One of the ongoing issues in this election is going to be waking people up to the fact that John McCain is a grade A, totally not moderate social conservative. This is critical for that swing vote, especially those swing voters that say, “Well, I don’t think abortion should be illegal, but it’s bad to use it as birth control.” Translation of that sentiment: “I want to be able to have an abortion if I so desire, but I reserve the right to gossip about others in tones that indicate that I’m so scandalized.” These people would shy away from a ban, of course, but they probably can be convinced to vote for someone they erroneously believe talks the anti-choice talk but won’t do the anti-choice walk.

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So NARAL endorsed Obama, in a move that was sure to create what you laypeople call “controversy”. The bloodletting at their blog comments is disturbing. You’d think they endorsed, oh, McCain or someone anti-choice, when they instead endorsed a pro-choice candidate they’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with.

It’s not a crazy choice, or even necessarily a badly timed one. NARAL has long thought of itself as a strategic organization, and I suspect that they think that Obama’s the better bet for beating McCain in November. And beating McCain is more important from a pro-choice perspective than the choice between Obama and Clinton, who have pretty much identical views on reproductive rights. Or maybe they think that an endorsement released now will help hurry up an end to the primary season, so the party can focus its energies on fighting McCain, who has pretty much promised to spike the Supreme Court with justices hostile to women’s rights.

In fact, they said as much in their press release.

NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC is making our endorsement now because every day that passes, Sen. McCain gets a free ride on the issue of choice. That free ride ends today.

It’s about moving onto the next stage, the most important stage: Getting a pro-choice Democrat into the White House.

There’s a scent of sour grapes in the air around the Clinton campaign, and from a feminist perspective, I’m boggled. Sure, I understand that it’s disappointing if “electing a female President” was a major priority for you and that’s getting thwarted. But if you support women’s rights, you need to put your support behind the Democratic nominee, even if it’s Obama and it’s likely to be. McCain can’t even support equal pay for women! He’s going to continue the assault on reproductive rights that the Bush administration started. If you support women, have some pity on us in our fertile years living in red states who sorely need a political break in our direction right now, namely a pro-choice Democrat in the White House. Which Obama is, in case there’s a whiff of doubt created by this needlessly contentious primary season.

Washington University students and faculty are in an uproar over the decision to award anti-gay, anti-feminist Eagle Forum fossil Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate at its May 16 commencement ceremony. A Facebook group created to protest the move has over a thousand members.

Mary Ann Dzuback, the director of the women and gender studies department at Washington University agreed, said it was “grossly inappropriate” for the university to honor Schlafly with a degree.

“She’s spent her entire career speaking against women in the workforce and for them remaining in the home,” Dzuback said of Schlafly, who rose to prominence during the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

…The university issued a statement Sunday defending its decision, saying it — like many other universities — chooses to honor those “who have become a part of the broad public discourse on vital issues of the times.” The statement cited other controversial figures, such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom the school has honored.

PFLAG and our St. Louis chapter are proud to join those on the ground in Missouri and call on school officials to do the right thing and, as executive director Jody Huckaby said today, “find a more suitable person to applaud.”

On California’s SB-77, to protect GLBT students: The legislation “represent[s] a repudiation of 2,000 years of Christian moral teaching on human sexuality, marriage, and the family. The result is that California’s schools are now promoting behaviors and lifestyles that are physically and spiritually dangerous for children.”

On the idea of any protections for GLBT youth: “The bottom line is, don’t count on the courts to protect public school students from being subjected to the promotion of homosexuality.”

On sexual harassment laws: “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.”

Yeah. I think they could locate someone who isn’t terminally frozen in the dark ages.

Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.

Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.

Well, actually, as an asset, virginity ranks below toilet paper in terms of holding value, because after you use the toilet paper, it’s still there. But virginity is gone the second you make use of your “property”. If an asset is utterly demolished to non-existence after one use, it’s not really an asset by any real measure.

And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.

I suspect the Abstinence Clearinghouse folks think the way to get around this is for women (who these messages are mainly aimed at) to marry when they’re really young, so that they don’t get a whole bunch of job skills and independent ideas and therefore escape hatches before the fateful day. But that’s just a guess; I suppose we’ll have to keep reading to find out the whole story.

Image from Gretchen Schermerhorn.

So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc. Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.

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I’ve been hanging onto this awhile, but I knew it would come up: the Anti-Defamation League has condemned Expelled for using the tragedy of the Holocaust in service of an anti-science agenda.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

It’s initially bizarre to see creationists—who are largely fundamentalist Christians—hide behind Holocaust accusations on this issue, since the major factor that led Jews to be the scapegoated group was centuries of Christians scapegoating Jews, accusing them of killing Jesus and of course reserving them the place of the especially not-saved, ideas that would pretty much die if fundies didn’t keep them alive. But it’s not actually that big a surprise to anti-choice movement watchers like myself, because the Holocaust allusions are big with the anti-choice nuts.* And in the annals of wingnuttery, abortion (and birth control for some) and evolutionary theory are like the same thing pretty much, so of course they’re going to use the same language to describe them. The two get conflated all the time, like in this trailer for Expelled.

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Annejumps sent me this, and Cristina Page posted on it. Various anti-choice organizations are coming together and protesting the fact that many of you right now are not having to get abortions. You know, because you use contraception.

There’s an entire bit of pseudo-science woo to explain how the birth control pill actually causes abortion, but there’s no actual scientific reason to think it. The only reason they grasp at this is that the anti-choice movement is not, and has never really been, motivated by concern for fetuses, but more concern for women’s ability to control our fertility, and subsequently our lives, control they don’t want us to have. The pill is protested because their magical beliefs would have it “killing babies”, but that doesn’t explain their opposition to condoms, opposition that has led to abstinence-only education and abstinence-only strings attached to HIV relief funds to the rest of the world. Maybe it kills babies when sperm are deprived of the opportunity to swim free?

Back from NYC and onto everyone’s favorite game: catch-up. Of which I have a lot to do, because JFK airport didn’t have wifi. Still, absorbing stuff to blog about later is never far from my mind, and Marc and I watched nearly the whole first season of “Mad Men” while waiting for our delayed plane to arrive and take off. Will report later on it, when we’re done.

In the meantime, I’d like to point everyone to this article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation about the national hypocrisy that was evident during recent events, notably the way that people managed to be simultaneously scandalized by FLDS while also kissing some Pope ass, when the difference between the attitudes of Warren Jeffs and Pope Ratz towards women aren’t all that different by objective standards. Okay, to be fair, the Pope believes that any individual man should only be assigned one wife to control in a lifetime, and I doubt he’d be be against making women stay virgins a bit longer in life before they submit to a lifetime of having one baby after another. But the basic principles are the same: Women are for making babies, and should do that extensively and to the exclusion of having a full life of their own. If women don’t volunteer for this—and let’s face it, most won’t, since it’s cruel—they should be coerced through religious threats of burning in hell or ex-communication. In addition to making up mystical punishments for errant women, both the Pope and Warren Jeffs are happy to use physical coercion. Jeffs employed a system where young women barely out of childhood were married to older men, who would rape them into submission if need be. The Pope prefers to rely on state authority to do his dirty work, supporting measures enacted by the state to force childbirth onto women who have shown their unwillingness to go through with it by seeking abortion. And, as Pollitt notes, the Catholic Church uses state and social coercion instead of persuasion in other ways.

If it was up to Benedict, we might be more stylish than the plural wives of the FLDS, but we’d be trapped in marriage and have fifteen children just like them. In the United States the Catholic church has lost some of its moral authority–thank you, pedophile priests–but it has more temporal power than you might think. Around 12 percent of US hospitals are church-affiliated, which entitles them to refuse modern reproductive healthcare to women. The church is the major opponent of the drive to make health insurance plans cover birth control, forcing women to pay up to $600 out of pocket every year for contraceptives. Along with evangelical Protestants, it is the main force behind every attempt to restrict abortion, defeat prochoice politicians, make contraception and the morning-after pill harder to get, promote false and sexist abstinence-only education and discourage the use of condoms to prevent HIV by spreading unfounded doubts about their effectiveness.

Of course, persuasion has the downside of being ineffective. Most American Catholics use contraception, and a hefty percentage also use abortion when necessary. They may or may not feel guilty about this on an individual level, but the result of freedom is clear to them and to the Pope: When people are free, they are likely to take care of themselves and their families, even when under immense pressure not to. So, no wonder the Pope looks to the law to help him accomplish what persuasion cannot. Perversely, it’s because American Catholics are free to disregard the dictates of the church that the nation can be so welcoming to the Pope. His sick attitudes towards women seem harmless because the American government restricts him from employing them. For now. To a lesser degree all the time.

Do you think the planned vigils and demonstrations are going to do anything to sway Benedict, or is this simply a matter of letting him know the dismay about his hateful rhetoric on key issues? (PageOneQ):

Gay Catholic activists, who plan to demonstrate Tuesday along the papal motorcade route in Washington, have compiled a list of statements by Benedict during his career which they consider hostile to gays and lesbians. These include forceful denunciations of gay marriage and of adoption rights for same-sex couples.

“He has issued some of the most hurtful and extreme rhetoric against our community of any religious leader in history, and we want to call him into account for the damage that he’s done,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA.

Duddy-Burke said she hopes the protests will be coupled with celebration of the gains made by gay Catholics in America in recent years. She cited the growing number of parishes welcoming openly gay members and the dozens of Catholic colleges that now have gay-straight alliances.

…For many American Catholics, the most distressing church-related issue of recent years has been clerical sex abuse. Thousands of molestation allegations have been filed against Catholic clergy, and dioceses have paid out more than $2 billion in claims since 1950.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abuse by Priests, said his advocacy group would not be mollified even if the pope meets privately with abuse victims.

Other Qs —
* What about churches that are welcoming to non-celibate gay parishioners - will there be a “crackdown”?
* Is it reasonable to expect any meaningful progressive change during this Pope’s reign?
* For Catholics out there, how do you reconcile Benedict’s positions with your faith?

I’m just tossing these out there for discussion. It’s clear that Prada Papa Ratzi’s arrival on U.S. soil will generate a lot of press, and a good amount of dismay among women, gays, health advocates who are promoting condom use to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, and other progressive members of the Catholic community who believe that the conservative Benedict has hurt the church, particularly in light of the clergy sex abuse scandals.
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Jill linked Ema’s awesome post about why Leslee Unruh and her cadre of crazy anti-choicers are very Communist in their thinking. I’m reading Glenn Greenwald’s newest book, and I have to say that this post really reminds me of his larger points about how right wingers all too often embody the very things they claim to hate. The official right wing reason to hate communism was that it was totalitarian, but the recent embrace of Soviet tactics demonstrates that it wasn’t the totalitarianism that was an issue so much at the lefty economics, as you might suspect.

The bill that Unruh and company are trying to pass into law could potentially ban birth control along with abortion, and it redefines biology in a way that would bring a tear to the eye of Soviets who thought natural selection was politically incorrect and had to go. It gives the government panty-sniffing power that would make the Stasi jealous. It redefines women’s bodies as property of the state in a way that the Chinese are taking notes.

But when red-baiting the anti-choicers, we mustn’t forget to mention the anti-choice communist utopia: Romania. Now there was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren’t having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community’s disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn’t do anything to lower the abortion rate—under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.

That’s the utopia they’re looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist’s nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.

Perhaps the cuteness of the snufflelump will distract you from the fact that it means “horrible uterine infection” or “prison sentence”.

Often, someone will present me in arguments about reproductive rights, the statistic that demonstrates that women are anti-choice in roughly the same rates as men, and sometimes a little more, as if this is damning evidence against the idea that anti-choicers are working from a misogynist worldview. Usually, I respond by pointing out that sexism is a unique oppression in the levels of internalized self-hatred in the oppressed,* and that many of the women who call themselves “pro-life” do in fact have abortions, and a lot of them are even more likely to than your average pro-choice feminist, because they’re also less likely to be educated about and using contraception. So it’s as much a pose about kissing patriarchal ass as anything.

But there’s another aspect to anti-choice advocacy that can’t be ignored when examining the statistics, and that’s the stupid factor.

I’m asked all the time, “Do you really think that all anti-choicers are crazy nuts who hate women and sex?”, and I say, “No, I think the leadership definitely is, but the followers are mostly sheep, albeit sheep who are drawn to this issue because they have deepset issues about sexuality.” And considering that women, being equal to men, are as likely to be dumb sheep as men, then it follows that as many will label themselves “pro-life” and scream about murdering babies while giving Bush license to murder actual babies with his war in Iraq.

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Right wingers ask:

Huh? Who thinks of babies as “punishment”?

Better yet, what kind of father would describe babies as “punishment”?

Well, Sean Hannity, for one, describes unplanned pregnancies that result in babies as a punishment for sex he doesn’t approve of. From his anti-freedom tome Let Freedom Ring:

We live in an age characterized by the maxim “If it feels good do it, regardless of the consequences.” It’s a sex-drenched culture–from movies, music, and magazines to TV, radio and the Internet–that glorifies premarital sex, promiscuous sex, extramarital sex, kinky sex, rough sex, and gay sex. You name it, you can find it, and without looking too hard.

So there’s the point of disagreement. Right wingers who wish to deprive women of the right to choose abortion, of contraception access, and of sex education believe babies are a punishment for sex. Obama said they shouldn’t be a punishment for sex, meaning he believes they are not a punishment for sex, but that right wing policies make them that way.

If you are against babies being treated as a punishment for sex, you agree with Obama.

So why are these wingnuts freaking out? Could it be that they’re lying sons of bitches? Sources say yes.

The building the conference is in—the MIT Stata center—really looks like this. It’s fitting for this conference, somehow. It suits the cheekiness of the average attendee.

I should have slept in longer, since I functionally only got 6 hours of sleep, but sometimes I just can’t sleep in, even in a nice, soft hotel bed surrounded by pillows, so I’m up. Which gives me time to blog about my panel at the WAM! conference yesterday before I head out and see another panel.

Kudos to RH Reality Check and especially to editor Emily Douglas for putting together a good group of speakers. We had Aimee Thorne-Thomson of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, Cristina Page, author of How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America, and me. The panel was called “Breaking the Frame: Revitalizing and Redefining Reproductive Rights Media Coverage”. I was stoked and a little intimidated to be on a panel with such awesome women. That sense of being intimidated grew when I got to the conference and mingled and realized this place is just packed to the gills with intelligent, invested, awesome women (and a few men). We got to the panel room, looked inside and saw about 15 hanging out waiting for stuff to start. I lingered outside the door, talking with the other panelists, and then we turned around to go inside and it was packed. Every seat full, the entire windowsill the length of the room had people sitting on it, and people standing in the back. There’s a couple of liveblogs of the panel here and here. Cristina and Aimee were both a bit surprised—usually the issue of reproductive justice is not that big a draw, due to a combination of complacency and probably privilege—but I suppose the recent encroachments on basic rights has shaken people out of complacency. It was great to draw such a crowd, but I did shake with nerves throughout, because I wanted to make sure they got something interesting out of the whole thing.

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By the way, I want to draw your attention to this week’s podcast. I like to think all my podcasts are good, of course, but I really busted my ass on this second major segment (the one after the interview) this week, because the issue at stake pissed me off something fierce. I think I sometimes forget how much of people’s misunderstandings about the realities of reproductive justice go back to piss-poor local media reporting, but boy I got a big, fat reminder when looking for information on Virginia’s legislature pulling all funding from Planned Parenthood. A local station in Charlottesville, VA had a report on the whole controversy that was lies and bullshit from top to bottom, from misleading hints that this is about abortion (it’s about depriving low income women of contraception and cancer screening, mostly) to representing a crisis pregnancy center as a place you can get health services (you can’t). I take it apart in the podcast, which you can read in transcript, though of course it makes a lot more sense if you listen to the whole thing.

Starting at 5PM EST (now, that is) today, I’ll be hosting a book salon at Firedoglake on This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Dr. Susan Wicklund. It was a great book, very inspiring, and so very highly recommended. I’m going to be in the comments there answering questions about the book, abortion, and reproductive rights, and lucky for all of us, so is the author Dr. Wicklund. I’m really excited about this opportunity, and hope that the Pandagonian crew can hop on over and join the conversation. Especially since, you know, it’s one that often attracts some contentious, mean-spirited assholes.

This is a classic video about the ongoing sex toy battles in my fine home state of Texas.

Well, I celebrated the new-found legality of female masturbation in the state of Texas. One should never underestimate the lengths to which wingnuts will go to control female sexuality. The Texas AG Greg Abbott, who apparently has nothing better to do than to separate women from their dildos, has asked the 5th Circuit Court to rehear the sex toy case.

I’m trying to imagine the mindset of a man who doesn’t realize that when you try to take dildos away from women, basically everyone with a brain and/or a sense of humor is going to assume it’s because you’re afraid you can’t handle the competition.

But I am routinely assured by commenters here, at other feminist blogs, and at RH Reality Check that the opposition is not in this because they are misogynists that fear female sexuality or control freaks who can’t stand the idea of someone else having fun. No, they are in this to save the unborn babies. Opposition to the birth control pill and emergency contraception is about making sure that no microscopic babies that look remarkably more like formless balls of cells rather than infants get accidentally flushed by hormones. Nothing whatsoever to do with female sexuality, no siree. It’s all babies.

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If you haven’t read Cristina Page’s devastating article about how un-moderate John McCain is on reproductive justice issues, despite his reputation, you should. Seriously, it’s bizarre how the social conservatives are throwing temper tantrums about McCain, because he’s so very much on their side. Check out this interview, for instance:

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception - I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Q: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”

Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

He won’t admit that condoms work. Straight talk my ass.

I’m entirely unsure how someone can be considered a “moderate” on an issue where he’s far to the right of 98% of Americans. I say 98%, because that’s the percentage of women who use contraception at some point in their lives, and I’m sure that number extends to men, who by and large participate in the use of barrier or hormonal methods with partners male and female.

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Via Feministing, I have to admit this article from Reason by Ronald Bailey about the bullshit threat of a “demographic winter” and why childlessness is just fucking great cracked me up. Say what you will about Reason, but they are consistent about their libertarian values in a way that most conservatives who claim to be libertarian aren’t. As I’ve noted in the past, a lot of libertarian utopian fantasizing requires a belief that women will have communal values to hold society together while every man is out for himself, but at Reason, they go even further and allow a feminist libertarianism to thrive. Hilarity ensues, because it turns out that this ideology circumvents guilt-tripping women into setting aside their own life goals to make more patriots for the nation.

There are many reasons social and economic that people (read: women, for the purposes of the anti-choice doom-sayers) don’t want children, or at least many children. They’re expensive, they’re time constraints, and our fast-paced economy doesn’t have time for the slower lives required to raise children properly. All this is true, but even if you managed to fix those problems, you can still expect people, especially educated women, to just opt out.

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I have to respond to Kevin Drum’s gotcha reply to my criticisms of Amy Sullivan. First, Kevin’s gotcha:

In the rest of the interview, she basically suggests that about 60% of the evangelical community is politically conservative and won’t ever vote for a Democrat. But the other 40% will, and those 40% are worth trying to appeal to. And one way to appeal to them is to acknowledge their moral qualms about abortion even if you don’t happen to share them yourself. Like this guy:

I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There’s the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it’s potential life. I think people recognize that there’s a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.

I don’t think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I’ve arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don’t think they make it lightly.

That’s Barack Obama, likely the next Democratic candidate for the presidency. All he’s doing is acknowledging the moral dimension of abortion, while remaining solidly in favor of abortion choice, reducing unwanted pregnancies, and encouraging responsible sexual behavior.

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Holy mother of dog. It only takes 76,000 registered Colorado voters to sign up to get this on the ballot.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Monday endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

The former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister also supports a human-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Huckabee spoke favorably about the Colorado ballot initiative, sponsored by 20-year-old Kristi Burton and her Colorado for Equal Rights group, during his Friday visit to Colorado Springs. On Monday, Huckabee lent official support to the measure.

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement. “With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value,” Huckabee said. “Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Burton’s initiative, if approved by voters in November, would extend state constitutional protections to every fertilized egg, guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law.

* For instance, will a post-coitus woman be able to drive in a HOV lane because she may be carrying a fertilized egg?
* Will the highway patrol need to carry pregnancy testing kits to confirm the ability for them to use HOV lanes on the spot?
* Can airlines charge a woman for two seats since the fertilized egg is a person?
* Can an impregnated woman be punished for poor eating habits, or consuming alcohol or artificial sweeteners?
* Is the boyfriend/husband an accomplice to a crime if he drives her to the abortion clinic?
* Can a woman claim her fetus as a tax deduction?
* For couples who fertilize multiple eggs for in vitro, are they guilty of murder if the unused eggs are discarded?
* Should a woman register with the state whenever she has unprotected sex (without using any form of birth control), since she might be carrying a fertilized egg?
* What about a woman who skips her birth control pills, has sex, the egg is fertilized and she later resumes her contraception, unknowingly causing an “abortion.” What punishment should she receive?
* And, of course, the current bar people on both sides banter about — consideration of the a medical emergency of the mother or cases of rape and incest — how will the state-based fetus citizen council determine punishment?

We know Pastor Hutch and friends want to have control over every womb, but if we take this thinking to its logical conclusion, the state would need to know when a man spilled his seed in a situation where creating a fetus citizen is a possibility.

I appreciate bean’s concern about the description of a woman’s body (or the parts therein) as a “factory” in a political environment where there’s powerful forces centered around making sure that women really are treated like baby factories that are properly owned and operated by their patriarchally appointed male guardians. It would be really easy to deliberately misread this cartoon in just such a manner. But I’ll admit, when I first saw the cartoon posted, my first thought was, “If all men could come around to thinking about women’s bodies in just this manner, there would be no anti-choice movement in the U.S.” What made the cartoon endearing and funny is how respectful the male figure is towards the female figure, in his own eccentric way. It’s startling, too, because we so rarely hear men openly frame women’s procreative powers as “neat” or using language that shows a full understanding that such powers belong to the women who hold them alone and not to anyone else.

Women’s bodies are pretty damn neat. Part of the reason I find myself drawn to writing so much about reproductive rights is because I think that women’s bodies are neat. It’s ironic that I don’t ever want to have children myself, but my attitude about it is roughly the same as my attitude towards scientists—I am mildly obsessed with admiring the whole shebang without feeling a need to get personally involved. I think biology is neat and human evolution is neat, and the ground zero of where all this begins—in the womb—is neat. I never want to have a baby, but upon learning that one theory about why women menstruate so damn much is that we have to get a jumpstart on building the placenta to nurse the giant brains of human beings, well, I was kind of awed and felt a lot better about dealing with my period, which is mainly experienced by me as a nuisance. But it’s a nuisance that evolved so I could have a giant brain, so that’s pretty fucking cool.

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I suppose this was inevitable, but the growing movement of doctors and pharmacists who decide that you’re not worthy of medical treatment if you’re female and engaging in sexual behavior they disapprove of has reached the point where some doctors are refusing to perform Pap smears on unmarried women. I guess you probably don’t really need one if you’re a virgin, because they’re looking for cervical cancer, which is linked to HPV, which is sexually transmitted. For the people who think unwanted pregnancy and STDs are just the proper punishment for unmarried, sexually active women, it follows that death from cervical cancer should go on the “punishments for sluts” list.

Spot the fallacy of this sentence:

MISHAWAKA, Ind. - A free giveaway of emergency contraception doses at Planned Parenthood health centers in Indiana cities with large college populations has angered an anti-abortion group, whose leader calls it “irresponsible.”

If you don’t see what the problem is, let me rewrite for you to clarify:

MISHAWAKA, Ind. - Planned Parenthood health centers in Indiana cities with large college populations made a large move to reduce the number of abortions performed in their state this year, thereby angering a group that calls itself “anti-abortion”.

They aren’t “anti-abortion” or “pro-life” or anything like that. They’re the forced childbirth lobby, with an emphasis on making sure that unmarried white girls have to give their babies up to couples deemed worthy.

I’ve been meaning to write about this piece (summarized in the video above) about the ways the right has woven together an agenda of racism, specifically anti-Muslim hysteria, anti-immigration hysteria, and anti-feminism to create this myth that there’s an imminent destruction of the white, Christian race due to insufficient sperm worship. In America, we hear cute little stories about how European governments are bribing women to have babies, and we may just keep moving, but as Joyce notes, this is part of a larger racist agenda with genocidal overtones, a particularly troubling thing, considering the widespread belief that Europeans learned a valuable lesson about the possible consequences of demonizing a religious minority in their midst. Maybe it didn’t stick as hard as it should have.

What was a conservative drumbeat about Europe’s death has become mainstream media shorthand, complementing ominous news items about Muslim riots in France; Muslim boycotts in London; Muslim “veil” debates in Denmark; and empty European churches transformed into mosques, with calls to prayer replacing church bells. Evangelical luminary Chuck Colson, head of the vast Prison Fellowship ministry and a close ally of George W. Bush, espoused a conspiracy theory in which he construed an Islamic Council of Europe handbook for Muslims trying to keep the faith abroad as a “soft terrorism” plot for takeover. The late Oriana Fallaci lambasted Europe’s transformation into a Muslim colony, “Eurabia.” And in a recent political match in Switzerland, a campaign poster depicted a flock of white sheep kicking a black sheep out of their pasture, “For Greater Security.” The refrain is that the good-faith multicultural tolerance approach of the Netherlands has been tried and has failed, which is arguably a few polite steps from Mosher’s summary of the problem: that Muslim immigrants are simply “too many and too culturally different from their new countries’ populations to assimilate quickly…. They are contributing to the cultural suicide of these nations as they commit demographic suicide.” Or, as he declared while rallying a gathering of profamily activists last spring in Poland, “I want to see more Poles!”

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No shortcuts on this one

Frances Kissling has come out and endorsed Obama. She attacks the question from the choice angle, even though I can safely say that this election is showing that the pro-choice “single issue” voter just doesn’t exist. How can she, anyway? “Choice” is not a single issue, but just one buried in a web of interrelated issues regarding justice and equality. Nonetheless, the Clinton campaign has played up the non-existent differences on the candidates as a way to woo female voters, and so addressing the issue head-on is good for an Obama supporter. (Not blaming the Clinton campaign for what is misdemeanor deception in an ugly race.) Kissling corrects the record, and points out that the difference between them is basically non-existent. Obama as a senator is probably less likely to write and introduce bills on reproductive justice, I’m sure, but we’re not discussing an election for senator, are we? (In fact, I think it’s worth remembering that Clinton will remain a senator and maintain her capacity to write legislation on the issue if she loses this primary.) But where things go off the rails is when she starts to make the case against Clinton in terms of reproductive justice. It’s this sort of thing that makes me just irate and wishing that the primary season would just be done already.

While Burk and others noted in their letter of support Senator Clinton’s leadership on Medicaid family planning funding, they studiously ignored the question of whether the Senator has led efforts to restore Medicaid funding for abortions. She has not. In fact, in the last years of his presidency it was Bill Clinton who signed into law a permanent Hyde Amendment that prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, a presidential first. We might have expected that the Senator with eight years in the Senate who our colleagues tell us is “the one candidate whose leadership on this issue is unparalleled” and who is considered one of the best across the aisle players might have tried to overturn that Amendment and shown a stronger commitment to poor and low income women than we saw in Senator Clinton.

Another controversial issue that went unmentioned was the question of whether the health care plan of Senator Clinton will give religious organizations the right to refuse to provide services they consider “immoral” — emergency contraception, voluntary sterilization, condoms to prevent HIV, and assisted reproduction come to mind. Will the Clinton plan require abortion coverage? Some of us still remember the battles we had with Senator Clinton when as First Lady and health care reform honcho she was at first unwilling to include abortion as a mandated service. To the end the Clinton health care reform plan included the broadest right of refusal to provide services ever introduced in federal legislation. It would have allowed any provider, religious or not, to refuse to provide any service they deemed immoral and still participate in the plan and reap the benefits of participation. Has Senator Clinton changed her mind on these issues? It is perfectly plausible that she has, but it is the responsibility of reproductive health and women’s rights advocates to secure those commitments now, not simply trust that the woman they know and love will do the right thing if elected.

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Say it, brother. How many ways can you say Charles Barkley is the bomb? A gay-affirming black man in American team sports, calling out the bigotry of the fundies, and bluntly blows them out of the water on live TV. Look at what he said on CNN.

Hey, I live in Arizona. I have got great respect for Senator McCain. Great respect. But I don’t like the way the Republicans are taking this country. Every time I hear the word “conservative,” it makes me sick to my stomach, because they’re really just fake Christians, as I call them. That’s all they are. But I just — I’m going to vote Democratic no matter what.

…BLITZER: All right. One quick point before I let you go. You used the phrase “fake Christians” for conservatives. Explain what you’re talking about.

BARKLEY: Well, I think they — they want to be judge and jury. Like, I’m for gay marriage. It’s none of my business if gay people want to get married. I’m pro-choice. And I think these Christians — first of all, they’re supposed to be — they’re not supposed to judge other people. But they’re the most hypocritical judge of people we have in this country. And it bugs the hell out of me. They act like their Christians. And they’re not forgiving at all.

BLITZER: So you’re going to get a lot of feedback on this one, Charles.

BARKLEY: They can’t do anything to me. I don’t work for them.

BLITZER: You feel comfortable saying all that?

BARKLEY: I feel very comfortable saying I’m pro-choice, and I’m for gay marriage. Very comfortable.

BLITZER: But you can’t lump all these conservatives as being fake. A lot of them obviously — most of them are very, very sincere in their religious beliefs.

BARKLEY: Well, they should read the part about they’re not supposed to judge other people. They forget that one when it doesn’t fit what they want it to say. “

Still legal in South Dakota, much to anti-choice chagrin.

In this week’s podcast, I cover the way that the legislators in South Dakota have been avoiding the discussion of a birth control protection act that would protect the right of the citizens of South Dakota to access and use contraception. Pushing this act is a brilliant move on the part of reproductive rights activists, because it puts anti-choice legislators (the same ones who tried to ban abortion in that state) in a bad situation. You see, they want to ban contraception eventually, which is something you can figure out by reading enough anti-choice literature or Cristina Page’s book How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America, but since that’s not exactly a popular stance, they try to hide those cards until such time as they can shove through contraception bans a bit more easily. (No telling when they expect not to meet massive resistance on that.)

If I may digress for a moment, I’d like to share what might be my all-time favorite anti-choicer whine. It pops up in comments here and at RH Reality Check all the time. It’s always a variation of: “Why do you use the term ‘anti-choice’? They want to be called ‘pro-life’! It’s only civil to act like you think they’re just in this because they want to save lives! Whine, whine, concern troll, whine.” It’s a variation on the standard right wing concern troll routine, which is to essentially claim that it’s uncivil to tell the truth, and that to maintain civility, we have to play along with their favorite lies that they use to hoodwink the public. It’s uncivil to point out that Bible-thumpers care more about control than about any actual teachings of Christ and that their leaders don’t even believe their own bullshit. It’s uncivil to point out that right wingers who supported the war are a bunch of bloodthirsty racists who didn’t actually mind being lied to about WMDs if that’s what it took to get us into the war. And it’s uncivil to point out that the anti-choicers’ behavior and beliefs don’t tailor at all to the “we just love babies!” P.R. strategy, and in fact indicate that they’re a bunch of misogynist nuts who have made it their lives’ work to make women’s lives as unmanageable as possible. Reality has a liberal bias, and it’s also very uncivil.

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Update: Make no mistake over what all of this is about. All of it. Regardless of our lying sacks of shit commenters who pretend they have respectful beliefs they don’t. Women get more power and the mask comes off more.

“In my parents’ day and age, (unmarried teen parents) were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are,” Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. “There was at least a sense of shame.”

Liston continued: “There’s no sense of shame today. Society condones it … I think it’s wrong. They’re sluts. And I don’t mean just the women. I mean the men, too.”

Ha! See what I mean, how they just lie? He doesn’t actually mean the men, too. For one thing, the men were never sent away. So he clearly doesn’t mean that. And anyway, no one uses the term “slut” for men in a way that’s anything but ironic.

For further entertainment, read our comments and our brand-new troll who brags about sniffing his grown daughter’s hymen. She must be so proud of Daddy.

There is a word for this, and that word is “inevitable”.

A revised regulation that directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant has drawn criticism from health experts who say it violates a young woman’s right to privacy and jeopardizes health care.

The policy and accompanying procedures appear to be among the strictest in the region.

Health experts say that students’ willingness to seek care will decline.

“There’s no question this will have a chilling effect on kids coming forward,” said County Health Officer Peter Beilenson. “It’s going to slow down health care.”

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

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Oh man, I just sent off my Wednesday column for RH Reality Check, and then I see that Jen at Feministing is mocking this new attempt from Mississippi to ban abortion:

A pregnant mother possesses certain inherent rights that are natural intrinsic rights which enjoy affirmative protection under the Constitution of the United States, and under the laws or Constitution of the State of Mississippi; that among these rights are the fundamental rights of the pregnant mother to her relationship with her child; her fundamental right to make decisions that insure the well-being of her child; and her interest in her own health and bodily integrity.

My column is about the maddening belief held by anti-choicers and made into law by Carhart v Gonzalez that women are fundamentally stupid and therefore have to be “protected” from abortion. This is further evidence of this. Reading this bill, you get the strong impression that anti-choicers sincerely believe this is how abortion happens: You’re walking down the street one day, minding your own business, happy to be pregnant (or whatever—it’s not like we question whether a car is happy to be driving, nor should we question if the wombs with no discernible wills of their own worth respecting are happy about doing their pregnancy duties), and suddenly a carful of feminists and abortionists kidnap you and force you, against your will (that you don’t really have), to have an abortion.

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Sara Robinson has an interesting question about how RU-486 fits into the right wing propaganda about women who have abortions.

The anti-choice movement has always assumed that women are weak vessels, at best lacking moral agency and at worst overwhelmed by pregnancy and easily gulled by manipulative men into making bad choices. Leaving aside what this worldview says about their own psychosexual kinks, it was a galling, insulting, sexist assumption from the get-go. But for the most part, it did keep them from directing the brunt of their punitive rage toward us. (The fastest way to shut up the “abortion is murder!” rant is to say: “Fine. When do we start sending women to the gas chamber for it?” It’s always fun to listen to the necks snap as moral absolutists make that abrupt warp-speed U-turn into moral relativists. “Uh…no…that’s not really what I meant….”)

But in medical abortion, the agent of termination is not surgical instruments in the hands of the doctor in an office, but drugs in the hands of the patient at home. That fact literally puts the event far more directly under women’s control — a shift that may finally force them to fully reckon with the fact that women are ultimately the responsible moral agents in every abortion decision.

She expects that if RU-486 becomes the abortion method of choice, we’re going to see anti-choicers finally face up to the fact that women are not ambulatory wombs whose minds can be safely assumed to be irrelevant in the abortion decision. I’m less sure, honestly. I’m skeptical about how much of the “we don’t want to punish the women since they don’t know what they’re doing” mindset is genuine contempt for women’s moral culpability and how much of it is just a P.R.-mindful shield erected to convince the public that opposition to abortion is not fundamentally based in hatred of women. I’m cynical and tend to think that most of the people who refuse to answer the question “How much time should she do?” are motivated by avoiding a trap set to catch them being misogynist more than they are genuinely convinced that women are moral children who can’t be held accountable for their actions.

Still, I agree with Sara that RU-486 puts anti-choicers in a bad position, since it reduces the credibility of their arguments about how women are mere victims of abortion who were lured into their sinful ways by doctors (who apparently can’t be women), feminists (who are Unwomen), and men who want to use women for sex (because women would never have sex for their own reasons). And they may have no choice but to start stalking and attacking women instead of doctors if they want to continue the tactic of using intimidation to try to prevent abortion.

In particular, we should expect full frontal assaults on our cultural and legal assumptions about medical privacy. They’ll probably never give up on Planned Parenthood as the all-time all-star Personification of Absolute Evil in their perfervid little cosmological drama — conservatives can do without God, but they can’t get through the day without a devil; and they’re loathe to give up on one they’ve become so familiar with. But when abortion vanishes behind a wall of privacy, we can expect to see newly focused attempts to breach the wall of doctor-patient confidentiality, using every means at hand.

They’re already at it, as those who’ve been following the exploits of former Kansas attorney general Phil Kline can tell you. (Kline used his office to harass the state’s abortion doctors, requiring them to give up their case records to state review — a step that would have outed tens of thousands of women who’d had abortions.) This is a preview of what doctors will be in for: escalating attempts to use the law (or simple spying) to discover their treatment choices, open their files, and put their patients’ data on public record. We’ll see increased use of medical oversight and disciplinary boards to harass doctors and compile lists of women who’ve had abortions. To the degree this succeeds, it will set terrible precedents that will jeopardize everybody’s right to the confidentiality of their own medical records.

And, with those lists in hand, they will — for the first time — probably start going directly after women.

Phill Kline’s desire to start creating lists of women who had abortions, probably with the long-term goal of making those women targets for harassment, got his ass bounced out of office. Kansas may be super right wing, but being really right wing is a lot easier if you’re afforded the ability to be a hypocrite. The danger in creating lists of women who had abortions so that the anti-choice community can stalk them instead of stalking just doctors is that it will smoke out prominent anti-choice women who have had abortions. But then again, that’s never been that big a deal for anti-choicers. You just act really sorry and your regret is channeled into evidence that abortion should be banned.

Still, since I think the “women are stupid, not evil” argument won’t be relinquished lightly by anti-choicers, precisely because I think it’s a cynical maneuver adopted to escape the accusations that anti-choicers are basically anti-women. Plus, they’ve managed to ramrod a huge anti-choice decision through the Supreme Court with this argument. Gonzalez v. Carhart, which upheld a federal ban on “partial-birth” abortion, was crafted with the idea that this particular abortion procedure should be banned to protect women from ourselves. You see, the woman who gets a later term abortion so she doesn’t die doesn’t realize that deep down inside, she wants to die to carry out a pregnancy that’s most likely doomed anyway. Going after women directly and creating evidence that anti-choicers do think women are morally culpable would undermine this entire strategy against women’s rights they’ve managed to escalate to a major Supreme Court decision.

But then again, Sara’s 100% right that the core value of the anti-choice movement is controlling women’s sexuality and fertility, and if it comes down to a choice between the politically palatable argument that abortion needs to be banned to protect women from their own stupidity and giving up the attempts to control and terrorize and even just get a look at women who’ve had abortions, they’ll probably pick the latter every time.