-rights advocates, concerned that the issue was being blamed for Kerry’s loss, commissioned an analysis by Kerry pollster Mark Mellman. He concluded that abortion “played little role in the election” and, when it was a factor, “appears to have helped Democrats.” He wrote: “Support for a woman’s right to choose has, in many ways, become the scapegoat for Democrats’ losses.”

“Democrats at their own peril will move away from choice,” says Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily’s List, which supports Democratic female candidates who favor abortion rights. She says Kerry would have fared better by doing more, not less, to emphasize the issue.

I agree. I realize that in the most conservative parts of the country a pro-choice candidate would have a hard time getting elected. But in many other parts of the country, an anti-choice candidate would have a hard time getting elected. The issue is a sword that cuts both ways. For years the anti-choice movement has aggressively taken credit for Republican victories and Democratic defeats, to the point that the power of abortion to swing elections for Republicans has become conventional wisdom. But I’m convinced the claims of anti-choice leaders have been, um, inflated. And I say districts that would not elect a pro-choice politician probably are safe Republican strongholds on other issues as well.

Henneberger continues,

Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.

Dems have a problem with women voters? According to the Pew Research Center, in last year’s midterms 56 percent of women voted for Democrats, as opposed to 51 percent of men.

Henneberger continues,

The standard response from Democratic leaders has been that anyone lost to them over this issue is not coming back — and that regrettable as that might be, there is nothing to be done. But that is not what I heard from these voters.

Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.” Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.

What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and — though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this — a human rights issue comparable to slavery.

I see it as a human rights issue, too. A human rights issue for women.

And when did Democratic Party leaders accuse anti-rights voters of being “extremists”? If anything, Dems have rhetorically tip-toed around abortion for years, being careful to speak respectfully of those who oppose abortion. The most common talking points from Dems are those that begin “I am personally opposed to abortion, but …” and those that end with the words “safe, legal and rare.”

I bet if I looked I could find Republicans who have accused pro-choicers of being extremists, as well as baby murderers and a few other things. I’d like some respect too, y’know.

Again and again, these voters said Democrats are too unwilling to tolerate dissent on abortion.

Bean answers this one at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

That might have been true in 2004 — maybe (I concede nothing). But it’s not now. The Democrats have shown that they are willing to tolerate dissent — look at the candidacies of Bob Casey Jr. and Heath Shuler. Henneberger is right that Dems were slow to broaden the tent when it comes to abortion rights, but it seems as if they have been recently. To pin Democrats’ chances in 2008 on this is a false excuse.

This may be the single dumbest sentence in Henneberger’s article:

Democratic Party leaders should also stop pushing the perception that Republicans are natural defenders of the faithful.

Um, haven’t Democratic Party leaders been working overtime to prove how religious they are in recent years?

Henneberger also thinks Dems were wrong to criticize the recent Carhart decision. It may cost them votes, she said. Yes, and speaking out against job discrimination cost Dems votes in the 1960s, too. Were they wrong to do so? Are the lives and health of women to be bartered for votes?

But Henneberger, somehow, is the political editor of the Huffington Post. I suggest HP cut Henneberger loose so she can rise in the ranks of big-time pundits. Surely there is someone else in America qualified for the job who actually (dare I hope?) thinks.

Update: Tristero posts on this same op ed, then updates —

In comments, Susan S. makes an important point, but I don’t think her conclusion follows:

    I think you’re missing Melinda’s point. I recently saw her at a Planned Parenthood luncheon in Tampa where she made the same arguments that she makes in her op-ed. She’s merely saying that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t see abortion in the black and white terms most of us do. We ignore that at our peril. We have to find a way of talking to them that shows we recognize their concerns, and not automatically dismiss them…
    She doesn’t disagree with us. She’s saying that there are many Democrats who can be brought back into the fold if we stop automatically dismissing them and equating them with the right-wing crazies. For whatever reason (possibly because they’ve been manipulated) their views on abortion are more complicated than ours. We need to educate them, but we can’t do it by talking down to them.

I completely agree. That is exactly the issue. There are a lot of people who don’t see abortion as black and white.

But the issue is not abortion but government regulation of abortion. The fact that so many of us see the abortion issue differently is precisely at the heart of the fight against the right.

They, not Democrats and liberals, want this country to see the issue in black and white. The effect, if they win, will be catastrophic. And the catastrophe will fall predominantly on poor women.

That’s why Henneberger is not only wrong, but completely wrong.

One more thing: While I think Susan S. is quite mistaken in defending Henneberger, I hope my saying so directly is not perceived as a personal attack. It certainly is not meant to be.

Again, to be clear, this is not about personal opinions about terminating or completing pregnancies. This about demanding the government regulate pregnancy and reproduction in accordance with one specific ideology.

Possibly no one feels the same as another about abortion itself. But that is not the issue. It’s the extreme right forcing people to adhere to their, and only their, morality that is the issue.

Nicely put, and let me add that I disagree with Susan when she says “their views on abortion are more complicated than ours.” Just the opposite is true; theirs is very simple. Abortion is bad. We’re the ones who have to be nuanced.

How Not to Save Embryos

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Liza Mundy writes in today’s Washington Post that “Children are born every day whose health and well-being are permanently affected by the funding ban for embryo research.”

This isn’t just about the therapeutic potential of embryonic stem cells. The stem cell restrictions are indirectly resulting in an increase in babies born with health problems such as cerebral palsy.

Here’s how: The popularity of in vitro fertilization and other fertilization treatments has resulted in a dramatic increase in multiple births. But the human womb is designed to carry one baby at a time. So the rise in multiple births has resulted in more babies with health problems.

The number of babies born as triplets, quadruplets or even more rose from about 900 in 1972 to 7,275 in 2004. That same year, the highest number of twins ever were born — 132,000, nearly double the number born in 1980. Not coincidentally, there has also been a rise in premature births, infants born with low birth weights and disorders — such as cerebral palsy — that can occur when a premature baby’s brain is insufficiently developed.

Some of these problems could be eliminated if doctors performing in vitro fertilization could learn more about embryos. But federal law prohibits the research.

In 1996 a law known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment took effect prohibiting funding research involving the creation or destruction of embryos. The provision is regularly passed as part of the Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill. It has become a conservative touchstone.

The upshot is that scientists who receive federal funding — and most good scientists do — cannot use any part of it, even indirectly, to study the embryos that IVF creates so as to learn how to better assess their viability. “There is so much we do not know about the human embryo that we need to,” said scientist James Trimarchi. “The truth is, we really don’t know anything.”

Doctors performing in vitro fertilization routinely implant multiple embryos to ensure at least one will be viable. But if all of them are viable — hello, quadruplets. Further, doctors may be making other mistakes in the handling of the fertilized eggs that could compromise the long-term health of “in vitro” babies.

U.S. scientists acknowledged that there is much they don’t know, including whether embryos are affected by the media in which they are cultured, and the long-term impact of the increasingly invasive lab techniques that IVF now often involves.

These complications arise from a peculiar belief, held by many Christian conservatives, that a human blastocyst has the same inherent value as a baby or child or adult. An aggressive, politicized religious Right has imposed its will on the rest of us, knocking science and sensibility out of the way in their single-minded determination to “protect” embryos. And their “protection” of embryos hurts embryos.

I think one could make a moral argument that we shouldn’t be doing procedures like in vitro fertilization if we’re going to be half-assed about it.

In a related story, Rick Weiss reports in WaPo that researchers think they have found a way to get stem cells with the same properties as embryonic stem cells from tissue other than embryos.

Three teams of scientists said today they had coaxed ordinary mouse skin cells to become what are effectively embryonic stem cells without creating or destroying embryos in the process — an advance that, if it works with human cells, could revolutionize stem cell research and defuse one of the hottest bioethical controversies of the decade.

In work being published online today, the scientists reported two new ways of turning back the biological clocks of skin cells growing in laboratory dishes. Thus rejuvenated, the cells gave rise to daughter cells that were able to become all the parts needed to make a new mouse.

Of course, it could be years before the researchers know whether this will work with humans, or if the resulting cells really do have the same properties of embryonic stem cells. But conservatives have already seized upon this research to argue that scientists don’t need embryos to do stem cell research.

“A human is not a mouse, so a lot more work has to be done,” said Marius Wernig, who led one team with Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

But opponents of human embryo research said the findings bolster their argument that stem cell science can progress apace without harming human embryos.

“Morally and practically, this new approach appears to be far superior,” said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Seems to me that even if the new process eliminates the need to destroy embryos to get stem cells, we are left with our current blind spots about embryos. And we’ll still have too many premature births, infants born with low birth weights and disorders — such as cerebral palsy — that can occur when a premature baby’s brain is insufficiently developed.

We do seem to have a lot of insufficiently developed brains in this country, don’t we?

The Puppet Vote

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Just to show I don’t always know what I’m talking about, Rudy Giuliani remains firmly in first place for the Republican presidential nomination. Recent polls show that about a third of Republican voters say he is their first choice among the many contenders. The only other two candidates with double-digit support right now are John McCain and Fred Thompson. Mitt Romney, who is still being treated as a front runner in news stories, is running behind Newt Gringrich in most polls.

What’s remarkable to me is that none of the current top three — Giuliani, McCain, and Thompson — would seem to be a “social conservative” candidate. Thompson is on record as supporting legal elective abortion in the first trimester, although he’s being touted as a pro-life purist by news media. (On the other hand, as a senator Thompson “registered a zero rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America and a rating of 100 percent from the National Right to Life Committee,” according to this article. So maybe he is a purist.) Mitt Romney also was for legal abortion before he was against it. Meanwhile, the candidates with the purest social conservative credentials — e.g., Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, Sam Brownback — are bouncing along the bottom of the pond with 1 and 2 percent support.

But the continued support for Giuliani surprises me. I assumed that once the Republican base found out about Rudy’s pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, pro-sequin and lipstick past, they’d drop him like a hot tiara. All of these issues have received considerable national media attention, yet there Giuliani still is, at the top of the heap. He’s down a bit from where he was in February, but he’s still way ahead of McCain, his nearest rival.

It’s way too early to assume this will be the order of finish when the candidates hit the nomination wire. About 60 percent of Republican voters say they are not satisfied with the choices. This suggests to me that support for all these candidates, including Rudy, is soft.

Also, as demonstrated in the last post, social conservatives have a remarkable proclivity for being oblivious. It’s entirely possible a large percentage of social conservatives still haven’t heard about Rudy’s liberal stand on values issues. If it isn’t being hammered to death in the Limbaugh-O’Reilly-Hannity echo chamber, it’s off the rightie viewscreen.

However, it’s also possible that a whole lot of conservative voters do know where Rudy stands on abortion et al., yet they have made a decision to overlook this for the sake of an “electable” Republican candidate. Rightie pundit Martin Frost speculates this is the case; he compares Rudy’s GOP support to the way Dems settled on John Kerry as the “electable” candidate in 2004.

George Will seems to be leaning in that direction as well:

Rudy Giuliani is crosswise with social conservatives, especially concerning abortion. Yet one reason he is in the top tier of the Republican field is that, according to Pew Research Center polling, he is supported by nearly 30 percent of social conservatives, who are 42 percent of the Republican vote. Perhaps some opponents of abortion are coming to terms with the fact that the party has written itself into a corner regarding that issue.

The corner that Will thinks the GOP painted (“written,” George?) itself into exists mostly in his own head. He thinks the GOP is losing traction on abortion because the GOP has been talking about a “right to life” amendment since the 1970s but at the same time says the life of embryos is already protected under the due process clause Fourteenth Amendment. Will must not have noticed that the same amendment defines citizens as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

But I think the GOP has painted itself into a corner on abortion, which is the same corner it has painted itself into on a lot of other issues. The GOP base is way to the right of mainstream opinion. Thus, a candidate who perfectly reflects the values of the base would be toxic in a general election. The Republican leadership must realize this, which probably has a lot to do with why the leadership is sending signals to the base (through tools like George Will) that they’re supposed to be pragmatic and choose the “electable” candidate.

Much has already been written about the Republican hope for the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. Brendan Spiegel says they are really looking for another Dubya.

Of course, they don’t want the 2007 model W — the post-Hurricane Katrina and civil war in Iraq version. They want vintage 2000 W — a man adherent to the religious right’s social views, yet blessed with enough “regular guy” appeal for the political center. In two successive elections, Bush completely dominated the growing evangelical vote without alienating centrist voters. Bush built a unique political coalition that may never again be duplicated, and he has left his party scrambling for a candidate with similar potential. The problem is, this candidate doesn’t exist.

I think it can be argued that many thought Dubya was the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and only after Dubya’s poll numbers slipped under 50 percent did they realize he wasn’t. The first-term Dubya had St. Ronald’s genius for being all things to all (conservative) people. The Religious Right saw him as God’s representative on earth — if not Jesus himself, at least Jesus Lite. Corporatist conservatives knew he and Dick the Dick were in their corner, and of course they were right about that. To neocons and other jingoists, Dubya was their middle finger by proxy extended to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter to them that Iraq is a quagmire and international terrorism is growing in leaps and bounds; as long as Dubya is telling the rest of the planet to kiss his ass, he’s their guy. That he actually shows a little compassion toward illegal immigrants — albeit if only so he and his friends can hire cheap household help — is an unfathomable betrayal to them.

Spiegel continues,

The fruitless search for a successor to W is not a new development. Since Bush took office in 2001, several men have temporarily held the title of next great conservative hope, yet no one has held on to it for very long. Rick Santorum was once touted as the next presidential candidate of the religious right, but Americans found him way too creepy and Pennsylvania voters booted him from the Senate. Then there was Bill Frist, who quickly rose to Senate Majority Leader and just as quickly proved his irrelevance. There was also George Allen, whose presidential prospects unraveled the most dramatically when even voters in red state Virginia didn’t want him in Washington anymore. One after another, W’s would-be successors have burned out. The void in the Republican primary is so gaping that a large segment of the party has pinned their hopes on TV actor Fred Thompson, over-hyping the former Senator to ridiculous proportions, despite the fact that most Americans don’t even know who he is.

Those waiting for an electable, evangelical-approved candidate to materialize fail to realize how unique Bush’s political skills are (or were, at one point). Bush’s ability to convince religious fundamentalists he was one of them, yet appear acceptable to centrist voters was an unprecedented feat. An unlikely feat too, when you consider the very positions that allowed him to win a whopping 79 percent of the evangelical vote — complete opposition to abortion rights, intolerance of gay rights, denial of evolution and refusal to support stem cell research — are not values shared by a majority of Americans.

Republican politicians were in a better position to pander to right-wing voters without scaring away moderates in those long-ago times when a right-wing government was unimaginable. For example, in the 1990s abortion rights seemed nearly unassailable. Even when candidates made pro-life extremist noises, moderates assumed it was just talk and voted for them anyway. (Do you remember the way moderate Republican women in 2000 winked at us and claimed that Bush wasn’t really against abortion? It was just something he had to say to get elected, they told us.) Voters are finally waking up to the realization that if we keep electing whackjobs, we end up with whackjob government.

But if the New Conventional Wisdom among Republicans is that a candidate’s stand on abortion doesn’t matter, where does that leave the “right to life” movement? The old CW was that, somehow, being opposed to abortion gave Republicans an advantage because they would gain the loyalty and support of the “pro-life” crowd without paying a penalty from the moderate majority, who had other issues on their minds. It also gave the GOP “moral clarity,” in that they had a simple, easy-to-explain position (“I’m agin’ it”). Dems, on the other hand, had to be nuanced, since being enthusiastically for abortion is unacceptable and might give poor Wolf Blitzer the vapors. So Dems fell back on “I don’t like abortion personally but I think it should be a woman’s choice.” But any position that can’t fit on a standard bumper sticker is not “clear” in Mass Media Pundit Land and is held against Dem candidates even when it reflects a mainstream point of view.

Now that the front-running GOP candidate is making the “I don’t like it personally, but …” argument, expect the pundits to suddenly shut up about moral clarity and discover the virtues of nuance. And if the “pro life” movement loses its kingmaker power, expect the leadership of the GOP to stop taking its calls.

The Kennedy D&E

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After the Supreme Court upheld the “partial birth” abortion ban in April I wrote a couple of posts (“Late-Term Confusion” and “More Late-Term Confusion“) about how the Fetus People celebrating the end of “late-term abortion” had been seriously misled. I predicted the FPs would be in for a shock when they realized what the decision was really about, and that it did not “save” any “babies” at all.

Well, that day has arrived. Some in the rank-and-file of the movement to criminalize abortion have realized they’ve been had. And in a messy attempt at damage control, a spokesperson for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family explained that the “partial birth” ban would stop some abortions, because the alternative procedures are more dangerous to women. Which is what we pro-choicers have been saying all along.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave …

Alan Cooperman writes in today’s Washington Post:

In an open letter to Dobson that was published as a full-page ad May 23 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Focus on the Family’s hometown newspaper, and May 30 in the Washington Times, the heads of five small but vocal groups called the Carhart decision “wicked,” and accused Dobson of misleading Christians by applauding it.

Carhart is even “more wicked than Roe” because it is “not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual” that affirms the legality of late-term abortions “as long as you follow its guidelines,” the ads said. “Yet, for many years you have misled the Body of Christ about the ban, and now about the ruling itself.”

Brian Rohrbough, president of Colorado Right to Life and a signer of the ads, said:

“All you have to do is read the ruling, and you will find that this will never save a single child, because even though the justices say this one technique is mostly banned — not completely banned — there are lots of other techniques, and they even encourage abortionists to find less shocking means to kill late-term babies,” he said.

Another signer, the Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising.

“Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars” for major antiabortion groups, “but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that,” he said. “That’s why we call it the pro-life industry.”

In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved.

“What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected,” he said. “So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do.”

WaPo‘s Alan Cooperman frames this little clash as a “split between incrementalists who support piecemeal restrictions and purists who seek a wholesale prohibition on abortions,” but I doubt that’s the issue. It’s obvious that some among the faithful who bothered to read the Carhart decision and deliberations were shocked into the realization that the anti-choice leadership had been lying to them about “partial birth” abortions.

The faithful had been coaxed into believing that “partial birth” abortion was a synonym for “late-term” abortion, and that by banning “PBA” they would save viable “babies” from being killed by their mothers. Without PBA, they thought, women had no alternative but live birth. This belief was expressed recently by the perpetually clueless Dean Barnett:

While most people agree that life begins at some point between conception and birth, pro-choice absolutists argue that life doesn’t begin until the fetus is fully delivered. Thus, they can enthusiastically defend a procedure like “partial birth abortion” where the fetus is partially delivered and then brutally “terminated” before it is fully delivered.

As near as I can tell, Barnett assumes the point of “PBA” is to kill the “baby” before it is fully delivered, because killing a baby after delivery is infanticide. And after the Carhart decision was handed down many rightie bloggers declared that women in their third trimester would no longer be able to waltz into an abortion clinic and get their babies killed as easily as getting a bikini wax. This assumption revealed a gross ignorance of the issue, both medically and legally.

As explained in the two “confusion” posts linked above, elective late-term abortions were already illegal. The Roe v. Wade decision provided that states could ban elective abortions when the fetus has been gestating long enough that it might be viable, a stage reached very late in the second trimester. Most states have passed laws that prohibit abortions after that point except where a physician decides there is a real medical need.

The fact is that the procedure the Fetus People call “partial birth” is most often performed in the second trimester, before the fetus is viable, which in my mind is a mid-term abortion. The fetus is not going to survive a mid-term “birth” no matter how it is performed.

Further, there are other ways to perform mid- and late-term abortions that the “PBA” law does not ban. The justices of the Supreme Court discussed these other procedures in their deliberations on Carhart. None of these other procedures were secret. You can learn all about them with a few minutes of googling. But apparently true believers like Brian Rohrbough were in the dark about this until he read the Carhart deliberations and decision.

Thus, to some people, Carhart is “not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual.” It explains procedures they didn’t know about, but in fact have been the more common procedures used in mid- and late-term abortions for many years. And the laws about how late in pregnancy an abortion may be performed have not changed.

(If any Fetus People are reading this, let me say that I’ve been trying to explain this to you meatheads for years. Many’s the time I attempted to explain that your beloved “partial birth” bills would, in effect, ban no abortions at all. And for my trouble I was called a lying baby killer. Listen to me next time, OK?)

Here’s where it gets cute (emphasis added):

A Focus on the Family spokesman said that Dobson would not comment. But the organization’s vice president, Tom Minnery, said that Dobson rejoiced over the ruling “because we, and most pro-lifers, are sophisticated enough to know we’re not going to win a total victory all at once. We’re going to win piece by piece.”

Doctors adopted the late-term procedure “out of convenience,” Minnery added. “The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”

Got that? Doctors only performed “partial birth” abortions as a convenience to themselves, because malpractice suits filed by women with mangled reproductive organs are such an inconvenience.


Marty Lederman writes at Balkinization:

… the Court’s decision [Carhart] was predicated on the conclusion that there was a plausible case that a safer form of abortion — standard D&E — remains legally available for women in late stages of pregnancy.

But in today’s Washington Post, one of the foremost proponents of the law appears to take issue with this aspect of the Court’s holding — indeed, this anti-abortion group appears to argue that the Act’s prohibition is especially desirable precisely because the primary alternative method of late-term abortion endangers the health of women.

I am not a physician and cannot speak to risk of any medical procedure with any authority. I just know what I read. My understanding is that the principal risk of the standard D&E procedure is that in a small number of cases damage to reproductive organs makes future pregnancies more difficult. According to this Alan Guttmacher document (page 22),

Some studies suggest that second-trimester abortion using dilation and evacuation may pose some increased risk of complications in future pregnancies, such as premature delivery and low birth weight in future pregnancies (as it does for short-term mortality and morbidity).

Thus, by banning the safer method, Congress may have inadvertently caused future fetal deaths.

After that, it gets even creepier. Rebecca Vesely writes at InsideBayArea.com that confusion over the “PBA” act is pushing physicians away from safe medical practice in several ways.

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion in April is causing medical practitioners to explore alternate second-trimester abortion methods, placing them in uncharted legal and medical waters that could compromise women’s health.

The ban is expected to bring more risky abortion methods — with little clinical data on safety — into wider use for the sole purpose of legally protecting providers, doctors and experts say.

These alternative second-trimester abortion methods include fetalcide — killing the fetus while it is still in the womb — and hysterotomy, opening the uterus through an abdominal incision.

Those aren’t new procedures, I don’t believe. Just not the preferred procedures.

While practitioners can continue to perform D&Es, they must now be careful about their methods, Drey said.

Dilating a woman’s cervix too far could show intent to perform a D&X — a violation of the law. Even the way clinicians hold forceps could show intent, Drey said.

“This is where it becomes frightening for physicians,” she said. “To do a safe D&E, you like to have more dilators. Now we are being told that more dilation means you have intent to do a criminal procedure.”

Not dilating a woman’s cervix far enough can result in discomfort, pain and medical risk, she said. [emphasis added]

I liked this bit: “Clinicians are now referring to a legal second-trimester abortion as a “Kennedy D&E,” said Heather Saunders Estes, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was the formerly pro-choice justice who voted with the troglodytes majority in Carhart.

See also Scott Lemieux, “It’s Alright Mr. Kennedy, My Uterus Is Only Bleeding.”

Invisible Women

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Achieving “moral clarity” is easy. First, take a firm and inflexible position on a moral question. Then, studiously ignore any factors that might call that opinion into question. If the factors refuse to go away, make up lies to neutralize them.

See? Nothin’ to it.

If you are foolish enough to take all facets of an issue into account, you risk not being clear. In fact, the more gut-level honest you are about a messy, unpleasant issue, the less clear you are likely to be. And this is a problem for conservatives, who by nature cannot stand ambiguity. One of the most basic traits of conservatives, in fact, is a compulsion to sort the world into rigid binary categories — right and wrong, good and evil, white and black. Any muddling of categories sends them into nervous fits. But once all things and all issues are properly sorted, they can relax and bask in their moral clarity.

Liberals, on the other hand, are far more interested in being fair. Conversely, they hate unfairness. Conservatives will refuse to see whatever suffering or injustice their binary sorting might have created. Indeed, they get mightily annoyed when you bring such things to their attention. But to liberals, any system of “morality” that is unfair to anybody is not moral at all.

The liberal compulsion to balance scales can be taken to extremes. At the far end of the continuum there’s a tendency to assume that which is powerful and privileged must be evil, and that which is downtrodden and poor must be righteous. This is the leftie version of moral clarity. In the real world the powerful are not always in the wrong, however, and the poor are not always innocent. And I felt compelled to write this paragraph because I’m a liberal. I have to be fair.

I bring this up because of a couple of op eds about abortion published this week. The first, by Hugh Hewitt’s blog partner Dean Barnett, was in the Monday Boston Globe. Barnett places much importance on the “great moral question” of when life begins, which I’ve said many times before is a stupid question. Barnett then explicates the abortion issue with the most narrow and rigidly linear logic imaginable and concludes that abortion is immoral. But in true conservative style, he leaves out anything that might complicate his equation. Like women. Digby writes,

This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument and it’s always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.

The “great moral issue” of when life begins is fascinating I’m sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will. But I guess that’s an argument for another day. Today, we are talking about the meaning of “life” and that has no bearing on the vessel that contributes its DNA and lifeblood, incubates it for nine months inside itself and potentially bears its siblings. Certainly that vessel’s personhood and agency is irrelevant to the much greater issue of blastocyst rights. Why even bring it up?

Of course Barnett couldn’t bring it up. It would have muddied his moral clarity.

I spent a large part of Monday composing a response to Barnett and zapping it off to the Globe, but since I haven’t heard back by now I assume my response was rejected. I don’t want to post it here because I plan to tweak it a bit and try to get it published elsewhere. Most of the points I made were in this old post, anyway.

The other op ed I want to discuss was in yesterday’s Washington Post. Michael Gerson says Rudy Giuliani’s stand on abortion is “muddled.” These days it is muddled, because he’s been trying to explain his pro-choice record in a way that won’t spook the social conservatives, and in doing so he’s twisted himself into some amazing rhetorical knots.

But to Gerson, the only reason Giuliani fails the moral clarity test is that he breaks the first rule of wingnut abortion logic. To his credit, Giuliani doesn’t leave out women. Gerson writes,

In early debates and statements, he has set out his views on this topic with all the order and symmetry of a freeway pileup. His argument comes down to this: “I hate abortion,” which is “morally wrong.” But “people ultimately have to make that choice. If a woman chooses that, that’s her choice, not mine. That’s her morality, not mine.”…

… But the question naturally arises: Why does Giuliani “hate” abortion? No one feels moral outrage about an appendectomy. Clearly he is implying his support for the Catholic belief that an innocent life is being taken. And here the problems begin.

How can the violation of a fundamental human right be viewed as a private matter? Not everything that is viewed as immoral should be illegal; there are no compelling public reasons to restrict adultery, for example, or to outlaw sodomy. But when morality demands respect for the rights of a human being, those protections become a matter of social justice, not just personal or religious preference.

I’m sure you see what Gerson is doing here. He frames the issue as one of “rights of a human being,” and then without explanation or excuse he awards all of these rights to the fetus, thereby changing the woman’s status from “human being” to “major appliance.”

Gerson then dredges up the ghost of Dred Scott and tells us that in his debates with Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas declared slavery to be a “right” protected by the Constitution, whereas Lincoln based his argument on “faith” and “conscience.” That’s an oversimplification of the position of both men, but I’ll leave that for another post. Gerson continues,

Giuliani’s doctrine of individual sovereignty goes much further than did Douglas, logically preventing even states from restricting abortion. And this raises a question about Giuliani’s view of the law itself: Can it be a right to violate the basic rights of others? Given American opinion, progress toward the protection of unborn life is likely to be incremental and partial. It would be foolish to prosecute women who have abortions — and the law struck down in Roe v. Wade did nothing of the kind. But recognizing these limits and realities is different from asserting that the law should have nothing to do with the defense of the weak.

Ah, where to begin? I’ll skip past the point where Gerson renders recognition of the humanity of women into a “doctrine of individual sovereignty,” although there’s plenty of social pathology to be be mined there. Instead, let’s go straight to the claim that the “law struck down by Roe v. Wade” did not punish women. This statement is false on several counts.

First, according to “Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” by Rachel Benson Gold (Alan Guttmacher Institute, March 2003), among the several state laws struck down by Roe v. Wade, fourteen made obtaining an abortion a crime. Women were sometimes convicted; often they were given a choice between prosecution and testifying against the abortion provider. I’m still searching for information on the penalties provided in these laws, but one suspects some punishment was involved.

Second, it’s simple fact that many nations that ban abortion today impose criminal penalties on women who obtain abortion; see old Mahablog posts “Under the Rug” and “Under the Rug II” and also Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column of April 7, 2004. Kristof wrote,

To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.

Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 ‘’accomplices,’’ including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.

The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.

Think that can’t happen here? Remember the Kansas attorney general who subpoenaed abortion clinic patient files so he could go on fishing expeditions for crime?

And then there’s the mountain of testimony and data revealing the suffering, mutilations, and painful deaths endured by women who don’t have access to legal abortion. For just a few examples see Molly Ginty, “Life Before Roe v. Wade” and Marianne Mollmann of Human Rights Watch, “Abortion lessons from Latin America.”

In researching this post I came across an article by Heather Boonstra titled “The Antiabortion Campaign To Personify the Fetus: Looking Back to the Future” (Alan Guttmacher Institute, December 1999). Bookstra examines anti-choice rhetoric to reveal how it renders embryos into children. At the same time, of course, women are rendered into toasters. Earlier this week, Scott Lemieux discussed claims from the Fetus People that they want to “protect” women from their own irrational choices.

Jill Filipovic points us to this Times article about the new strategy to justify using state coercion to force women to carry pregnancies to term by claiming that women are too irrational to know what’s good for them, and offers a modest proposal. I would also urge you to read Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain (see also here.) Quite simply, these justifications are premised on 19th-century conceptions of women as not being rational agents. And such justifications evidently underpin a great deal of anti-choice discourse and policy (most obviously seen in the fact that the official Republican position is that abortion is murder but women who obtain them should be entirely exempt from legal sanctions.)

So, we come full circle. Michael Gerson claims Giuliani’s pro-choice arguments are “muddled” because Rudy must believe an embryo is human but not deserving of human rights. Gerson wants to make abortion a crime, yet the person initiating that crime cannot be guilty of it; only the people who enable her are subject to prosecution. Women are thus passive instruments in the hands of others; we cannot be free-willed captains of our own fates. Your average embryo, on the other hand, is just one “Mommy and Me” class away from running for Congress.

I do occasionally run into pro-choice people trying to clarify their moral judgments by downgrading the fetus to something like a tumor. It’s rare, but I have seen it. Anyone who doesn’t feel some regret at the elective termination of a pregnancy is a bit out of touch with humanity, also. Abortion is a difficult issue; making it simpler by blurring the reality of it is not being honest. And anyone who sees a bright, clear line between right and wrong needs glasses.

People at any stage of development are not mathematical equations. We lead messy lives entangled in webs of relationships and responsibilities. We are infused with dreams and delusions, and limited by what we can bear and what we cannot. Not every problem we face has a painless solution. But unless there is a compelling civil reason to get government involved, the people who need to make moral decisions are the ones who must live with the consequences.

And if you long for unambiguous clarity, go balance your checkbook.

Only Muslims Commit Terrorism

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If you define terrorism as an act committed by Muslims, then only Muslims can commit terrorism, right? Thus, when a bomb is planted outside an abortion clinic by the Fetus People, it’s not terrorism. It’s free speech. Perfectly logical.

Read Zuzu for more.

Update: Thanks much to alert maha reader MapRef41N93W, who sent a link to this story from today’s Birmingham (AL) News that’s not about terrorists:

Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free Militia.

Six alleged members of the Free Militia also were arrested by federal authorities and are being held without bond.

Investigators said the DeKalb County-based group had not made any specific threats or devised any plots, but was targeted for swift dismantling because of its heavy firepower. The militia, which called itself the Naval Militia at one point, had enough armament to outfit a small army. …

… The massive operation forced the closing of Collinsville High School on U.S. 11 because of traffic concerns. In Trussville, authorities rented a U-Haul truck to cart away the load of explosives and weapons from a house.

Agents encountered booby traps at one site. They found trip wires and two hand grenades rigged as booby traps at the Collinsville camper home of 46-year-old Raymond Dillard, who holds titles of both militia major and fugitive from justice on an unrelated federal case in Mobile.

“We were prepared,” Cavanaugh said. “We suspect booby traps with these types of groups.”

Arrested and detained in federal custody were Dillard, also known as Jeff Osborne, 46, of Collinsville; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41, of Collinsville; Bonnell Hughes, 57, of Crossville; Randall Garrett Cole, 22, of Gadsden; James Ray McElroy, 20, of Collinsville; and Michael Wayne Bobo, 30, of Trussville.

None of these people are named Mohammed or al-Something; therefore, they are not terrorists.

Authorities wouldn’t pinpoint a leader, but said Dillard called himself the major. In addition to the booby traps, authorities recovered a long gun and a pistol from his home.

Recovered from Cunningham’s Collinsville home were stolen commercial fireworks, improvised hand grenades, fuse assemblies and a half-dozen guns. At Hughes’ Crossville home, agents found 100 improvised hand grenades, 70 improvised hand grenades fired from the 37 mm rocket launch, a submachine gun and two silencers.

An SKS rifle was found at McElroy’s home.

In Jefferson County, authorities said they had to rent a truck to handle the bomb-making material from Bobo’s home, as well as 2,500 rounds of ammunition and 12 guns.

The 30-year-old Bobo still lives with his parents and works for their pest-control company. Why am I not surprised?

But it’s a real relief to find out these guys aren’t Muslims, huh? Otherwise they might be dangerous or something.

Haley Barbour, Baby Killer

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Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi hates abortion. On March 23 he signed a bill that would criminalize all abortions in Mississippi as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned. After the nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, Barbour announced his support a bill that allowed abortion only to save a woman’s life but made no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. (He would prefer a bill that made a rape and incest exception, but said he would sign the bill without it.)

Sharon Lerner wrote in The Nation (February 7, 2005):

As you read this piece about abortion in Mississippi thirty-two years after the right to have an abortion was affirmed by the Supreme Court, the government of Mississippi is marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in another way. Governor Haley Barbour has issued an official proclamation declaring the seven days leading up to the anniversary “a week of prayer regarding the sanctity of human life.” Barbour also authorized the placement of tiny white crosses on the lawn of the state Capitol “in memory of the unborn children who die each day in America,” according to the decree.

You get the picture. However, in Mississippi there’s much less concern for the lives of children after they are born.

I mentioned this in the last post — in an article to be published in tomorrow’s New York Times, Erik Eckholm writes that infant mortality rates in some of the southern states are going up.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average.

Here’s more —

Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.)

The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481. …

…Poverty has climbed in Mississippi in recent years, and things are tougher in other ways for poor women, with cuts in cash welfare and changes in the medical safety net.

Here’s where Gov. Barbour comes in.

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.

“The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy,” she said. …

… The state Health Department has cut back its system of clinics, in part because of budget shortfalls and a shortage of nurses. Some clinics that used to be open several days a week are now open once a week and some offer no prenatal care.

The department has also suffered management turmoil and reductions in field staff, problems so severe that the state Legislature recently voted to replace the director.

Oleta Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund, said: “When you see drops in the welfare rolls, when you see drops in Medicaid and children’s insurance, you see a recipe for disaster. Somebody’s not eating, somebody’s not going to the doctor and unborn children suffer.”

Questions: Is Gov. Haley Barbour one of the most craven hypocrites on the planet? Or is he just oblivious to the suffering he is causing? And does the fact that many of Mississippi’s black citizens are living in third-world conditions even register with him?

More Late-Term Confusion

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Time and time again I am struck by how little people know about abortion law and practice in the U.S. This includes most people with firm opinions on abortion. For example, earlier this week I noticed one right-wing blog after another celebrating the end of “late-term abortions,” by which they obviously mean abortion of a viable fetus, presumably for frivolous reasons. Example:

Most Americans, even those who are pro-choice, understand how sick this procedure was. If a late term pregnancy was so harmful to the mother’s health, then the mother should just deliver the baby and give the baby a chance to survive. But this procedure wasn’t really about saving the life of the mother. It was about killing an unwanted baby. …

… Some lefties are angry at Justice Kennedy, claiming that he’s abandoned them, and now they’re lamenting the fact that killing a late term unborn baby by sucking its brains out is no longer legal. Of course, they disguise partial birth abortion as “women’s rights,” which is a bunch of hooey.

Here’s a feminist whose first comment was “We’re f***ed.” Sure, lady, if you mean that you can’t go to an abortionist when you’re 6+ months pregnant and have your unborn baby almost completely delivered except for his head and have his brains sucked out while he’s still alive because you just don’t feel like being pregnant any longer, then yes, I suppose you’re f***ed. Be sure to check out the comments on this feminist’s blog as well. These wacko women are beside themselves about the fact that they can’t kill their babies in this manner any longer.

But elective late-term abortions were already illegal in most states. Roe v. Wade allows states to ban abortions once the fetus has reached the gestation age at which it is potentially viable, about 23 weeks[*], except when the life and health of the mother are at risk. There are laws on the books in most states to that effect. Some of the states that don’t have such laws in effect are those which tried to enact a law without the “life and health” exception, and the law got tangled up in court challenges.

[* Recently an infant survived that was believed to have been born at 21 weeks gestation. This made international news because she was the first baby ever known to have survived after a gestation period of fewer than 23 weeks.]

A PDF document at the Alan Guttmacher web site provides an overview of abortion law in the states as of April 1, 2007. It’s a three-page document, and pages 1 and 2 are a table that provides basic information on the abortion laws of each state. If you doubt what I say about elective late-term abortion already being illegal, just take a look.

The “Partial Birth” Abortion Act of 2003, while burdened with several miscarriages of fact and logic, makes no provisions for the lateness of the procedure, just the nature of the procedure. The real battle begun by this week’s SCOTUS ruling is not over “late term” abortions, but “mid term” abortions, meaning second-trimester abortions performed before a fetus is possibly viable.

Roughly 10 percent of all abortions in the U.S. are performed after the first trimester and before 20 weeks’ gestation, or about two thirds of the way through the second trimester. Some of these are performed for medical reasons, and some are elective. However, when a pregnancy is terminated before 20 weeks’ gestation, the fetus will die, no matter how the abortion is performed. No exceptions. So when people start raving about changing procedures so that “the baby has a chance to live,” they are confused.

The fact is, there is little agreement about what it was that was just banned. Depending on how the “partial birth” act is interpreted, it might ban no abortions at all, but only stipulate that abortions be performed by different means. Or, it might ban most abortions after the first trimester. And I won’t be the least bit surprised if some states “interpret” the act in a way that shuts off access to abortion entirely.

So what was just banned, exactly?

About the only point everyone seems agreed on is that the act bans a second trimester (notice emphasis) procedure called “intact D&E” (sometimes referred to as dilation and extraction, or D&X) in which all but the fetal head is extracted, then the fetal skull is pierced or crushed so it can easily pass through the birth canal. However, the far more common practice in second trimester abortions is dilation and evacuation , also called standard D&E, in which surgical instruments are used to dismember the fetus in the womb, and body parts are pulled out through the birth canal.

Exactly why one procedure is more icky than the other eludes me. However, my understanding is that some physicians prefer intact D&E (or D&X) procedures because with the standard D&E physicians must fish around for all the little fetus pieces, thus increasing risk of injury or infection to the woman. In some cases a woman whose life or health is really on the line might be at less risk with an intact D&E rather than a standard D&E.

There is one other abortion method generally used in the late second trimester called “induction.” In this procedure chemicals are introduced into the womb to cause fetal death, and then labor is induced. So far I haven’t heard anyone argue that induction is covered by the “partial birth” ban, but I also doubt many Fetus People have heard of it. My understanding is that induction is the most common method used in genuinely late-term abortions, of which I’ll speak a bit later in this post.

Analysis of this week’s Supreme Court decision written by people who seem to understand these distinctions say that the “partial birth” act actually bans only the “intact D&E,” also called D&X, procedure. It does not ban standard D&E or induction abortions, they say. Nor does it change the gestational limits of abortion, so abortions will be no more or less “late term” as they were before. And if you read this section of the Supreme Court’s deliberations, this view appears to be correct; the justices interpret the Act to ban D&X, but not standard D&E, procedures.

National Right to Life has its own views (emphasis added).

“Partial-birth abortion” is a legal term of art, defined by Congress as a matter of federal law, as quoted above.

Although supporters and opponents of the new law differ dramatically in their perceptions of what methods the law covers (as discussed below), neither side believes that the legal definition of “partial-birth abortion” is synonymous with the shifting and conflicting descriptions attached in various literature to such pseudo-medical jargon terms as “dilation and extraction,” “intact dilation and evacuation,” or “intact dilation and extraction.”

In short, it is simply inaccurate for journalists to equate the legal term “partial-birth abortion” with these nebulous jargon terms.

For the record, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says,

Despite the fact that the safety advantages of intact dilatation and evacuation (intact D&E) procedures are widely recognized—in medical texts, peer-reviewed studies, clinical practice, and in mainstream, medical care in the United States—the US Supreme Court today upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

The “partial birth” claptrap was coined by the Fetus People as a propaganda tactic, and they define it to please themselves. If in the next few weeks or months they don’t decide that the “partial birth” act also covers standard D&E, I will eat my keyboard. Because if the “PAB” Act truly bans only intact D&E/D&X abortion, those celebrating the end of “late term” abortions may be in for a shock. Very likely the same number of abortions will still be performed, and as early or late as they were before.

In today’s New York Times, a Cambridge fellow named David Garrow also tells us, soothingly, that hardly anything will actually change.

The Carhart decision is an extremely limited upholding of the federal ban, one that promises to affect very few abortion providers and only a tiny percentage of their patients. The most recent and reliable national statistics, from the Guttmacher Institute, show that only about 30 American doctors ever use the “intact dilation and evacuation” method that has now been criminalized. Only some 2,200 of the 1.3 million abortions performed annually in the United States involve the banned procedure.

Moreover, Justice Kennedy explicitly and insistently limited the reach of the new prohibition. He emphasized that the ban covers only the relatively rare intact dilation and evacuation method, and does not in any way apply to standard dilation and evacuation, the most common method for late-term abortions, in which fetal tissue is removed from the womb piecemeal. Reiterating the standard he embraced 15 years ago in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Kennedy stated that the ban would impose an undue burden if it covered standard dilation and evacuation and thus would be unconstitutional. …

… Writing on behalf of the four dissenters, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly emphasized that under Justice Kennedy’s holding, “the law saves not a single fetus from destruction, for it targets only a method of performing abortion.”

Also in today’s New York Times, Gina Kolata writes,

The Supreme Court decision on Wednesday to uphold a ban on a type of abortion, has huge political implications but, as a practical matter, is unlikely to have much of an effect.

The reason, said Dr. Isaac Schiff, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is that there are safe and readily available alternatives to the banned method, which the law calls partial birth abortion.

“This law by itself, if it were the only law passed, would be a nonoccurrence,” Dr. Schiff said.

I’m not arguing here that we should be complacent, because there is copious medical testimony from ACOG and others that under some circumstances the alternative methods could put some women at increased risk. And you know the Fetus People are not going to be content with the “PBA” law. They will push ahead to legislate more restrictions. This was just a beginning.

On the other hand, I do think we need to be careful about making predictions of wholesale slaughter of women resulting from the “PBA” ban. There may not be a statistically significant result, in which case the Fetus People will be emboldened, and we who think women are not brood animals might be less credible when they try to extend the ban to other procedures.

Now, about real late-term abortions —

Organizations working to criminalize abortion have done a great job conflating the terms “late term” and “partial birth,” and I infer most wingnuts think they’re the same thing. This has led to fuzzy headed assumptions (such as the one quoted at the top of this post) that women routinely waltz into abortion clinics in the last trimester of pregnancy and demand abortions because they are having a bad hair day. But I’ve seen no authoritative data saying that elective third-trimester abortions are being performed by licensed medical personnel anywhere in the U.S., including those few states that haven’t expressly banned them.

And it’s very rare for a viable fetus to have to be sacrificed to save a mother. I understand third-trimester abortions are most commonly done when the fetus is already dead or has no hope of survival, but I don’t have a source to prove that. On the other hand, “rare” is not “never,” and if you (or your wife, or daughter, or sister, or mother) are one of the rare exceptions, is that OK? And how weird is it to justify sacrificing the life of even one woman for some twisted principle misnamed the “right to life”?

Eleanor Clift writes of third-trimester abortions:

Late-term abortions account for only .08 percent of the 1.3 million abortions that take place in this country every year. Most of that .08 percent are done to protect the life of the mother, so they are not affected by the Court’s ruling. This is a tiny, tiny sliver of a much larger issue. Politicians of either party seeking the center on an issue with such moral ramifications should be able to agree on ways to reduce abortions without criminalizing a medical procedure—and putting doctors, and potentially, women, in jail.

But today wingnuts everywhere no doubt still believe that “late term” abortions are banned. And this takes us to why NARAL is one of the most worthless advocacy organizations ever invented. For years newspaper and television reporters have sloppily used “late-term abortion” as a synonym for whatever it is the wingnuts call “partial-birth abortion.” And for years I’ve been yelling at television screens “MID-term, you twit!” to no avail. NARAL really should have been working hard to educate journalists about the distinctions. I see no evidence they ever did so. Instead, journalists have been getting all of their “information” from abortion criminalization groups and repeating their propagandistic language.

There have been some excellent critiques of NARAL on firedoglake this past week, including this one by Brendan and this one by Phoenix Woman. If you are upset by this week’s SCOTUS ruling, whatever you do don’t donate money to the national NARAL organization. Volunteer or donate money to a local NARAL chapter or, even better, Planned Parenthood.

Back in the 1970s I thought NARAL was making a big mistake not to issue a clear statement in support of banning elective third trimester abortions, as Roe v. Wade allowed, by any means. NARAL was concerned about the famous slippery slope, but I think making a clear distinction about elective post-viability abortions would have defused much rightie propaganda that has hurt the cause of reproductive rights and health lo these many years.

The fact is — and having given birth to two babies myself, I say this with authority — if a woman does not want to be pregnant, she needs to terminate that pregnancy way before the third trimester begins. Because at that point you’re about as pregnant as anybody ever gets. The hormones are raging, the ankles are swollen, you may have gained most of your pregnancy weight, and your “innie” belly button has popped out and become an “outie.” (I’m explaining this to guys; frankly, I doubt many women have ever willingly carried a pregnancy to the sixth month and suddenly decided to end it.) And by then, however the pregnancy is terminated — childbirth or otherwise — it’s a big honking medical deal that is riskier than a first-trimester abortion. A legal gestational limit on elective abortion set somewhere between 20 and 23 weeks would simply reflect good medical practice. But that’s my sermon.

One more thing — in an article to be published in tomorrow’s New York Times, Erik Eckholm writes that infant mortality rates in some of the southern states are going up.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average.

By contrast, many developed nations and some states in the U.S. in recent years have an infant mortality rate of less than 5 per 1,000 live births. Clearly, infants are dying in the South who would not have died had they been born in, say, Massachusetts. Righties love to argue that because of some discrepancies of how infant mortality is calculated by various nations, comparisons between the U.S. and other nations is meaningless (this is bogus, but I’ll leave that alone for now). But when you’ve got a rate of 11.4 in Mississippi and 4.9 in California, I’d say there’s something wrong with Mississippi.

But right now I will predict that the state legislatures of these southern states will put little effort in the coming months into improving the health of pregnant women and small children, and will instead work overtime thinking up new ways to restrict abortion. Anyone wanna bet?

Update: Something the Fetus People say never happens.