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?

Dear Lulu: People Live Here

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The second day after 9/11, New Yorkers were officially summoned back to their lives. Commuters flowed into Manhattan by auto and train, through tunnels and over bridges. They piled back onto the city’s buses and subways. They maneuvered around the growing number of sidewalk shrines in the shadows of world-famous landmarks like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.

In short, we who live and work in New York City spent our days in a labyrinth of prime targets for terrorists. And we were not unmindful of this.

On 9/13 I remember riding the downtown local Seventh Avenue train toward my place of employment in Chelsea. Before the cataclysm this train went to the World Trade Center; people who lived on the West Side could ride it to their jobs in the Financial District. But on that day, we all knew, the train would stop short of its usual route, because part of the tunnel was collapsed under the smoldering ruins of the towers. And on that day I saw a Financial District sort of guy — good suit, gold watch, leather briefcase — riding that train. He was trembling. He shifted in his seat and muttered to himself. He was terrified. God only knows what that man had seen with his own eyes just two days before. Other commuters stood around him, clinging to poles and swaying with the subway car. They were silent and respectful, and they clustered around him like protective angels. But the fact is we were all flesh, and we were locked inside a metal and glass thing hurtling through miles of unguarded underground tunnels.

We all knew that. Yet we got on the subway, anyway. We had to get to work.

In those first few days, rumors flew about poison gas in the subways and mysterious packages left on buses. One such rumor caused a co-worker of mine to faint from fear. She laid on the office floor moaning, and her husband had to come in a car to take her home.

Military planes guarded the city, and every time one flew close to the high-rise office building I worked in (which had given us a clear view of the atrocity) we all dashed to the windows to see if it was one of Them. I suppose you could say we were a bit twitchy.

But the point is that life is what it is, and if you lived or worked in Manhattan, you had to overcome your nerves and get on with things. “Getting on with things” doesn’t mean forgetting. It means making peace, somehow, with your own vulnerabilities.

This past Monday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg talked about the alleged plot to “blow up” JFK airport:

“There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life,” he said.

That “What, me worry?” attitude pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s advice to New Yorkers on the terror plot. As far as he was concerned, the professionals were on it, so New Yorkers shouldn’t let it tax their brains.

“You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist,” he added.

The Usual Screechers, naturally, are outraged. Michelle Malkin says non-worriers are “ostriches.” “Add NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to the gathering of ostriches,” she sneers.

In other words, according to Lulu, if one is not living in a constant state of terror, one is an “ostrich.”

I’ve got news for you, toots: People can’t live that way. And some of us, you know, live here. And if we choose to stay here, we must expose our precious flesh to the dangers of subways and tunnels and bridges and high-rise office buildings and Muslim taxi drivers every single damn day.

But just because we are not in a constant state of mind-numbing, inchoate fear, does not mean we are not mindful of what can happen. A whole lot of of watched the worst that terrorism can do with our own eyes. We were not sitting safely in our living rooms watching a little picture on a television. We were there. We lived with it. And we lived with the shrines and the smell and the sorrow for weeks after.

Believe me, you don’t forget something like that.

We’re still living with the hole in the city. I walked by it just a couple of days ago. Nobody’s forgotten anything. People still cluster in front of St. Paul’s to read the sidewalk display about the recovery effort. There’s still a big flag hung on the front of the Stock Exchange, and another from the ceiling in Grand Central Station, where armed National Guard still stroll through the corridors.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, I’m very happy that law enforcement is watching our airports so vigilantly that even half-assed plots are nipped in the bud. I fly into and out of New York City airports from time to time.

However, I don’t see anything useful about fear-mongering. Fear does have its uses, of course. If you confront a snarling dog, for example, fear gives you that nice shot of adrenaline that might help you climb a tree to safety. But the reality of modern life is that most of the scary things we face are things we can’t run away from. If we’re going to live our lives as we choose to live them, fear is an obstacle that must be overcome. Stirring up more fear isn’t helping anyone.

Fear isn’t helping anyone but some politicians, I should say.

New Yorkers on the whole do not like it when some politician frightens us with a terrorism threat, and we find out later the threat was absurd (e.g., destroying the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch). We get annoyed when news stories hype a threat to the office buildings we work in, and then we find out the threat was based on three-year-old information. And we do not appreciate someone who lives somewhere else, who was hundreds or thousands of miles away from Manhattan on 9/11, screeching at us that we’re supposed to be afraid. And that if we’re not afraid, we must not understand the dangers we live in.

You want to step over here and say that, Michelle? Out loud? On a New York City sidewalk? You might not like the reaction you get. You should be afraid, actually.

Update: See also Liberal Values, Oliver Willis, Gawker.

Update 2: See Happy Furry Puppy Story Time.

Soft Chewy Centers

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This is a follow up to the last post that I started to add in the comments, but this is a good discussion question. So here’s a new post.

The question is: Other issues aside, do people think a TRUE anti-choice presidential candidate could win the general election? By that I mean someone who persuades the public he MEANS IT when he says he’s going to see to it that abortion is criminalized.

Republicans in the past got away with being anti-choice because the only ones who believed they would really outlaw abortion were the minority against abortion. As campaigners, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II (initially) were able to persuade the faithful that they were really against abortion, while winking at everyone else that they really weren’t against abortion.

I don’t remember abortion being an issue in presidential politics until after Roe v. Wade in 1973. The next presidential election was in 1976, Ford v. Carter. I don’t remember if Gerald Ford made any statements about abortion, but Betty called Roe “a great decision.” Essentially, both candidates that year were perceived to be pro-choice, as I remember.

Reagan ran against abortion, but it was well known that as governor of California he had signed a liberal abortion law, and whatever he thought of the bill he didn’t fight it. And then as President he took no action to stop abortions, and two of his three Supreme Court appointees supported Roe v. Wade. This tended to lull the public into the complacent belief that presidential candidates might talk about ending abortion, but they wouldn’t really do it if they got elected.

George H.W. Bush had supported abortion rights when he ran for the GOP nomination in 1980. He had lines about the “sanctity of life” in his speeches during the 1988 campaign, but I don’t think many people outside the anti-choice movement took him seriously. He made just enough anti-choice noises to get the anti-choice vote, but he wasn’t so strongly ideological about it that he frightened away moderates. And, anyway, Bar clearly was pro-choice and didn’t care who knew about it.

As president Poppy vetoed some bills that would have provided Medicaid funding to pay for abortions, and of course he appointed Clarence Thomas to the SCOTUS. I don’t think this registered with the general public at the time as a threat to Roe v. Wade.

Being pro-choice didn’t seem to hurt Bill Clinton get elected twice.

Finally we get to Dubya, and in 2000 he did a grand job with the mixed signal thing, too. While he was out making speeches about stopping abortion, all those Republican women were all over radio and television winking at voters that it was OK; he really didn’t mean it. And I think by then a lot of people assumed Roe v. Wade was written in stone, so abortion wouldn’t be outlawed, no matter what the president said.

But now we’ve had two anti-choice SCOTUS appointments and the PBA law is, I assume, in effect. Do you think the Republican Party will get away with making promises to one side while winking at the other any more? And if a Republican presidential candidate is firmly and adamantly anti-choice, could he win a general election? I’m sure he’d lose most of the northeastern states, but I can’t speak to the rest of the country.

Update: See Jeff Feldman for another perspective.

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.”