Two Justices Don’t Make a Society

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Anti-abortion rights forces see an end to Roe v. Wade just around the corner, writes Michelle Boorstein in today’s Washington Post.

Tens of thousands of abortion opponents held an upbeat rally on the cold, gray streets of downtown Washington yesterday and described what they see as a societal tide turning against the 33-year-old Roe v. Wade court decision that legalized the procedure.

“Societal tide”? Two justices don’t make a society. In fact, possibly the most remarkable thing about the abortion controversy is that, in spite of years of Sturm und Drang, opinions actually are not shifting. I believe we’re still pretty much where we were just after Roe v. Wade was decided.

Check out the archive of abortion polls at pollingreport.com. Scroll down to the ABC News/Washington Post poll asking the question, “Do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases?” This table shows results going back to 1996. In June 1996, 58 percent of adults nationwide believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 39 percent believed it should be illegal in all or most cases. In December 2005, 57 percent believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 40 percent believed it should be illegal in all or most cases. Given a 3 percent margin of error, this shows that over the past decade there has been no change at all.

If you scroll even further down, you can find a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll that goes back to 1975. This poll asked the question “Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?” Let’s compare April 1975 to November 2005:

1975

Always legal — 21 percent
Sometimes legal — 54 percent
Always illegal — 22 percent

2005

Always legal — 26 percent
Sometimes legal — 56 percent
Always illegal — 16 percent

If anything, the Fetus People lost ground somewhere.

Back to Boorstein:

Demonstrators at the annual March for Life said their movement has been buoyed by two recent Supreme Court nominees — one of them confirmed — who appear open to reconsidering the 1973 decision. They talked optimistically about how technological advances are producing clearer sonograms, which could make it harder to argue that a fetus is not a person.

Life Magazine ran its famous photographs of fetii in utero in April 1966. These photos and others like them have been around for 40 years. And the dingbats are talking about better sonograms?

You’ll like this part:

And they noted yesterday’s large turnout of young people, who filled the march route along Constitution Avenue and lined the walls outside the Supreme Court in cheerleader jackets, black leather outfits with studs and T-shirts that read, “Abortion is Mean” and “Sex is good, the pill is not.” [emphasis added]

You see the problem.

In the February 9 New York Review of Books, historian Gary Wills reviews Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis. Here’s a snip:

On abortion, for instance, Carter argues that a “pro-life” dogmatism defeats human life and values at many turns. Carter is opposed to abortion, as what he calls a tragedy “brought about by a combination of human errors.” But the “pro-life” forces compound rather than reduce the errors. The most common abortions, and the most common reasons cited for undergoing them, are caused by economic pressure compounded by ignorance.

Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

    Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

The result of a rigid fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance can be seen where the law forbids abortion:

    In some predominantly Roman Catholic countries where all abortions are illegal and few social services are available, such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the abortion rate is fifty per thousand. According to the World Health Organization, this is the highest ratio of unsafe abortions [in the world].

A New York Times article that came out after Carter’s book appeared further confirms what he is saying: “Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.“[*] This takes place in countries where churches and schools teach abstinence as the only form of contraception—demonstrating conclusively the ineffectiveness of that kind of program.

By contrast, in the United States, where abortion is legal and sex education is broader, the abortion rate reached a twenty-four-year low during the 1990s. Yet the ironically named “pro-life” movement would return the United States to the condition of Chile or Colombia. And not only that, the fundamentalists try to impose the anti-life program in other countries by refusing foreign aid to programs that teach family planning, safe sex, and contraceptive knowledge. They also oppose life-saving advances through the use of stem cell research. With friends like these, “life” is in thrall to death. Carter finds these results neither loving (in religious terms) nor just (in political terms).

Be sure to read the whole review; you’ll enjoy it. I’d also like to point out that Wills is a Catholic and Carter an evangelical, proving that not all religious people are whackjobs.

Back to Boorstein:

“This is the beginning of the end. We’ll look back at some point soon and won’t believe that people were ever killing babies like it was nothing,” said Ryan McAlpin, 19, who came from Chicago with a group of friends.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute provides a wealth of information on abortion and abortion law worldwide. I’ve spent considerable time there and have yet to find an example — in the past 30 or so years, anyway — of a nation criminalizing abortion in a place where it was once legal. Abortion has been decriminalized in many nations, but not the other way around. Worldwide, the societal tide is clearly with choice, not against it.

One more bit from Boorstein:

Joe Giganti, a spokesman for the action center, said more Americans are starting to question the notion that Roe is settled law. “I’d say the mood has changed significantly just in the past year,” he said. “We’re going to see the overturning of Roe .”

Back to pollingreport.com. According to a, NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in December 2005, 66 percent of adults nationwide support keeping Roe v. Wade as settled law; only 30 percent want it overturned. I’d say Joe Giganti is celebrating a little too soon.

In the long term, even if Roe v. Wade were overturned and a whole mess of states criminalized abortion the next day, the overwhelming force of public opinion would eventually set things right again to make abortion legal. That is, unless the United States isn’t converted into a fundie theocracy, in which case all bets are off. And in that case abortion law will be the least of our problems.

Update: See also feministing and Digby.

Hamdi Ho

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Our national debate on the President’s surveillance powers has reached an impasse. We’re at the “Am not!” “Am too!” stage, which can only be resolved through the intervention of a parent.

Our side of the argument is laid out pretty well in an editorial in today’s Washington Post.

Especially without knowing the parameters of the surveillance, we hesitate to second-guess the president’s argument that FISA’s limits are unduly constraining. The surveillance may be critical for national security, and a law written in a different technological age may well need to be refurbished. But the proper way to handle that — which the administration rejected — would have been to seek changes in the law, not to do a stealthy end run around the legislative process. In such an amorphous, long-running conflict as the war against terrorism, it’s critical to ensure that limits are in place to prevent the executive branch from overreaching.

The White House has yet to explain why, if FISA regulations were cumbersome, it did not ask Congress for changes. After 9/11 Congress was tripping all over itself to give President Bush every tool he could possibly ask for to fight terrorism. The Patriot Act did, in fact, make changes in FISA (see Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures). Clearly, the White House simply didn’t bother to follow legal procedure. They didn’t think they had to.

And now that they’ve been caught, they’ve gone on the defensive to make critics out to be dupes of terrorists. Instead of discussing the real issue (why the White House bypassed constitutional procedures) they’re trying to make the issue about why the Democrats are soft on terrorism, leading to the “Am not!” “Am too!” impasse. Now we need Mom to step in to make Georgie explain his extraconstitutional shenanigans and send him to his room until he promises to stop. And no computer or video games for you tonight, young man!

Today President Bush said the Supreme Court had approved warrantless wiretapping, which might come as a surprise to the justices. He’s referring to the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, decided in 2004. If you don’t want to slog through the entire decision, there’s a brief abstract here.

Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen, was arrested in the fall of 2001 in Afghanistan by U.S. military. He was declared an “enemy combatant” and transferred to a military prison. A defense attorney filed a writ of certiorari in federal district court. Perhaps a reader with a law degree can explain this, but I take it this was a petition for the court to review Hamdi’s case. Anyway, the attorney, Frank Dunham, Jr., argued that the government had violated Hamdi’s 5th Amendment right to due process “by holding him indefinitely and not giving him access to an attorney or a trial,” says the abstract. “The government countered that the Executive Branch had the right, during wartime, to declare people who fight against the United States ‘enemy combatants’ and thus restrict their access to the court system.”

So how did the case turn out? The abstract continues,

In an opinion backed by a four-justice plurality and partly joined by two additional justices, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that although Congress authorized Hamdi’s detention, Fifth Amendment due process guarantees give a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant the right to contest that detention before a neutral decisionmaker. The plurality rejected the government’s argument that the separation-of-powers prevents the judiciary from hearing Hamdi’s challenge.

If you’re not seeing authorization for warrantless wiretapping in there, don’t worry. You aren’t the only one. A whole lot of real smart legal scholars got together to write this in the February 9 issue of the New York Review of Books:

Finally, the DOJ’s reliance upon Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), to support its reading of the AUMF, see DOJ Letter at 3, is misplaced. A plurality of the Court in Hamdi held that the AUMF authorized military detention of enemy combatants captured on the battlefield abroad as a “fundamental incident of waging war.” Id. at 519. The plurality expressly limited this holding to individuals who were “part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners in Afghanistan and who engaged in an armed conflict against the United States there.” Id. at 516 (emphasis added). It is one thing, however, to say that foreign battlefield capture of enemy combatants is an incident of waging war that Congress intended to authorize. It is another matter entirely to treat unchecked warrantless domestic spying as included in that authorization, especially where an existing statute specifies that other laws are the “exclusive means” by which electronic surveillance may be conducted and provides that even a declaration of war authorizes such spying only for a fifteen-day emergency period.

The AUMF is an act of Congress, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). The White House argues that Congress implicitly authorized the NSA domestic spying program by means of the AUMF. The Department of Justice argues that

The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the AUMF in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), confirms that Congress in the AUMF gave its express approval to the military conflict against al Qaeda and its allies and thereby to the President’s use of all traditional and accepted incidents of force in this current military conflict—including warrantless electronic surveillance to intercept enemy communications both at home and abroad. [emphasis added]

Oh, so did Justice O’Connor write in the majority decision that the AUMF authorizes the President to engage in warrantless wiretapping? Um, well, Justice O’Connor didn’t write about wiretapping or surveillance at all in the Hamdi decision. She does address warrantless arrests of American citizens, and she took a dim view of them. But not a peep about surveillance.

To understand where the Right is seeing this authorization for warrantless wiretapping in Hamdi, I turned to Paul of PowerLine, who wrote,

Specifcally, the Court ruled that AUMF grants the president implied authority to detain U.S. citizens in the U.S. because detention to prevent a combatant from returning to the battlefield is a fundamental incident of waging war. In the same way, AUMF can be read as authorizing the president to conduct communication surveillance targeted at the enemy on the ground that it too is a fundamental incident of waging war. If so, then the intercept program does not violate FISA because that statute contains an exception for surveillance authorized by statute.

Yes, O’Connor’s decision does say that combatants can be detained: “The capture and detention of lawful combatants and the capture, detention, and trial of unlawful combatants, by ‘universal agreement and practice,’ are ‘important incident[s] of war.’ … The purpose of detention is to prevent captured individuals from returning to the field of battle and taking up arms once again. … There is no bar to this Nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant. … In light of these principles, it is of no moment that the AUMF does not use specific language of detention.”

My reading of O’Connor’s decision is not that the AUMF authorized detention, but that detention is indisputably something that soldiers in war can do to someone fighting them. If we extrapolate Paul of PL’s reasoning, we’d have to say that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens is indisputably something that the White House can do. That’s not workin’ for me.

And the Court ruled against the Bush Administration in the Hamdi case, remember. The Court said that the executive branch cannot arbitrarily declare that an American citizen may be stripped of his due process rights, even if that citizen is caught fighting against the U.S. in a foreign country. Justice O’Connor wrote,

Striking the proper constitutional balance here is of great importance to the Nation during this period of ongoing combat. But it is equally vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship. It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad. See Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U. S. 144, 164-165 (1963) (“The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit government action”); see also United States v. Robel, 389 U. S. 258, 264 (1967) (“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties … which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile”). …

… We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens. [emphasis added]

This, folks, is the legal decision that Bush claims supports his warrantless wiretapping program. This, folks, is called “blowin’ smoke” where I come from. There are a great many more colorful things one might call it.

The legal eagles in the New York Review of Books say that the Hamdi decision is limited to to people engaging in armed conflict against the United States in Afghanistan. Further, Congress cannot have implied authorization of the NSA program, because “Congress has expressly and specifically addressed that precise question in FISA and limited any such warrantless surveillance to the first fifteen days of war.”

I will admit right now that I am no lawyer. Paul of PowerLine is a lawyer, or so he says. Someone on the Right might — no, will — say that he must understand this legal stuff better than I do. And maybe he does. But what he claims about Hamdi is pure fantasy. I may not be a lawyer, but I can read, and I can think. And I know bullshit when I see it.

Abortion and Slavery

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If you’ve spent much time in Civil War discussion groups you’ve probably run into the argument that slavery would have ended in the South without the Civil War; therefore, the War hadn’t needed to be fought. Indeed, occasionally some southern apologist will insist that the South was well on the way toward giving up slavery and would have done so freely had the statist, Big Gubmint damnyankees not pushed the issue prematurely.

Well, certainly, by now slavery would have ended, although probably not by the free will of the slave states. It more likely would have ended by constitutional amendment once enough “free soil” states had entered the Union to form a majority.

In fact, that is what the plantation owners feared. And in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected on a platform of keeping slavery out of the territories, which would ensure that new states entering the Union would be free soil states. Thus the election of Lincoln touched off the secession crisis, which in turn took the nation to war.

The southern plantation class, which controlled the South economically, politically and socially, was certain that the abolition of slavery would ruin them. They were prepared to fight to the death (or compel non-slave-owning whites to fight to the death in their place) to preserve slavery. The Declaration of Causes documents adopted by the states of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas make it clear that secession was all about preserving slavery.

And may I suggest that a people determined to fight to the death to preserve something are not on the brink of giving that something up?

Anyway, the South started the war when South Carolina fired on the federal military reservation of Fort Sumter, and ever after they have blamed Lincoln for making them start it (that’s why it’s called the “War of Northern Aggression,” see; the damnyankees fought back). And after the war the former secessionists blamed Reconstruction for making them engage in race riots, lynchings, and other violence perpetrated upon the freed African Americans (even though much Reconstruction policy was enacted in reaction to the race riots, lynchings, etc.). Had the white plantation class been allowed more time to change their minds about slavery and end it on their own, which they would have done someday, then white southerners wouldn’t have been left with all those hard feelings that made them so violent. And then there wouldn’t have been a Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow or any of that stuff.

But after the war those damnyankee carpetbaggers conspired to temporarily disenfranchise southern white men just because they had engaged in armed rebellion against the government and thereby forced through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And then the poor downtrodden southern white people just had no choice but to form the Klan and enact Jim Crow laws, because they hadn’t been given enough time to adjust.

Those of you who are much younger than I am and/or did not grow up in hollerin’ distance of Dixie might not have been exposed to this line of reasoning much, but believe me, it was common. Still is, in some circles.

Fast forward to today’s anti-abortion rights movement. Fetus People like to see themselves as the heirs of the abolitionists, and they compare the struggle to protect fetii with the stuggle to end slavery. And they like to evoke the Dred Scott decision, which declared that a black man could not be a citizen and could have no standing to bring suit against a white man. The “antis” want fetii to be given full citizenship status; those who would deny them that status are bad people, just like the justices who ruled against Dred Scott.

But in truth, the anti-choicers more and more remind me of the old white supremacists and Klansmen, not the abolitionists.

First, the line of reasoning that blames the abortion wars on Roe v. Wade (see previous post on abortion) and not on a faction of fanatics who will try to stop abortions by any means is just too much like saying the 13th Amendment was responsible for the formation of the Klan. Let’s pretend that tomorrow Roe is reversed. Does anyone seriously believe that states which allowed abortion to remain legal would not be descended upon by Randall Terry and the screaming culture of death hoardes? Puh-leeze …

The Right argues that the Roe v. Wade decision amounted to judicial activism and judges “ruling from the bench,” which is exactly the same thing they said about Brown v. Board of Education. Many on the Right insist they don’t really want to impose a ban on abortion; they just want the question to be decided by elected state legislatures according to the democratic process. Does anyone really think that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, and abortion given a full and fair debate in every statehouse, and the 50 states separately wrote abortion law that reflected majority opinion in each state, that the Fetus People would accept any state’s decision to keep abortion legal?

Hah.

The Fetus People simply do not accept any position on abortion but theirs, and they will not give up until their will is law. For the past 33 years these people have engaged in systematic intimidation and terrorism to impose their will. Let me repeat this passage from Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion Wars” …

The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

These are not people who give a bleep about debate or the democratic process. And they are the cause of the abortion wars, which would be waged Roe v. Wade or no.

Some might argue that the pro-privacy Left is just as adamant to have its way, but when has anyone on the pro-privacy Left committed arsons and bombings, butyric acid attacks, and murders to get their way? In the 90 or so years in which abortion was illegal in most states — abortion didn’t become illegal until the late 19th century — I do not believe activists for abortion rights killed anyone, bombed anyone, or issued fatwas against the opposition. Instead, they worked within the system, which includes court challenges.

Let us revisit the old plantation slaveowners and ask another hypothetical question. Let’s say they’d been allowed more time to decide to give up slavery. Surely another generation, probably two, maybe more, of human beings would have lived their lives enslaved. And even if the slave states had been given more time, there is no guarantee that all slaveowners would have given up without a fight, or that slavery would not have left a residue of white supremacy no matter where or how it ended.

Today some on the Left argue that giving up Roe v. Wade would be smart strategy. Republicans have hidden behind Roe v. Wade long enough, they say. Without it, they’d be forced to deliver on their promises to ban abortion, thereby alienating the majority of voters. Or, they’d be forced to disappoint the Fetus People and forfeit their votes. Yet this would not end the abortion wars, and many women would suffer. And where abortion becomes illegal, the Fetus People will press for more — banning birth control and sex education, for example. The war will continue as long as the Fetus People choose to wage it. They will not be appeased.

So let’s stop kidding ourselves that there is anything that can be done to end the abortion wars. Like extremist Islamic terrorists, the Fetus People believe in their own absolute righteousness and will not stop fighting — to the death — to get their way. Like the slaveowners of earlier times, there is nothing else to be done but oppose them.

See also: Fetus People Follies.

Blog for Choice Sunday

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Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion War” in today’s New York Times magazine is a sometimes sobering, sometimes frustrating reflection on Press’s father, an ob-gyn who devotes part of his practice to performing abortions, and the larger struggle over choice.

Eyal Press provides keen insight into opposition to abortion — the sobering part — but blames Roe v. Wade for the ongoing abortion wars — the frustrating part.

Dr. Press’s medical practice is in Buffalo, New York. Until 1998 he and Dr. Barnett Slepian often covered for each other on weekends at a Buffalo abortion clinic. Then Dr. Slepian was murdered — shot in the back by an anti-choice fanatic — and Eyal Press feared his father was next. Both Dr. Slepian and Dr. Press had been “subjected to abrasive treatment – protests in front of their offices and homes, harassment of their patients, death threats,” writes Eyal Press. “I had witnessed some of this firsthand while growing up.”

After Dr. Slepian’s murder, Eyal Press tried to persuade his father to retire.

There was silence. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed. Then, looking over in my direction, with weariness but no hint of acquiescence in his eyes, he started telling me about his upbringing in Israel, how he got used to living in a world full of danger and not allowing it to deter him from doing what he felt was right.

“It’s wrong, wrong,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“To give in to fanatics, to terrorists.”

The very next morning, around 10, as I was talking to my mother, the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Death threat?” she said. “Death threat?. . .Excuse me, you’ll have to speak with my son.”

Her hand shook as she passed me the phone. It was a detective from the Police Department. He was calling to inform us that a newspaper in Hamilton, Ontario, which days earlier received a package containing a photograph of Slepian with an X drawn through his face, had just received an anonymous threat that my father was “next on the list.”

After interviewing a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated her life to abortion clinic protests — Eyal Press doesn’t say if he told her his father was an abortion provider — Press praised her religious sincerity, and added,

Yet as the scholar Jessica Stern notes, there are two sides to religion – “one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other particularist and sectarian.” The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

I call Eyal Press’s work frustrating because it is too much written through the prism of his experiences in Buffalo, New York, a city with a large Catholic population that is far, far away from the Bible Belt. In Eyal Press’s version of anti-choice history, abortion didn’t become a hot-button issue until after Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice movment didn’t get organized until well into the 1980s. “During the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics – the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo – the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical,” he writes. But the mid-1980s saw the “political reawakening of evangelicals” who began “filtering into the movement.”

Had Eyal Press grown up closer to the Bible Belt, he would have seen a very different history. The way I remember it is that before Roe v. Wade the Missouri state legislature was engaged in a Second Civil War over whether to legalize abortion. The state capitol at Jefferson City was besieged with pros and antis, and it seemed little else was on the legislative agenda. In 1972, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri, contingents from various evangelical student organizations regularly marched into the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian (the J School publishes a community daily newspaper to provide students with real-world experience) demanding that their anti-abortion press release du jour be given space on page 1, unedited. (Fortunately the “professors,” who were mostly former newspaper reporters, were a thick-skinned crew who didn’t like being told what to publish.)

Eyal Press of Buffalo, New York, thinks that Roe v. Wade began the abortion wars, but in Missouri and other midwestern states the announcement of the Roe decision in 1973 brought about a temporary cease-fire. State legislatures were allowed to turn their attention to other matters, and anti-choice groups withdrew to consider new strategies.

Abortion clinic arsons began three years later, in 1976. Bombings began in 1978.

Other nations are not tearing themselves apart over abortion, writes Press.

“No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do,” the columnist Michael Kinsley noted recently. Not Italy, home to the Vatican; not France, England or Germany. Only in America is a medical procedure that was legalized more than three decades ago at risk of once again being criminalized. Only here have doctors routinely taken to wearing bulletproof vests and hiring armed guards for protection.

He blames Roe v. Wade for this. “By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell.”

Many argue that if only the SCOTUS hadn’t handed down Roe v. Wade, by now most state legislatures would have at least partly legalized abortion, and the American people would have reached something like a consensus. Some even argue that most states were well on the way to legalizing abortion, and the Roe decision had the effect of making anti-choice opinion more entrenched. To which I say … hooey. In a large part of the country the abortion wars were hot and heavy before Roe v. Wade was decided, and I believe that in most of the South and Midwest abortion would never have been legalized.

The argument is that most citizens, even in the South and Midwest, support keeping abortion legal; therefore, state legislatures would have bowed to the will of the majority and legalized it. Maybe; maybe not. A pro-choice majority nationwide doesn’t seem to stop the U.S. Congress from passing anti-choice legislation. And geographic proximity does not make state legislatures more sensitive to the public will; if anything, most citizens know less about what their state legislature is up to than they do about what goes on in Washington. As long as social reactionaries are able to swing close elections (or convince politicians that they can), politicians will cater to them.

Press writes that, in Europe, nations “decriminalizing abortion on the grounds of health rather than rights” and left open the possibility that abortion could be re-criminalized through regular legislative channels. Hence, anti-abortion terrorism didn’t catch on there. But according to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money,

What’s interesting about this is that Canada’s abortion policy–there are no legislative restrictions on abortion at all–was created by the judiciary, which struck down a national abortion law. While many people assert that judicial policy-making is much more “divisive” than when issues are resolved by legislatures, the court’s intervention is so popular 15 years after the fact that proposing even modest abortion legislation is electoral suicide. The lesson of this is obvious: people evaluate judicial policy-making the same way they evaluate other forms of policy-making. The idea that prior to Roe v. Wade American abortion policy was represented by a stable consensus is absurd, but a convenient myth for people who oppose abortion, because the legislative status quo was heavily slanted against the pro-choice majority. Abortion policy in the U.S. is divisive because it’s divisive; it doesn’t matter whether it’s courts or legislatures that do the policy-making.

I agree with Scott. I believe hysteria over abortion reflects something in American culture; the same something that keeps us fighting over evolution and other aspects of modernity long accepted in the rest of the civilized world. And later today or tomorrow I want to blog about the parallel between the abortion controversy and the abolition of slavery — and it’s not the parallel the Right sees, believe me.

See also: Other recent Mahablog posts on abortion; Blog for Choice.

Caption Contest!

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Be careful what you say — anybody might be wiretapped. Seems to me this vintage World War I poster would lend itself to a wiretap-related caption. Whoever comes up with the best zinger wins a cafepress T-shirt or poster with the updated Miss Liberty graphic!

Of course, the Bushies are goin’ way beyond phone wiretaps. Mo Dowd writes today (courtesy of True Blue Liberal) that she doesn’t appreciate “Dick Cheney ogling my Googling.”

Because what I’m Googling, of course, is Dick Cheney. I have to constantly monitor how Vice Voyeur is pushing the federal government to constantly monitor millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, e-mail notes and Internet searches.

If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”

I tried “fruitcake” and got, well, fruitcake, but “government snooping” brings up some real interesting hits.