Yesterday was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and while it's good news that you can still get an abortion in all 50 states in this country (sort of), the fact of the matter is that we've lost a lot of ground. Legally, for one thing, but psychologically as well. I examine the problem at RH Reality Check, talking about how people are growing more accustomed to the idea that female sexuality is male property. Depressing stuff, but it's important to realize that this battle is not and has never been just about abortion. It's about women's rights and women's roles, and whether we should be full citizens or be managed and controlled by fathers, husbands, ministers, etc. Which is why I loved the picture that the New York Times chose to illustrate this story about the growing acceptance of anti-contraception views amongst Protestants.

In a single image, we get what anti-choicers believe men have lost, and what they believe stripping reproductive rights will return to them: Woman as pet dog. 

We don't even get the dignity that cats get, in their worldview. No wonder they don't care if Gingrich told his second wife she should just put up with the third one. Your dog doesn't get a vote when you get a new dog.

Some feminists tend to dismiss everything anti-choicers say out of hand, but what I think is interesting is that they're often quite right on the facts of what reproductive rights mean for women, but they're just wrong when it comes to their beliefs. For instance, this passage in the Times piece: 

As Dr. Paris suggests, much of the new birth-control skepticism comes from the suspicion that contraception is allied with more nefarious practices. In the 1970s, abortion became a central issue for evangelicals; now some worry that the kind of woman who controls her fertility is the kind who would abort an unwanted fetus. Antifeminist Christians worry that secular culture both encourages women to take the pill and leads them into the work force.

There's something a little strange about the distancing language the writer, Mark Oppenheimer, uses here. I would say that it's encroaching on the status of "indisputable fact" that contraception makes it easier for women to enter the work force. I would also argue that they're not wrong to believe that that exceedingly rare women who "doesn't believe" in contraception is probably not going to have an abortion when she gets pregnant. The problem is that they extrapolate incorrectly from there, assuming that taking away women's contraception will somehow magically make them feel more passive and accepting of the idea of constant, forced childbirth. The data shows the opposite, that the more hostility there is to reproductive rights, the more abortions there are, because more women are facing unwanted pregnancies. Simply enshrining one set of values into law doesn't magically make the population agree. Anti-feminists know this very well, since they adamantly resist laws that reflect women's equality. The problem here is their woman-as-dog model doesn't allow for understanding that women have minds of their own, and so they tend to think that simply demanding it will get instant, dog-like compliance. You see this a lot with antis who wave off your questions about the inevitable black market that arises when abortion is illegal; they have convinced themselves women only seek abortion because women are dumbly following orders, and they'll change when they're given a different set of instructions.

What Oppenheimer doesn't talk about. but that picture illustrates so well, is what anti-feminists really feel is lost with what they call "contraceptive culture": men's god-given right to have a woman---perhaps several (though in a row, mostly)---who follow them around, worshipping their every move, submitting completely and joyfully. I suspect this fantasy never was a reality, but I suspect a lot of Christian fundamentalists have convinced themselves that giving women the power to say "no" to men is what made us so maddeningly unwilling to play the supplicant. No to sexual overtures, no to marriage, no to demands that we wait on you, and most importantly, no to letting your magical seed plant itself in our bodies whenever it wants. That's why I believe that modern conservative Christians don't worship Jesus so much as Sperm Magic. The last few paragraphs of this piece makes that clear:

It then occurred to me that a few decades ago, when evangelicals and Catholics were further apart on birth control, they were also pretty far apart on questions of salvation — evangelicals were quite clear that Catholics were going to hell.

So I asked Mr. Surratt if Mr. Santorum would have any trouble getting into heaven. His answer confirmed that for today’s conservative Christians, the differences between Protestant and Catholic have gotten narrow indeed.

“That’s a God deal,” the pastor told me. “That’s his deal to judge. I’m glad I don’t have his job.”

When the differences between fundamentalist Protestants and Catholics were about things like the worship of saints and transubstantiation, well, there were real differences there. Now they're coming together to worship their true god---Sperm Magic---in basically the same way---fighting against women's rights---and so there aren't any theological differences to fight over. The chumminess that follows is predictable enough. 

This story is definitely flying around feminist circles. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two investigative reporters for the Boston Globe, have published an excerpt from their new book about Mitt Romney in Vanity Fair. In it, they tell the story of a woman who was in Romney's church and when she was pregnant with her second child---while single---Romney, acting as a bishop, paid her a visit. He then pressured her to give up her baby for adoption, which she most adamantly didn't want to do.

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn't exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. "And then he says, 'Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don't, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,'" Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. "This is not playing around," she said. "This is not like 'You don't get to take Communion.' This is like 'You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.'" Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: "Give up your son or give up your God."

It's a believable story, even though the church denies that they prescribe excommunication for the "sin" of single motherhood. After all, it sounds like he didn't phrase it to her that way, more more as a matter of disobedience. More to the point, I can see Romney, who is an imperious fuckhead, getting rapidly frustrated that this woman didn't immediately give in to his demands, so he could wrap up his church duties and return to his beloved business of cannibalizing other businesses and putting people out of work. Or whatever it was he had to do that day. Either way, I don't imagine he thought much of some woman low on the totem pole talking back to him instead of just doing what she was told. In frustration, bringing up the possibility of excommunication to get his way? Totally plausible.

(It's worth noting at this  point that Jezebel is right that his behavior, if true, is beyond the pale.  But from what I understand, Mormons don't believe in hell, per se, so perhaps this threat isn't quite as dire as when it's made by Catholics using the threat of god's punishment to control women's reproductive choices. It's like only 99.9% evil instead of 100% evil. But any Mormons or former Mormons are free to 'splain in comments.)

What's interesting to me is that the Romney campaign is denying the story. This is interesting to me, because it suggests that even out-of-touch Mitt Romney realizes that pressuring a woman to put a baby up for adoption has become politically toxic. This is an interesting and positive development, if that is in fact his concern. 

For as long as I remember, the anti-choice movement has heralded adoption as the "perfect" alternative to abortion, usually accompanies with platitudes like, "Abortion is never the answer." They implied that growing a baby for 9 months, giving birth, and then simply giving the baby to a "deserving" couple and walking away like it never happened was really not much harder than getting an abortion, and anyone who disputed that was just being selfish. The argument demonstrates the fundamental refusal of anti-choicers to see women---all women, even sexually active ones (aka, most women)---as full human beings. The value of women's labor, and the suffering that women reported was a common side effect of giving a baby away? Waved off, because they quite literally don't see it as mattering. Women are basically breeding animals in their view, and just like you don't ask your breeding dog if she wants pups when it's time to bring the stud around, you certainly do't worry if the women you see as stupid sluts get their hearts broken producing babies for "deserving" couples. You even take umbrage at the idea that women should be compensated for their labor with money.* 

For whatever reason, however, the coldness of this point of view has suddenly become apparent, and anti-choicers are scrambling to seem a little less heartless. I mean, they aren't becoming less heartless---their view is still that women who have sex outside of marriage deserve no better than to be forced to bear children and then to have those children taken away from them---but they are beginning to realize that they should probably at least pretend to support other options besides shotgun marriages and giving the baby up for adoption, if they want to present the false image of caring about women. That's why they occasionally make a big fuss over a single mother like Bristol Palin (while of course mindlessly condemning most single mothers who aren't white, wealthy, and Christian-identified). It's about creating the image that they will take single motherhood as a lesser of two evils, because they know their absolutist view of "get married or give it away" isn't flying with the public as much anymore. This feigned support for women who choose single motherhood over abortion is all smoke and mirrors, of course, since the Christian right by and large still doesn't support any social programs that would make raising a child by yourself easier, but that they feel the need to pretend to support single mothers is an interesting development.

Romney's denial suggests that he gets that. The aggressive attacks on single mothers makes it incredibly clear that the opposition to abortion is not about "life", but about patriarchal power and controlling women's reproductive capacities.That anti-choicers have to tone down the sexist aggression, at least for P.R. reasons, is a victory for feminists. While it's frustrating that they pretend to uphold our belief that women are valuable while pushing legislation to relegate women to second class status, it's interesting that our values are so ascendent that they have no other choice. Which, of course, is all the more reason to keep these older stories of women being coerced and threatened into giving babies up for adoption in the public eye. Antis shouldn't be allowed to hide their point of view on this so very easily.

*Yes, yes, I get that there are women who give babies up and walk away and it's not a big deal for them. But that's surprisingly rare. The evidence for this contention is that after maternity homes, which were basically places where pregnant women and girls were made to believe they had no choice but to give up their babies, were shut down, the number of healthy, adoptable babies on the market plummeted. Meanwhile, there was a concurrent rise in the rate of single motherhood, which indicates that it's not legal abortion that really did the adoption market in, but women keeping their babies. In fact, the difficulties white Christian couples have in finding white, healthy babies to adopt is one of the reasons the anti-choice movement is so extreme: They want to restore the supply side, by force, if necessary. Which it appears to be.

PZ Myers has a really cool blog post up now about a new theory of menstruation put out in a paper by Emera, Romero, and Wagner, who appear to be actual biologists, instead of those psych profs and anthropology profs who get called "evolutionary biologists" every time they wank off in public with unevidenced theories about how we evolved to have 50s-era gender roles. It's one of those things I want to flag for feminists particularly, because I think really understanding the scientific discourse around human female biology can go a long way to chilling some of the uglier debates that go on about "nature" and things like reproduction, menstruation, etc. Basically, the problem for biologists regarding human menstruation is that it's surprisingly uncommon for mammals to have monthly menstruation. Not all mammals---as PZ says, other primates, bats, and elephant shrews menstruate---but by and large, most mammals only build up a uterine lining after an embryo implants and begins the pregnancy cycle. On paper, this seems like the smarter move, survival-wise. It uses fewer resources and avoid the health problems that can accompany menstruation if you're not lucky enough to live in a hygienic environment. (Or, as PZ puts it, "filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea.") I'll add that it's particularly confusing for it to happen in humans, who are social animals who tend to be private about our body functions. How much so changes across cultures, sure, but overall, we're private animals. Finding ways to conceal menstruation in order to participate in public life has been a hassle for women throughout history, and unfortunately for many, the answer today is still "avoid leaving the house until it's over". So, the question is why: why would we evolve a unique-ish trait that is a physical and social burden to an extent that it also impacts our ability to survive and optimally reproduce? There's a lot of theories, but this new one is pretty interesting:

The answer that Emera suggests is entirely evolutionary, and involves maternal-fetal conflict. The mother and fetus have an adversarial relationship: mom’s best interest is to survive pregnancy to bear children again, and so her body tries to conserve resources for the long haul. The fetus, on the other hand, benefits from wresting as much from mom as it can, sometimes to the mother’s detriment. The fetus, for instance, manipulates the mother’s hormones to weaken the insulin response, so less sugar is taken up by mom’s cells, making more available for the fetus.

Within the mammals, there is variation in how deeply the fetus sinks its placental teeth into the uterus. Some species are epithelochorial; the connection is entirely superficial. Others are endotheliochorial, in which the placenta pierces the uterine epithelium. And others, the most invasive, are hemochorial, and actually breach maternal blood vessels. Humans are hemochorial. All of the mammalian species that menstruate are also hemochorial.

That’s a hint. Menstruation is a consequence of self-defense. Females build up that thickened uterine lining to protect and insulate themselves from the greedy embryo and its selfish placenta. In species with especially invasive embryos, it’s too late to wait for the moment of implantation — instead, they build up the wall pre-emptively, before and in case of fertilization. Then, if fertilization doesn’t occur, the universal process of responding to declining progesterone levels by sloughing off the lining occurs.

Bonus! Another process that goes on is that the lining of the uterus is also a sensor for fetal quality, detecting chromosomal abnormalities and allowing them to be spontaneously aborted early. There is some evidence for this: women vary in their degree of decidualization, and women with reduced decidualization have been found to become pregnant more often, but also exhibit pregnancy failure more often. So having a prepared uterus not only helps to fend off overly-aggressive fetuses, it allows mom a greater ability to be selective in which fetuses she carries to term.

I don't know that I can make it even more clear that PZ, who is a gifted science educator. What I want to talk about is how critical theories like this, and understanding the science of human reproduction, are to really understanding why our social/political debates over female reproductive systems are completely bonkers. That's because those debates are often built on the debate over what's "natural". Obviously, the best answer to anyone who says that women can't or shouldn't do X (have an abortion, use contraception, use the pill for suppressing a period) because of nature should be dismissed out of hand as using the naturalistic fallacy. But when it comes to ladies and our leaky bodies (though, of course, men's are just as leaky---leaky is the sort of natural state of bodies), a lot of people insist stridently that the naturalistic fallacy should be put on hold. Here's the thing that understanding the science should really help you realize, however: Nature doesn't have a single, unchangeable "intent" for women and our bodies, nor are women's wills automatically in conflict with nature.  I bracketed out some contentious areas for some thoughts on what PZ explains means for various debates on women's reproductive capacities and what's "natural".

1) Abortion. This one is a no-brainer. Anti-choicers claim abortion is unnatural, but as PZ's writing explains, it's actually perfectly natural. Women's bodies go through a lot of unconscious processes to determine if now is a good time to have a baby. Biologically speaking, the idealized reproductive strategy for a woman is to have babies when she's in the best possible state to raise them. The unconscious body does some of this work, but what makes human beings awesome is that we have these large brains that can supplement our natural processes and make them more efficient. "I'm not ready to have a baby" is an equally valid message coming from the brain as from inside the uterus. Unless, of course, you believe that women are inherently inferior creatures who should be constrained from self-care and family care in order to satisfy the desires of mostly strangers who have psychological issues around sex. To which I say, you have an entirely different argument to prove then. 

2) Contraception. Anti-choicers like to portray menstruation as the product of some inherent female tendency to nurture at all costs. In fact, PZ caught David Barton before making facetious arguments about how all animals but humans will sacrifice the health and lives of mothers for the young, which is not only false but obviously false. (Death of mothers tends to equal death of young from lack of care.) The image that anti-choicers paint of the monthly uterine build-up is that it's like a baby nest that you're making, and efforts to keep "babies" from making their homes there are somehow unnatural. The reality is far more complex. It's not that uterine lining isn't about nurture, but it's about so much more. It seems it's also likely about protecting a woman's body from the parasitic (biologists' word, not mine!) qualities of the embryo and fetus. It's also about sorting the good from the bad. But most importantly, it's a system that's got wastefulness built into it. That women menstruate so much means that saying no to babies a lot more than saying yes is a built-in part of the system. Contraception, alongside abortion, is simply a logical extension of the pre-existing system. 

3) Contraception, part two. Unfortunately, many feminists run with the naturalistic fallacy to bash hormonal contraception, saying that you shouldn't take it because it's not "natural". Again, neither are cars or clothes or condoms, for that matter, but for some reason, this argument has its hooks in many. A lot of people find it weird to stop the process of ovulating and then having a real period (as opposed to the fake one the pill creates, or suppressing your period altogether with continuous pill use) every month, which they assume must have some value in and of itself. But if you actually look at the science, the notion that we "should" be having a monthly cycle even while not trying to conceive doesn't really compute. Whether or not this particular theory is the truth, the reality is that constant ovulation and menstruation serves no purpose outside of being the best that evolution could come up with to reproduce. Humans have come up with better ways of handling these functions, so why not use them? An honest look at evolution shows that nature doesn't always know best, and some times it creates biological processes that look like what you rigged up as a home repair to avoid having the money to do it right. If evolution could have created a situation where women simply will their uterine lining to start building as they get closer to wanting to conceive, and then and only then ovulated, that would be in women's best biological interests. That technology goes ahead and does that for us is a blessing, it really is. 

Now, if you can't take the pill or don't want to, that's great. Don't. Please. I'm serious. This is not a guilt trip. The point is that there's no reason to make broad arguments about how it's "unnatural" or that there's some great purpose to menstruation that we can't know and so shouldn't suppress it to be safe.*

So, in sum: PZ's post is about one of the many theories to explain why humans menstruate. It may or may not be the best theory, but what it shares in common with all other theories is a baseline understanding that the ovulation-menstruation cycle is, at best, inefficient and often dangerous. It's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly not good. And definitely not good enough to overrule women's express desires to abort any one pregnancy, prevent ovulation, or prevent menstruation.

*The other argument that I hear from feminists on why menstrual suppression is bad is that men benefit from women not bleeding on their dicks when they have sex. Okay, but I figure women also benefit. It's weird to cast men and women's interests as always opposed, when mostly they're in line. You know who really doesn't benefit from bleeding all over the place during sex? Sheets. If you have something against sheets, I suppose you can start from there, but be assured that most people are simply not going to get on the anti-sheets train. Especially women, who do most of the washing of sheets. 

President Obama invoked the specter of 10- and 11-year-olds buying Plan B in order to justify keeping it out of the hands of the 15- and 16-year-olds currently banned from getting it without a prescription, and out of the hands of everyone 17 and older who has a broken condom but doesn't have an open pharmacy nearby. This, even though fewer than 1% of 11-year-olds are sexually active, and since the drug is taken after you have sperm inside you, withholding it can only be a punishment and not a preventive. Even if you believe that minor girls should be punished for sex, mandatory pregnancy strikes me as way too harsh. Anyway, one of the supposed justifications for this sort of thing is that it's not an undue burden on those with a legal right (those ages 17 and older---by the way, men can buy it, too), and that this is strictly about minors. Well, a recent study published in JAMA demonstrates that all this effort to keep this drug out of the hands of junior high school girls who aren't using it anyway (and who can use it safely, and certainly are better off not-pregnant than pregnant) is keeping it out of the hands of women who have a legal right to access this drug over-the-counter:

Female research assistants posing as 17-year-olds called every commercial pharmacy in Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. They found that 23.7 percent of pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods claimed that women could not obtain the morning-after pill under any circumstances regardless of age. This was only true of 14.6 percent of pharmacies in affluent neighborhoods.

Of the low-income pharmacies where the drug was not “hidden,” half gave the wrong age requirements for purchasing it, almost always indicating that callers would have to be older than legally necessary. In more affluent neighborhoods, pharmacies gave the correct age requirements 62.8 percent of the time.

To recap: One in five pharmacies overall basically said you couldn't get the drug from them over-the-counter, even if you were 17 or older. But even the ones who had it didn't necessarily realize that you could sell it to 17-year-olds. I can see people shrugging and saying, "What's the big deal? If a 16-year-old can't get it, then is it a big difference if a 17-year-old can't?" Actually, the answer to that question is yes, it is a big deal. Throughout adolescence, the percentage of teenagers that are sexually active rises rapidly each year of age, meaning you have a lot more 17-year-olds having sex than 16-year-olds. It's a huge gap. Only 13% of 15-year-olds are sexually active, but nearly half of 17-year-olds are. In fact, the average age for having first sexual intercourse in this country is 17, so by not respecting the rights of 17-year-olds, an enormous population of sexually active women are being cheated of their rights. Condoms are the favorite contraception of adolescents, and so Plan B is doubly necessary, because it's basically tailor-made as a back-up method to condoms. Errors in condom use are especially common with people who are just starting out, for the same reason that you make more mistakes the first few times you do anything. Access to EC couldn't be more critical for this group. 

Additionally, the fact that one in five pharmacies simply refused to sell the drug means all women of all ages are seeing their access seriously constrained. Not everyone lives in an area where they have easy access to three or four pharmacies. I suspect that the widespread myth that EC is the same thing as abortion doesn't help things, either. I'd bet some of these drugstores had the drug, but either because the person who answered the phone was anti-choice or because they didn't understand that it's available over-the-counter with an ID, they weren't able to sell it. Simply putting Plan B behind the counter gives it an aura of danger that raises the chances of these things happening. 

Ironically, these kinds of restrictions reward women for stockpiling this drug, which is what the opponents of it don't want, because that insinuates that you're---gasp!---planning to have sex. Just sayin'.

The good news is that the fight isn't over. The Center for Reproductive Rights is reopening their lawsuit against the feds for withholding emergency contraception access for political reasons, and now they're adding Kathleen Sebelius to the lawsuit, with the judge's blessing. What I ask of you guys out there as this goes forward is simple: please, please fight the misinformation about this drug. The main obstacle to getting it on pharmacy shelves is politicians correctly perceiving that the public thinks emergency contraception is an "abortion", which implies danger (even though actual abortion is relatively safe, especially compared to childbirth) and provokes hand-wringing. Talk to the people you know, and express these basic concepts:

1) Emergency contraception is not an abortion. It doesn't even work by killing fertilized eggs. Actual research into the drug demonstrates that the only way it works is suppressing ovulation, full stop. Since it's a single dose of the pill, it doesn't have enough influence on the uterine lining to matter one way or another. 

2) Emergency contraception is safer and easier to use than Tylenol, which is sold over-the-counter without age restrictions. It is a single dose pill that costs $35-$50, making it impossible to "overdose", if that's a concern. If they bring up the "it's a higher dose version of the birth control pill, scary!" argument, repeat, it's a single dose pill. What makes the birth control pill dangerous enough for a prescription is that you use it every day and it changes your body. EC simply can't do that. 

3) There has been no---I repeat no---research that indicates that the availability of emergency contraception encourages sexual activity. 

Rinse, and repeat. 100% of arguments against this pill being sold over-the-counter without age restrictions can be refuted with these talking points. If the conversation about this doesn't change, the policies guiding it probably won't, sadly. 

I have a post up at XX Factor laying out why this is just the stupidest decision possible from Sebelius, both in terms of the adolescents who are being kept from preventing pregnancy and in terms of adults who will continue to be forced to beg for emergency contraception from pharmacists. From every medical, humanitarian, and scientific viewpoint, Sebelius's unprecedented decision to overrule the FDA on this is the wrong decision. I think she knows that. I think Obama knows that, if he had a hand in this. They are not stupid people, and so they can't not know that. 

So why on earth did this happen? Well, it has to be political, doesn't it? I think so, yes. The Obama administration has already caught a lot of flack for classifying contraception as "prevention", and making it free without a co-pay, and so they threw teenage girls and adult women seeking EC out as a sacrificial lamb to "pay" for that. That seems obvious enough to me and apparently to the entire world. But a lot of people seem to think that's a really stupid decision, assuming that the opposition to OTC Plan B is the same as the opposition to covering contraception fully, that is, a bunch of misogynist wingnuts that will  never vote for Obama anyway, and no one else. And really, that was my first inclination, too. But then I started to check out some non-wingnut reactions, and now I'm not so sure anymore. Turns out a lot of people---especially men---who think of themselves as "reasonable" or moderate or even liberal, quickly glommed on to the argument that this ruling was addressing a parent's right to know. They falsely assumed that putting Plan B out of reach of teenagers will force teenagers to talk to their parents, and didn't consider that for many to most teenagers who were already not talking to parents, it will actually cause them to shut up about it and hope that they just don't get pregnant. 

From a teenager's perspective, skipping Plan B and praying you don't get pregnant is the best choice. Here are the possibilities from the perspective of a teenager who is already not communicating about sex with her parents:

Option #1: Tell my parents and get Plan B.* Doing this means a 100% chance of your parents finding out that you're fucking.  That is what is wished to be avoided. The teenager already not communicating with her parents knows that the consequences will be anything from a lecture that won't change her mind about fucking to, worst case scenario, a beating that won't change her mind about fucking. There is no value in this for the teenager. The parent will be upset, and she will be resolved in her decision to fuck. Remember being a teenager? Remember how much your parents disapproval of you growing up and trying new adult behaviors had no impact on your choices? Yeah, that hasn't changed. 

Option #2: Don't tell my parents and take my chances with getting pregnant. This reduces the odds of eventually coming clean to your folks to about 1 in 4, maybe even lower. If you do get pregnant, then you're just in the same boat you were with Option #1, so nothing is lost. But if you don't get pregnant, you never have to deal with it. If you do get pregnant and want an abortion, parents who are going to block that would have blocked Plan B, too, so again, you are in the same position as if you hadn't waited. 

Nothing to lose, and everything to gain, logically speaking, for a teenager who avoids asking for Plan B from a parent. So the "parent excuse" is illogical. Unfortuantely, a lot of people have completely forgotten about what it's like to be a teenager and are so self-absorbed, they can't get past thinking about how they don't want their own daughter to make a decision without asking for permission. And unfortunately, a lot of people in that position are likely Obama voters, so I can see how the administration decided not to cross them. It's still immoral and wrong to make such a political calculation, but in terms of a political calculatioon, it's not wrong. Sadly, many liberals and quite a few moderates believe teenage sexuality is immoral, even though they themselves were sexually active as teenagers. 

So this is who I blame: all of us. Anti-choicers are going to be anti-choicers. They don't want anyone fucking, and they want those who do to pay for it dearly with the loss of their health, their freedom, and even their lives. We can't change that. What we can change is  our reaction to it. And when it comes to teenage sexuality, liberals have unfortunately been unable to offer a strong defense of teenagers' rights and teenagers' desires, allowing anti-choice rhetoric to gain more of a hold than it should have.

The problem comes back to the phrase, "They're going to do it whether we like it or not." 

This is a favorite phrase of liberals defending everything from sex education to condom access for teenagers. It buys into the assumption that teenage sexuality is automatically illicit, and that the ideal would be retaining your virgnity until some non-disclosed point in the future. It treats teenagers having sex with each other as an unavoidable tragedy, like a hurricane. We argue that sex education is a matter of harm reduction, instead of viewing it as a baseline for one of the best parts of life. It's in direct opposition to how we teach driving. We frame driving as an exciting new development that demonstrates that a teenager is getting closer to adulthood. Yes, it's about responsibility, but everyone involved is happy because we know that it's really cool getting to the point where you can start going where you what when you want, and the fun and freedom that affords you. On the contrary, most adults imagine the discovery that an adolescent is sexually active as a tragic event for the family that requires recriminations and possibly even punishment. In this environment, the idea that the government policy should be about forcing this discovery instead of protecting adolescent health makes all too much sense.

Some liberals offer support for this more progressive view of teenage sexuality, pointing out that we all were doing it as teenagers, and it turned out pretty well on the whole. And would have been even better if there hadn't been so much shame and fear. But mostly liberals buy the idea that teenage sexuality should be treated like a form of acting out and misbehaving, and that when you turn 18 or 21 or 25, you should be able to flip a switch that makes it about pleasure and bonding. Until liberals as a group are willing to be outspoken in our support of teenagers' right to grow  into their sexuality at their own pace---and that we did so ourselves, and it was fine---we can expect Democrats to take a punitive approach to teenage sexuality instead of a sex-positive, health-centric view. 

*Even for the minority of kids who take this road, it's still less ideal than letting them buy Plan B OTC, because going to a parent, going to a doctor, and going to the pharmacy takes up a lot of precious time. You want to take Plan B with speed, because it prevents ovulation and if you ovulate before you take it, you're shit out of luck. Speed is of essence.

Going into the polls yesterday, there was strong reason to worry that Misssippi voters would vote to amend their constitution to declare fertilized eggs to be "persons". After all, a slight majority of voters favored the ballot initiative going in. And the people who strongly favorited it, basically white Republicans, are the ones who are sadly more likely to vote, especially in an off-year election. Still, seeing that 11% of voters were undecided gave me reason to hope. On a lot of issues, undecideds can break even, but on reproductive rights, they tend to break pro-choice. By a lot. 

It's not something I've ever seen an extensive study on, but the folk wisdom of pro-choice circles is "pro-life in the streets, pro-choice in the dark", as it were. In other words, there's an intense amount of pressure to identify as "pro-life" in conservative communities, even if you secretly disagree. To be vocally pro-choice is to be marked as a pervert and a feminist, and so it's avoided, to the point where some polling data suggests that half of people who identify as "pro-life" are actually pro-choice, at least to some extent. Certainly enough that they're not willing to see women thrown in jail for having miscarriages. Because of this intense social pressure, I suspect many people who side with pro-choicers on this law or that law won't say so to a pollster over the phone. Not only are you admitting out loud something that can get you marked as a "pervert" in your community, you may be doing so in front of friends, colleagues, or family members who overhear your conversation with the pollster. No wonder so many people say they're "undecided". But when you actually have your ballot in hand and you know that no one will ever find out how you voted, a solid percentage of voters go with common sense (and with sex!) instead of prevailing community pressures. Frankly, the way the poll numbers turned out, it appears many people who said they would vote yes on 26 instead voted no. 

I'm not just talking out of my ass on this, either. This happened before in South Dakota, when they tried to ban abortion both in 2006 and 2008. In 2008, the polling numbers going into election day weren't looking good for pro-choicers: 44-44 with 12% undecided. Again, you have the same problem of better turnout for more anti-choice demographic groups, as well. But when the ballots were finally counted, the abortion ban saw a surprisingly heavy defeat, 55-45. Seems like a combination of all the undecideds breaking pro-choice and more than a few people lying abou their views to pollsters. 

This trend reflects the larger situation with sex in the red states. In Bible Belt areas, the only thing more popular for teenagers than idealizing virginity is losing your virginity. Beyond that, you have the Saturday-night-is-for-drinking, Sunday-for-praying (yeah right) thing going on. I used to hang out at this honky-tonk-ish karaoke place outside of Austin, for instance, where more than a few people would get up and sing sentimental Jesus songs, then get liquored up and have a one night stand. You know, while no doubt fully believing that it's best to "wait for marriage". It's hard to explain, but they don't even seem to feel like there's a disconnect there, or not one that's much worth worrying about. Stringent sexual morality is put in the same bucket of ideals as going to church every Sunday, making your bed every day, and skipping dessert in order to go running: everyone knows that's what you "should" do, but no one is actually doing it. Openly rejected these prudish ideals is considered far more scandalous in many ways than simply not following them. Part of it is I think a lot of people think they'll eventually fall into a sexual relationship that fits within the narrow confines laid out by the religious right, so they're not ready for that big leap of questioning authority on this. It's very similar to people assuming they're going to get organized at some indeterminate date in the future, so they don't have to worry about it now. 

But of course, passing a law that truly could fuck with your basic freedom to live how you actually live, and not how you imagine your more upright and normative self will be living 10 years hence is a different story. Thus the sudden shift to the left in people's ideals when they don't think anyone is looking or judging. 

I'll add that the severity of the restrictions proposed in South Dakota and Mississippi didn't help the anti-choice cause. They do better when they aim for smaller restrictions that voters can convince themselves apply to other people, you know, sluts. That's why they were able to sell the defunding of Planned Parenthood to conservative voters, because it's easy for them to say, "Well, if you can't afford the pill, keep your legs shut." Anything where conservative-learning voters who fall short of fanaticism can feel they're sorting people into "good" and "bad" categories, and only depriving the latter of their rights, they'll support. It's why ultrasound laws pass easily; they invoke stereotypes of extremely stupid women who don't know that pregnancy means you're carrying a fetus. The non-fanatical supporter can imagine that should ever they need an abortion, that tactic won't apply in their case. Either they think they obvious superiority will get them an exception, or their obvious superiority will make it a less miserable thing to endure. Some may even like the idea of having to endure trials to prove you "deserve" the abortion. 

But this law put all women of reproductive age into a criminal class, as I explain at Alternet. Even the unicorns---women who wait until marriage, only have sex with their husbands, have the means and desires to have 5 or 6 children, and attend church twice a week---are eligible for criminal investigation for miscarriages, employment restrictions, and contraception denial. The whole point of the wingnut fascination with with sin and punishment is that there should be an ideal to aspire to, but this law made that impossible. This can't be discounted as a reason this ballot initiative went down in defeat.

Still, the most important factor is the casual hypocrisy of the Bible Belt. Sarah Morice-Brubaker asked this question in the wake of personhood's defeat: 

But sometimes a movement conducts itself in such a way that one wonders whether they truly grasp that most people simply do not agree with them, and are not likely to change their minds. Certainly this is not something that only conservatives (religious or otherwise) do. But those religious conservatives who argue against legal abortion, full stop; and who wish to see access to contraception curtailed… well, one begins to wonder: Do they get what a tiny minority they are?

No, they do not, because they wield so much social power in their communities. When they say things like, "the only way to prevent STDs is for two virgins to marry and stay faithful" or "contraception thwarts God's intentions for human sexuality", they face a chorus of amens from people who then often turn around and demonstrate, with their behavior, that they simply don't agree

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. I wrote about this problem at RH Reality Check, but in the days since it’s only gotten worse. (By the way, Katha Pollitt and I communicated about my linking of her article, and we see eye-to-eye on this---she, as I suspected, was under a column length crunch and couldn’t address every nagging detail. So I want you to say I’m not criticizing her, but simply pointing out that there’s a, let’s call it a “plot hole” in the pro-choice narrative.) The problem is that, in addressing anti-choice narratives around the personhood amendment and in explaining why such a thing can and probably will be used to restrict the birth control pill, feminists are giving air to an anti-choice misinformation campaign to redefine the pill as “abortion”. I strongly suspect that personhood amendments aren’t even really intended to win so much as to give anti-choicers frequent opportunities to claim the pill works by killing fertilized eggs. The long game, I believe, is to get that false belief ingrained in conventional wisdom, and then use it to apply existing abortion restrictions to the birth control pill. I especially suspect that the intention is to make sure that the Hyde and Stupak amendments are expanded to include the bill, meaning that the only way women will be able to get it is through out-of-pocket funding.

I realize that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if you buy the scientific misinformation that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs, that still wouldn’t make taking it an “abortion”, because pregnancy begins at implantation, not conception. The problem with making that point, of course, is that activists, legislators, and the courts aren’t beholden to the medical definition of an abortion. They argue life begins at conception, and so from their point of view, anything that interferes with that is an “abortion”. More importantly, you could call it a “tiddlywinks”, and they wouldn’t care. We aren’t really arguing about terminology here. They’re trying to claim the pill kills fertilized eggs, which are granted greater status in our culture than non-fertilized eggs, and they hope by doing so they can stigmatize the pill enough to start legislating against it. They probably wouldn’t even need to call it an “abortion” if they’re able to get the false story of how the pill works to spread far and wide. Already many abortion restrictions avoid talking about pregnancy and talk instead of “life at conception”; they’re poised to do this. Now they just need to get people to believe something that just has no evidence for it, that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs.

Luckily for them, they have feminists doing that job.

First, the facts. The fact of the matter is that the pill works by preventing ovulation. The original formulation---and I think this is still true for most forms of it, if not all---was to put your hormone levels where they would be post-ovulation. The reason for this is that after you ovulate, your body suppresses another ovulation in order to prevent a second conception. Some medical scientists have theorized that there may be secondary actions in play for the pill that make it work better.  One of these theories, which has no evidence for it that I could find (or that Lindsay Beyerstein could find---she’s been looking, too), is that the thinning of the uterine lining might make it harder for fertilized eggs to  implant.  Because of all sorts of regulations and practices in the pharmaceutical industry, these theories are included in the packaging for pills, in the same way they have to include potential side effects, even if the researchers are 95% sure the side effects weren’t actually caused by the medication. For instance, your pill package probably includes “weight gain” as a potential side effect of the pill. That’s because it was a potential, if basically untested side effect. But extensive research has demonstrated that the pill does not make you gain weight. As weird as it may seem to a layperson, that something is on your info packet when you get a medication doesn’t make it true. That info packet isn’t a scientific document; it’s a CYA maneuver.

Now for the facts.

Fact #1: Many eggs slough off on their own, so even if you manage to fertilize an egg and it dies while you’re on the pill, there’s no reason to think that the pill is the cause. That said, women on the pill don’t ovulate much! If you take it perfectly, probably never. Or even somewhat imperfectly. But even if you have a tendency to skip 4 or 5 days here or there, and you do ovulate, you’re still doing it less than someone who uses nothing at all. So you’re simply killing fewer fertilized eggs than the good Catholic who uses nothing and is constantly pregnant. Odds are high I’ve never had a fertilized egg die on me, but Rick Santorum’s wife has probably killed dozens, if not more.

Fact #2: No evidence that the pill works this way.  Not only that, but it’s been known for awhile that we don’t have any reason to believe that this theory of the pill’s function is true. Writing for RH Reality Check, Cristina Page said:

Prompted, in part, by the growing efforts of anti-abortion groups to define birth control as abortion, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1999 reviewed the available research on "the mechanism of action" of the contraceptive methods that so dismay pro-lifers……

The researchers consider the question and report , "No direct evidence exists showing that implantation is prevented by progestin-only methods" and "The evidence does not support the theory that the usual mechanism of action of IUDs is destruction of fertilized ova in the uterus," say the authors. After reviewing all the research available on the modes of action of all contraceptives in question the authors summarize their report by explaining that "Even though the precise mechanism of action of modern contraceptive is not yet fully known, scientific evidence suggests the main mechanisms of action for each method. Inhibition of ovulation and effects on the cervical mucus are the primary mechanisms of the contraceptive action of hormonal methods. Evidence indicates that the primary mechanism of action of IUDs is the prevention of fertilization."

It’s a widespread belief that emergency contraception works by killing a fertilized egg. Actually, it’s just high dose birth control pills that prevent ovulation. If anything, emergency contraception is less likely to have the uterine lining effect that anti-choicers claim.

It has been demonstrated that LNG-EC acts through an effect on follicular development to delay or inhibit ovulation but has no effect once luteinizing hormone has started to increase. Thereafter, LNG-EC cannot prevent ovulation and it does not prevent fertilization or affect the human fallopian tube. LNG-EC has no effect on endometrial development or function. In an in vitro model, it was demonstrated that LNG did not interfere with blastocyst function or implantation.

In her recent must-read post on this, Lindsay Beyerstein added: 

Over time, birth control pills thin the lining of the uterus. It has been hypothesized that a thinner endometrium is less receptive to fertilized eggs, but this conjecture has never been tested. This seems unlikely, given how easy it is for women to get pregnant by taking the birth control pill sporadically. Missing a couple of pills won't undo the chronic changes in the uterine lining, but skipping pills during the critical window can easily allow an egg to escape. If a thinner endometrium was such a barrier to pregnancy, we'd expect the pill to be even more reliable than it is.

I hope this has convinced you that we don’t need to repeat the claims that the pill kills fertilized eggs. There’s no scientific evidence for that claim, and there is scientific evidence against it. We should insist on sticking to the science instead of being dragged into the anti-choice “what if” game.

But not only have I seen feminists make the understandable mistake of accepting the fertilized egg theory as a third mechanism---the information that this is un-evidenced is very hard to get in a sea of anti-choice misinformation---I’m beginning to see inexcusable examples of feminists suggesting that “killing fertilized eggs” is how the pill works. Which is what anti-choicers want you to believe. A woman confronted Mitt Romney about his support of a personhood amendment, and her misinformation got wide hearing:

I don't know if you want to have some staff look into this, but hormonal forms of birth control work a little differently. They actually prevent implantation, not conception.

I saw this exchange posted everywhere with absolutely no correction of this blatant (if unintended) misinformation. Even Jezebel’s write-up unfortunately implied that killing fertilized eggs is an evidenced mechanism of the pill, and that it happens frequently, which it doesn’t.  They made it worse by making fun of Mitt Romney for not knowing how the pill works. The problem with that is he actually showed a better understanding of it than either the woman asking him a question or the Jezebel writer. If you make fun of someone for being wrong, but they’re actually right, then you’re the one with egg on your face.

I get why feminists are allowing anti-choice misinformation to find home in our mouths. We want to tell people that personhood amendments are intended to ban the pill, because they are! The easiest way to say that is to accept the false premise that the pill kills fertilized eggs. And that will win us a short term victory, but lose us the long term war. Plus, bad science is bad science, and you shouldn’t give air to it.

There is a way to make it clear that the right is using this to ban the pill without giving credence to their misinformation. One way I’ve gone about doing this is to say, “Anti-choicers hope that misinformation about how the pill works can be used to ban it.” Irin Carmon did a great job of parsing the scientific misinformation and the legal issues in her Salon piece on Mississippi personhood.

If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

I would also add that right wingers get all sorts of misinformation into the law all the time, as anyone who follows the creationism wars will tell you. Because the “pill kills” thing is untrue doesn’t make it less of a threat. All you need is a few people with some letters after their name to present themselves falsely as experts to the court, a judge with a right wing agenda, and the law can be kept in place. If you want evidence of how this works, consider that Carhart v. Gonzalez was decided in part on a big, fat lie: that women who have abortions have “post-abortion” syndrome. This isn’t even playing loose with the facts. Anti-choicers just made that shit up, presented it as evidence, and the idea of it was all over Kennedy’s decision.

There’s also the understandable fear of conceding the argument that fertilized eggs are people. No need to do that, either. I think one thing pro-choicers need to highlight as much as the pill thing is fact that these laws will almost surely be used to prosecute miscarriages. If anything, they’re more likely to be used for that at first than to ban the pill, which will be a separate legal battle that will take years to fight. You can start prosecuting miscarriages right away; you can even do so while leaving abortion legal. Prosecuting miscarriages is an especially attractive fight for anti-choicers because you can target the most vulnerable women in our society for that abuse. We know this, because women are already being thrown in jail for stillbirth.  They tend to be poorer women, women of color, and immigrants, exactly the sort of women that don’t get a lot of defenders, especially if they live less than perfect lives. Particularly in Mississippi, I expect that a personhood law would immediately result in miscarriage arrests and investigations. I’m guessing you will quickly see women who go to hospitals for miscarriages grilled about whether they’ve had a drink, worked at a job requiring physical labor, and tested for drug use---and if any of these things are true, out come the cuffs. Sure, there may not be any scientific information linking her miscarriage to these activities, but anti-choicers have never really been that enthusiastic about science in the first place. Additionally, expect it to become illegal for doctors to perform emergency D&Cs on women who are miscarrying, leaving those women to die, and doctors may also be required to let a woman’s fallopian tube burst rather than give her drugs to terminate ectopic pregnancies. 

I'm sure you've seen this story that's been passed around about the supposed "health" editor at xoJane who uses Plan B as her primary form of contraception. (Seriously, how rarely are you getting laid that this even seems like a remotely feasible plan of action?) There was much fail in that piece, including her casual assumption that condoms are only there if you sleep with a subjectively-defined "many people", as if STDs are the result of cumulative stranger-seed instead of exposure to contagious germs. This sort of thing might make you wonder---I know it made  me wonder---if younger people these days have been so poisoned by creeping prudery plus abstinence-only education that behavior like Cat's, which indicates a deep ambivalence about the morality of sexual pleasure, is common. I know it made me long for the days when Salt 'n' Pepa were talking about sex and TLC was flinging condoms around, and the pursuit of female sexual pleasure was taken as a right, instead of treated like some foul thing that requires self-punishment through repeated abortions. Or worse.

Well, I'm here to tell you that it may just be that Cat is an outlier, because the overall trend is towards more condom use, not less. 

As part of its National Survey of Family Growth, the CDC discovered that eight in 10 teen boys ages 15 to 19 reported they had used condoms during their first sexual experience. That's 9 percent more teenagers than the last time the CDC checked in, back in 2002. High school kids are still boning at the same rate they were 11 years ago—a little more than 40 percent for both genders—but they're getting smarter about it. Besides the rise of rubbers and the decline of teen pregnancy, the study also found that 16 percent of teen males "double up"—that is, use a condom in combination with a female partner's hormonal method—up from 10 percent in 2002.

As Nona notes, this shows that fears that better access to contraception will lead to more sex are ungrounded. Of course, the idea that "more sex" is some sort of bad thing to be opposed at all costs is what we in the biz like to call a problematic assumption. More bad sex is a bad thing, sure. But just more sex? If it's good sex, opposing it is like being opposed to sunny days and laughing with puppies. But even if you have a fucked-up way of looking at things and think that people feeling good has to bad, take heart. People don't have more sex because they use more condoms. Generally with young people who are already ready for sex, having it is a matter of people-based opportunity more than any other factor. The main obstacle to the fucking in the streets that conservatives worry so much about is getting people to do it with you. Since there's not a massive surge in people's attraction to each other, there really shouldn't be a surge in the havings of the sex. 

For those of us who actually like people and want them to be happy, this is just straight good news: Teenagers can be teenagers---that is, experiment and muddle their way towards adulthood---with a lower chance of getting sick from it. 

SIGH: that is usually my reaction anymore to seeing yet another dude whip out the "I'm pro-choice but Roe was wrongly decided/decided too soon" argument.  Scott Lemieux is the champion of shooting that one down, so I tend to leave it to him.  But I have to respond to Garrett Epps of The American Prospect ruining what was otherwise an interesting article by arguing that Brown v. the Board of Education was correctly timed and Roe v. Wade was too soon, because the latter had such an appalling backlash.  You hear variations of this argument a lot, and the sole evidence for them is that anti-choicers are such loud-mouthed assholes and they're willing to attack the decision directly, in a way that no one is willing to do with Brown.  But that's extremely limited evidence for the assertion, especially since it focuses more on what people say than what they do.  It's true that people are less likely to openly condemn desegregation than abortion rights, but does that mean the backlash to desegregation (and all it means) was less severe than the backlash to abortion rights (and all they mean)?  I think this deserves a look, from a number of angles. 

Structural differences in the decisions.  If you want to compare Brown and Roe, you should make sure you're comparing apples to apples.  Initially, it may seem that you are: both decisions granted rights to oppressed people that were expected to lead to their betterment and help them obtain political, social, and economic equality. Both had political movements behind them.  That's where the similarities end, however.  The big difference is that Brown addresses what is functionally a structural inequality---they forced schools who had previously closed their doors to non-white students to open them up.  Roe, however, addresses an individual right. An individual now has a right to choose to abort or provide abortion.  Abortion was a criminal matter, and segregation a matter of public accommodation.  This difference structures the backlash to it.  Opponents of Brown realized right away that they could re-establish desegregation by changing the systems so they seemed compliant, but with Roe, that's harder to do. When you're dealing with people making private choices, it's much harder to control without invoking law enforcement. In a sense, they don't have a choice but to oppose Roe directly, because without being able to use law enforcement, they're kind of fucked. They've finally figured out a way to get around Roe, but it really hasn't been easy.  The fact that Brown openly invoked equal protection and Roe didn't also makes Roe easier to criticize without going on the record as being hostile to the abstract principle of equality.

The backlash to Brown has been more severe than the backlash to Roe in many ways. The National Guard wasn't called to let women get abortions.  In fact, what was remarkable about Roe was that it was implemented with relatively little fuss. The violence agaisnt abortion providers didn't start up until the anti-choice movement had really developed into a hardline fundamentalist terrorist breeding camp. They have to work themselves into a frenzy to commit violence.  For civil rights activists, violence was a constant problem from the get-go, and it was more frequent, and it was often less tied to organized hate groups. In fact, it still goes on. Not to downplay the ugliness against abortion providers in the slightest, but it's important to understand that both decisions and the movements around them have resulted in a terrorist response.

In addition,  Roe was implemented without that much of a fuss in rapid order.  Law enforcement immediately stopped throwing abortion providers in jail, and doctors started hanging out a shingle without much concern of running into the authorities. Brown was basically rejected in many communities, however.  (My high school didn't desegregate until more than 20 years after the decision, if I recall correctly.)  And when the authorities forced schools to segregate, local governments moved in rapid response by redrawing district lines, changing tax structures, and implementing policies that basically reinstituted segregation. Private schools shot up in rapid response to take the white kids that were being yanked from school. Busing was basically abandoned.  White flight intensified. The result? American schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 60s.  You know, when people were still openly flouting the decision. And Brown has had huge chunks of it functionally overturned in a way that is just as, if not more severe than the restrictions that have been placed on Roe. 

Meanwhile, while it's been getting harder to get an abortion in this country than it used to be, women who want one are likelier than not to get it.  It's not as good as it should be, but I think abortion rights are still doing better than desegregation of the schools. 

The big picture.  Brown and Roe cannot be assessed in a vacuum. Both were decisions that were made in response to activist lawsuits from people who had a bigger picture in mind. I'd say it was the same picture, in fact.  Anti-racism and feminist activists wanted a world where the group they were advocating for were equal to white men in terms of education, career, personal freedom, personal stability, wealth, and access to those transcedent aspect of human life such as reputation, joy, creative freedom, role models for aspirational purposes, that sort of thing.  You know, equality. Both decisions were seen as major moves in that direction.  Brown addressed education inequalities that fed into economic and social inequalities.  Roe addressed the way that pregnancy and childbirth are used to constrain women's economic and social opportunities. 

Again, I have to look at the situation and think feminists have been allowed to go further in their goals. Women's status relative to men has improved more than black people's status relative to white people's.  It's a complex question, of course---after all, half of black people are also women, and racism is different than sexism, so it's really hard to measure.  One the measure of income, it's clear that race hurts more than gender: black people make 62% of what white people do, while women make 79% of what men do.  I believe this is a sign that desegregation has faced more backlash than reproductive rights.  Much of what made it hard for women in the past to get access to educational and employment opportunities was the assumption that they would get pregnant and be forced to drop out or downsize their careers in order to get married and have babies.  That expectation has been curtailed greatly, especially for average Americans.  Women can time their pregnancies and limit their family size, which gives them a great deal of control in the rest of their lives.  But black Americans continue to be pushed out of educational and employment opportunities that would help make that income number more equitable.  

It's true people are more willing to say grossly sexist things in public than grossly racist things (though the election of Obama has shifted that), but I think a larger look beyond what people say and what they do will indicate that the situation is more complicated than that. 

What does this all mean?  Well, it sure as hell doesn't mean that Brown was wrongly decided. What it does mean is that we can't judge a court decision granting human beings their full rights based on our fears of a backlash. Often, the only way to change the status quo is to force a confrontation, and courts granting rights are a good way to do that. Just quit pissing on Roe. It was a good decision and it came at a time that the country was actually supportive of abortion rights.  The backlash against is shaped by the trajectory of women's gains differing from the tragectory of African-American gains, but reading the tea leaves of specific court decisions isn't really all that illuminating as to why. 

I'm seeing this story linked all over the place, and I want to hop in and offer some skepticism about the NY Times reporting on this.  There's two things that go completely unmentioned in the original piece, and these are two details that I think are critical to understanding the situation.  One, the story implies, I believe falsely, that the average sperm donor has dozens of children created using his sperm.  I doubt that's true, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.  I suspect when sperm banks tell donors that it's a handful of children on average, they're telling the truth.  For most donors, it will just be a few.

That said, there are a handful of donors who do end up having their sperm used to create dozens of children.  The story implies that this is strictly for profit, and that no other motivations could be in play.  But I've read a lot of literature from women who've gone the sperm bank route for child-bearing, and the story I get from these narratives is that the problem is way more complex than that.  A lot of women---especially if they're a little older---struggle to conceive with donor sperm.  They'll pick a guy out of the book, go a couple rounds, find they can't conceive, pick another guy out of the book, same story, rinse and repeat, and eventually the sperm bank will take pity on them and say, "Why don't you use this donor?  He gets everyone pregnant."  

See, not all sperm is created equal, especially when you put it through the storage process that sperm banks use on donor sperm.  Some of it just works better---the sperm is stronger and the sperm count is higher---and it's more effective at impregnating women.  Once banks realize this, they're going to make note of the donors with the most efficient pregnancy rates. Which inclines me to think that the accusations that this is all about profit are missing the point.  A lot of banks could wring more profit out of women by letting them keep picking donors out of the book without giving them any information about the efficacy of the sperm, and that they don't do that suggests that problem is, at bare minimum, more complex than that. No one likes the idea of one guy making 200 kids with his sperm donations, but I suspect the desire to make the customers happy and actually get them pregnant is in play here. 

Setting limits on how many babies can be conceived with one donor would probably go a long way towards preventing these "oh my god, he's got 150 biological offspring!" situations, but what the NY Times story fails to note is that it would do so by dramatically reducing the number of women who successfully get pregnant from sperm banks.  This isn't a cost-free situation, in other words.  It's easy for women whose kids are already born to focus on the only real concern to them, which is the number of kids that are biological half-siblings of theirs, but if they were in the shoes of the women who have failed to conceive with various donors and are being told, "Why not use this guy?  He gets everyone pregnant."  I think their calculations would be very different.  

I don't really have a dog in this fight.  On one hand, the pro-choice side of me wants to make a full-throated argument for women being able to use every tool possible to conceive, if that's what's important to them.  On the flip side, I also tend to think our society puts too much emphasis on the idea that you're an incomplete woman if you don't have children, creating a cultural space where it's basically unacceptable to say that this particular thing isn't going to happen for some people, and it creates situations like this. Of course, we're not going to fix the "baby at any cost" mentality simply by restricting sperm banks, so that's a factor, as well.  I just want to point out that there's a lot of ideologues putting their thumb on the scale of this one---people who object to single mothers and lesbians having children come to mind---and we should be incredibly cautious about calling for regulations without looking at the full picture.  If you determine that substantially reducing the number of single women, women partnered with infertile men, and lesbiansn who are able to fulfill their goal of motherhood is an acceptable price to pay in order to limit the number of biological offspring a man has through a sperm bank, okay. But know that's the price that will likely be paid. 

Update: A victory!  The Daily Beast has switched the picture out to this one:

I've replaced the picture below with the same stock photo that they were using, which was also used by the BBC.  So you can see what caused me to be annoyed.

One of the great fears I have writing about reproductive rights as often as I do for online newspapers and magazines is that one day I'm going to pull up one of my pieces and it will be illustrated with a misleading picture of a hugely pregnant woman.  So far, I've been incredibly lucky on this front.  I write about abortion rights for XX Factor a lot, and I often get to choose my own art, but even when I don't, their editors are smart about picking things like medical imagery or pictures of anti-choice protesters or anything but a picture that implies that women getting abortions had to waddle into the clinic under the weight of their just-about-to-burst bellies.  The Guardian has kicked ass for me as well on this front.  Take, for instance, the art used to illustrate my piece about Rick Perry and his ultrasound law that just got halted by a federal court pending a court date. 

Michelle Goldberg also wrote a piece about Perry and what this case means for his presidential campaign in The Daily Beast.  It's a great piece, and should be read (right after mine!), but whoever chose the art screwed the pooch. 

Ever since Michelle Kinsey Bruns started her awesome Tumblr The Inevitable Preggobelly, which is dedicated to tracking this phenomenon of showing heavily pregnant women to illustrate stories about first trimester abortions, I haven't been able to stop noticing how widespread this problem really is.  With news coverage of the sonogram law, it's gotten really bad, because pretty much all pictures of sonograms in stock art show really big pregnant women.  And the reason, of course, is that sonograms on women in their first trimester are boring.  Which means there's no pictures of the event. There's nothing really to see for the layperson on a first trimester sonogram, and if they're done, it's mostly for the eyes of experts who can make sense of the teeny embryo or fetus onscreen.  We only take pictures of women who are having their babies getting sonograms much later in the pregnancy when there's something of interest to see, because at least those women are having a meaningful experience.  

The problem with showing women that are hugely pregnant to illustrate stories about abortion should be obvious.  That's because it's misleading.  This is how much your average woman getting an abortion is showing when she goes into a clinic:

(Sorry, I wanted more pictures of average-sized women who aren't visibly pregnant where you can see their stomachs, but most of the ones I could find are fat-shaming and inappropriate.)

In other words, the vast majority of women getting abortions aren't showing yet.  And even the ones who are aren't really in the giant-round-belly stage, but more the beginning-to-get-a-gut stage.  Obviously, just showing a random photo of a non-distended stomach won't work either for stories about abortion, since it would mostly be confusing to the audience, though maybe at this point we're so used to seeing bellies used to represent pregnancy that perhaps the audience would get the picture. But, as my experience shows, there's so many more useful ways to deal with the art problem.  That's what's so annoying about this entire issue.  Abortion is a complicated issue!  It involves medical science, leering Republicans, crazy anti-choicers, determined feminists, the court system, you name it. There are pictures of all of these things!  Use those instead. Please, art editors.  Just use your noggins. 

There are two basic reactions from Vatican apologists you get when you write a pointed criticism of the dippy shit that the Catholic Church does: incoherent, bed-shitting rage and unbelievably sexist condescension.  Both reactions are hilarious but disturbing, because they tend to be effective at the ultimate goal, which is silencing critics of the church.  Most people really don't enjoy getting dog-piled and will think harder next time they dare suggest that the god-botherers are assholes.    But it's hard to decide which is a more fucked-up reaction.  On one hand, there's a fear factor in the incoherent rage response.  But the condescension is really over the top in the "silly girls can't be expected to understand stuff, which is why the church expects them to submit and stop asking questions" kind of way. 

Take this amusing head pat I got from Jennifer Fulwiler, who, despite being female, is MRA-level sexist. I think she literally touches on every single condescending stereotype about women: that we're emotional children, that we're easily deceived, that we're incredibly stupid, and above all, that we cannot make decisions on our own, but instead are natural followers who are just doing what we're told.  And that therefore it's a matter of giving women the correct masters, because women, being basically like dogs, don't really have free will or moral agency. 

And no, I'm not exaggerating. Let us examine:

Amanda Marcotte’s article in Slate about World Youth Day is making the rounds this week. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that she was very upset when she wrote it. What was it about the event that got her so flustered?

Sure, lady, tell yourself I was flopped out on my bed, weeping like a child who has been told she has to clean her room before she goes outside. Actually, wait, no.  Actually, what was going on was I read the article about World Youth Day and thought, "Man, the pope is a real choad, isn't he? I can totally make fun of this."  I'm not saying if I was actually laughing at my own jokes while I wrote it, but let's just say it's happened before.  I'm also pretty sure that if I was "flustered", I wouldn't have written a piece that hit so close to home.  All these things seem really obvious from the piece, which has more of a "eat my poo" tone than a "waaaaaah the pope is a meanie" tone, but I'll bet Fulwiler's audience eats this crap up, because it fits their image of women as emotionally unstable children. 

There’s not a clear thesis to the piece, but it seems that the Church’s anti-abortion stance, emphasized when Pope Benedict offered forgiveness to women who have had abortions, is what triggered most of her angst.

Fulwiler can cram as many synonyms as possible in for "bitches be crazy", but it's not actually changing the fact that my tone was not upset, flustered, angsty, or in any way comparable to a teenage girl furiously writing about being rejected by a boy in her diary.  The correct adjectives are "amused" and "mocking".  And I think we all know what the thesis of the piece was---again, relying more on stereotypes of women as childish and not doing our homework properly!---but I'm happy to spell it out:  The pope is a dickbag, and increasing numbers of Catholics are clueing into that.  See, that wasn't so hard!

She then goes on to accurately enough describe the pro-choice view that women should have control over our bodies. But, you know, we've already established that she thinks women are just too damn stupid for choices. So now the fun really begins.  If you read anti-choice stuff, you can probably guess where she goes next.  That's right!  To "contraception is an evil conspiracy to hoodwink ladies, who are really really stupid".

And, like a lot of crazy ideas in our culture, we have contraception to thank for it. Now that there’s widespread access to contraception, our young women are told not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. They’re assured that sex can be safely separated from its life-giving potential, as long as they use artificial birth control. From a secular point of view, it might sound like a nice, pro-woman message.

Only if you think women are full human beings who can make their own decisions, which she most certainly does not. She goes on to point out that contraception some times fails, citiing the Guttmacher (who she erroneously claims is owned by Planned Parenthood---they're actually an independent organization with no connection to Planned Parenthood) statistic that half of women who have abortions were using contraception at the time.  Actually, she misinterprets the data, saying, "were using contraception when they conceived their child."  Actually, the statistic is "Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant."  Of this group, only 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use. She's fudging the numbers to imply that contraception is less effective than it is.

But let's get back to the "women are incredibly stupid" portion of the program!

So, let’s summarize the situation: Women are handed contraception and assured that they need not have a second thought as to whether they’re ready for pregnancy. Then, when their birth control method fails, they’re encouraged to undergo a painful medical procedure performed on the most sensitive part of their bodies.

Because you know what isn't even a remotely painful event in the most sensitive part of your body?  Childbirth.  Man, she not only thinks women are stupid, but that her audience is stupid.  I'm beginning to think she's just projecting a personal problem on everyone in sight.

I love the way she characterizes how contraception and abortions happen.  It's not that women seek these things out!  No, the contraception man comes to your door and hands you your bag of contraception.  Prior to then, it would have never occured you to do something like put a penis in your vagina.  But suddenly, without even thinking about it, you're rolling a condom on a penis and boom! Next thing you know, pregnant.  And then the abortion posse shows up to your house and takes you to the clinic.  You probably didn't even realize that you'd get a baby if you didn't go with them. Because you have no will or mind of your own. 

And so, to Amanda Marcotte and others like her, I would say, as I’ve said before: You’re right to be angry. You are correct in sensing that women’s freedom is being taken away. You’re just wrong to blame the Church. Not only does it not “punish female sexuality,” but it’s one of the few voices in our culture that respects it.

Yeah, they respect it so much that they'll respectfully force a 9-year-old to bear a rapist's child. 

Seriously, she has a strange view of respecting women: treat them like overgrown children, portray them as having no real will of their own, condescendingly tell us we have no understanding of our own lives and relationships, and push for laws that "respect" 78,000 women into their graves a year.  I think I'll stick with the old-fashioned definition of "respect" that involves treating women like grown adults who should have the right to make important decisions about their own lives. 

Also, because I know it's important to Jennifer Fulwiler, here's the thesis of this post: Jennifer Fulwiler is a sex-phobic, misogynist crank who does a poor job concealing her contempt for all women besides herself with condescending head pat tone. And she can eat my poo. 

I recently had occasion---I can imagine you can guess what it is---to think a bit on two separate versions of the Carole King-penned* "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", the original by the Shirelles and the cover by Amy Winehouse.

I like both, of course, but what's interesting to me is the gulf between these performances of the same song.  The Shirelles sing it cleanly and powerfully, but there's not a lot of melodrama to it.  If you aren't paying close attention to the lyrics, you might not even notice how heart-breaking they are.  Winehouse turns in a highly dramatic performance where the heartache is emphasized in every note she sings.  Now part of the reason Winehouse made the choice to sing it that way was that was just her style.  But her perfomance on this is especially heart-breaking, even for her, and I think the reason is that she's trying to take a familiar song and remind the audience of how sad it really is by exaggerating the drama in it.  The original didn't need you to bring the drama to it; it dropped in an era when the context was enough to remind the audience of how fraught the young woman in the song's dilemma is.  In fact, the song struck such a chord with its intended audience of teenagers that it was the first #1 hit for a girl group, coming out as it did in 1961.

1961: pre-pill, pre-legal abortion.  When Winehouse is singing this song, the audience implicitly understands that the worst that can happen to the narrator is a broken heart. She'll cry.  She'll maybe be depressed for awhile.  She'll probably pick herself and love again, though.  But in 1961, the context brought the drama.  Audiences knew that the young narrator is taking a risk that could lead to social ostracization, loss of freedom, or even death.  

It's this that I was thinking about while reading this article by Justin Elliot at Salon about Mitt Romney's relative who died of a septic abortion in 1963, and whose grieving parents asked only that donations to Planned Parenthood be given in the name of the victim of this tragedy, whose name Ann Keenan.  Keenan was one of up to 5,000 women a year who died of botched abortions in the years when abortion was a crime; some of them went to illegal abortionists but mainly they died because they, alone and afraid, desperately tried to take matters into their own hands.  (This is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around; I barely know how big my uterus is, much less how to manipulate it in any way.  I imagine most self-aborters know even less.)  Romney cited the loss of Keenan when he was trying to establish his pro-choice bona fides; he has dropped the issue now that he's trying to establish himself as a supporter of abortion bans.

It's tempting to just horse-race this one---will it hurt Romney to be a flip-flopper (invariably it will)---but I'd like to take a moment to remember that this is what we've overcome as a society, and what anti-choicers want to return us to.  It's not just that they're widely supportive of a regime that makes sex ridiculously dangerous and even deadly for young women, in order to punish them for being, well, human.  That would be enough to condemn them, but it's also that they long for a time when women's lives were pinched and strained by sexual expectations that were too high for the vast majority of women to meet: that you never make mistakes, that your desires are always perfectly in line with what's best for you, that you know exactly what's best for you because you possess the power of prophecy and can easily predict what man is going to be a loving husband for life and which will abandon or abuse you, that you have nothing else to live for but to marry and have children.  And should you be a human being---fallible, unable to predict the future, unlucky, or simply desiring of more than a life lived just for others---they want a world that treats this like a failing that should come complete with the destruction of your life and perhaps even death.

It's trendy now for anti-choicers to pretend that they want this for women for women's own good.  Sandy Rios on Fox News even tried to argue that withholding contraception would be good for young women, because an unwanted baby or two would teach them not to have "multiple" sex partners (remember, that just means "more than one"), and that having multiple sex partners is the worst possible fate for young women.  This is ludicrous from a purely logical standpoint, but it's also incredibly heartless, even as it's framed as somehow being charitable.  I think about this song and I can't help but think that the lack of options experienced by the narrator isn't really doing her any good. A world where she can pick herself up and love again is a better world.  Even more importantly, a world where she can wonder not just if he'll love her tomorrow, but whether or not she'll feel the same is better for women.  Above all other things, what anti-choicers are asking for is a world where women can't contemplate their own desires, and decide as free people whether or not it will be this man at this time---knowing what you want is hard to do when your main focus is on surviving, and in a world without real reproductive choice, women's social and even literal survival often depends on whether or not a man chooses them.  They don't have as much space to decide what they're choosing for themselves. 

I think it's useful to step back from the weeds of having these fights a little and think these things through: the context that made "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" so poignant, the completely unnecessary deaths of young women like Ann Keenan, who sounded like she was a bright spot in the lives of people around her:

"She was so intelligent, beautiful and a friend to everyone," Marilyn Frey, a classmate and friend of Keenan in the 22-member class of 1959 at the all-girls Liggett School, recalled in an email to Salon. In high school, Keenan was active in theater, performing in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and serving for three years on the drama board. She was a scholarship recipient and class president her sophomore year. One of Romney's sisters was quoted in the press in 1994 recalling that Keenan "was a beautiful, talented girl [whom] we all loved."

*The older I get, the more I appreciate the way King was routinely willing to explore the dark recesses of American attitudes towards sex and gender in her lyrics to what were meant to be radio-friendly pop songs.  "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" is by far the most notorious example, by way of being obvious, but there's darkness in "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" and even "Natural Woman" always struck me as songs with dark undertones indicating a deep dissatisfaction with gender norms.  

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of your time fretting because right wingers have grown incredibly bold about bald-faced lying, and so far it seems there's literally nothing that can be done about it.  We have extensive freedom of speech protections, which is a good thing of course, but leaves us with few options to stem the ever-growing tide of lies emanating from a right wing that knows that it can't make an honest argument.  The mainstream media has basically abandoned its mission to correct lies with the truth.  Some publications continue to fact check claims made by pundits, activists, and politicians, but it's just not enough to counter the endless stream of lies and misinformation coming from the right. That's why Fox News hates Media Matters so much---they have a machine-like approach to the lies, just debunking them in real time.  Media Matters can't get 'em all---that's a super-human feat---but they're the only people out there even approaching success with this.

Well, there is one door that is available, but not used especially often: lawsuits.  Part of that is that it's difficult to show damages with some of the lies that right wingers float, but not always.  Some lies are actionable.  Which is why I'm glad someone fought back against the aneurysm-causing lie that was in non-stop rotation during the health care debate, which is that health care reform somehow meant taxpayer-funded abortions.

A judge is allowing former Ohio congressman Steve Driehaus to sue the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List for defamation, because as he sensibly pointed out, they were lying about whether abortion is "taxpayer-funded" under the Affordable Care Act.

The irony is that Driehaus is anti-choice. He did, however, vote for health insurance reform, which meant that SBA decided to run the above billboards against him. Despite the fact that abortion is never paid for by federal funds (except extremely limited cases of rape and incest victims on Medicaid) and the ACA didn't change the status quo, anti-choicers have been obsessed with insisting that it does by focusing on federal subsidies to private plans. In fact, after the fight over Stupak-Pitts and abortion nearly derailed the entire proceedings, pro-choicers were the ones wringing their hands over what Planned Parenthood called "unacceptable provisions on abortion." Those were the ones outlined in an executive order affirming the Hyde Amendment and emphasizing enforcement of existing separation of federal funds and abortion services.

Granted, in a perfect world, the guy who fights back wouldn't actually be a fellow misogynist, but I also suspect a defamation suit will be easier to prove when the victim of this particular lie is himself anti-choice.  It would be weird for a pro-choicer to sue because they were "defamed" by false claims that they did what they actually wished they could.  It'd be like me suing because people were out there spreading rumors that I slept with Jon Hamm.  On one hand, it is false.  On the other hand, the defense attorneys could argue that it was only because of lack of opportunity.

So, it's far from perfect.  I may still, should I meet Driehaus, ask him how he came to be a Democrat when he's such an asshole about women's basic rights.  But the SBA List was flagrantly violating election laws that require some kind of tentacle of truth to touch your claims, and they need to be held accountable for that.  I'll take it.  Anything that might put the fear of consequences into right wingers who believe their god has given them free moral license to lie whenever they damn well please. 

There's been a lot of attention paid, rightly, to the Citizens United decision and the role money plays in politics. I think we should also think long and hard about the impact that all this free-wheeling lying has on our discourse.  I honestly think it's just as toxic a problem as money.  You can spend and spend but if people aren't ready to hear what you're saying, it's hard to get through to them. But stoking paranoia throw shiny-sounding lies is pretty much free, and right wingers never leave that trough for it.  I bet you could clock the lies-per-minute rate on Fox News at around 2-3 per, easily.  A well-placed lie can do an amazing amount of damage, as was demonstrated by the "taxpayer funding for abortion" lie that nearly derailed health care reform.  What's frustrating is the Democrats, knowing that taxpayer funding for abortion is a toxic issue in the current political climate, didn't even consider putting it in, and it didn't matter.  Who cares what you do if you can't get credit for it because the opposition claims you're doing the opposite?  The media basically abandoned its duty to vigorously correct the lie, pulling a lot of that "both sides" crap.  Without a reasonable handle on what is actually true, we can't even begin to have real political discourse in this country.

Obviously, just suing the hell out of all the liars isn't an option for various reasons.  But I would like to see more well-placed lawsuits like this, hopefully causing groups like SBA List to slow their roll when they're thinking of lying again.  Of course, their very name is an act of dishonesty (they pretend Susan B. Anthony shared their view of women as ambulatory baby factories who don't deserve basic rights, which is kind of like saying MLK was pro-segregation), so it's possible they wouldn't know how to tell the truth if they ever vowed to start doing so. 

Sorry for late-ish posting today.  But I've been kind of monitoring the news a lot this morning, I think because I'm still a little anxious about the debt ceiling situation.  Still, I was reassured enough last night that it's not going to fall through that I filed a piece that assumed it's a deal, which you can read here at RH Reality Check. My argument is that abortion caused the debt ceiling.  Okay, that's actually just the hook, but the real argument is that our right wing populist movement was built on sex panic (and race panic), and they have been able to use sex panic to grow their power and numbers until they were nearly able to derail the entire world economy.  The implication is that either we start taking the Fetus People seriously now, or next time they may have even more seats in Congress and no amount of Wall Street pleading will stop them from doing something world-destroying stupid. 

Anyway, the news that the country's not going to come crashing down around our ears but instead is going to continue its slow decline into becoming a banana republic will overwhelm today's actual, for-real good news: the HHS announced that birth control is going to start being free to women with insurance.  When it starts being free to you depends on when your insurance plan begins---it could be as late as 2013 for many women---but still.  Free birth control.  And by birth control, I don't just mean the pill or the ring.  You will also be able to get your tubes tied, an IUD installed, or an implant put in....all for free.  No co-pay for any contraception.  Free pills is a good thing and should reduce unintended pregnancies, but the free long-term birth control methods may be a bigger deal.  A lot of women would prefer to have these kinds of birth control, but the up front costs are just too daunting.  Preliminary research shows that women who have access to free long-acting birth control both are far more likely to use these methods and, unsurprisingly, have fewer abortions. 

So, hard as it is to believe, today is actually going to be somewhere between "not as bad as we feared" and even a good day.