Today at Alternet, I have a list of ten realities about abortion that anti-choicers deny, and should be made to answer for if you're unfortunate enough to get into an argument with one. But there's one anti-choice myth I left off the list, because they tend to argue this a little more internally than externally. Externally, they talk about adoption only in terms of making it "easier"---which pro-choicers tend to agree with because who wants to be seen as anti-adoption?---but there's rarely any specifics trotted out. The ugly truth is that adoption is about as easy as it can get for birth mothers. If you have a healthy white infant you're giving away, you can get people to take it. What anti-choicers are alluding to with this is their assumption that the number of healthy white infants available for adoption plummeted in the 70s because of legalized abortion. When they say "easier", I think they generally mean "easier for those that would strong-arm pregnant women into the adoption system".
The truth of why the number of healthy white infants on the adoption market plummeted is far more complex than "women just started having abortions instead". I mean, I'm sure that's part of it; the existence of legal abortion especially allows pregnant teenagers to go to their parents, when in the past, the illegality of it often drove women from seeking that kind of support system. But what really laid waste to the supply of healthy white infants was the winding down of the coercive adoption system, where pregnant teenagers and young women were channeled into maternity homes, where they were treated like criminals in a halfway house and where doctors and maternity home staff would often go as far as tying laboring girls to the table so that the girls felt they had no choice but to sign away parental rights in order to obtain their freedom. Often, to juice the deal, the staff would snatch the baby away so the mother couldn't even see it, raising the sense that she really has no choice but to give it up.
I think blaming abortion rights for the end of this is mixing up the causal link. I think the end of this system and the beginning of abortion rights are both the results of a common cause, which is that society stopped seeing women who engage in premarital sex as moral criminals, and enthusiasm for legal and extralegal punishments for women who have sex dissipated. We don't really have an idea what the pre- and post-Roe abortion rates look like, but what we do know is that the rate of single motherhood climbed as the adoption rate declined, indicating that women were using their newfound right to be a free, sexually active person in all sorts of ways. Anti-choicers assume that criminalizing abortion will flood the adoption market with healthy white infants again, but I'm skeptical. People in the past thought force was necessary to keep the supply high, and I see no evidence that they were wrong.
Anyway, I bring this up because the Catholic Church has apologized to the 150,000 women who were forced to give up their babies under this extralegal system of punishment for sexually active single women. Some of the statements from the victims are heart-breaking:
Juliette Clough is one of the women who says she was forced to give up her baby at a Catholic-run hospital in Newcastle in 1970.
She was 16 at the time and says she was alone, afraid and desperate.
"My ankles were strapped to the bed, they were in stirrups and I was gassed, I had plenty of gas and they just snatched away the baby," Ms Clough said.
"You weren't allowed to see him or touch him, anything like that, or hold him and it was just like a piece of my soul had died. And it's still dead"
Margaret had a similar experience when her son was taken against her will in 1975, when she was 17.
"Straight away he was taken out of the labour ward. By the records it only took 13 minutes to transfer him from the labour ward to the nursery, so he was gone," she said.
The women claim they were not told about single parent benefits or their rights to revoke consent for adoption.
Clare had two babies forcibly adopted.
She says the infants were like products, procured for couples deemed more suitable to raise them.
"I think it was almost like a machine or, you know I don't like the terminology but, a factory in that it was so well lubricated."
The whole apology was prompted by an ABC investigation and a Senate inquiry, where statements were taken from women who were also drugged and stifled with pillows so they couldn't fight back.
This is a good first step, but I think that as important as this is in Australia, we also need to have a similar airing-out of the past in the U.S., where exactly the same thing went on. People are afraid to talk about this---and about the continuing problem of coercion in international adoptions---because there's always the fear of doing damage to the families who were formed through these methods. And I get that, I really do. But that desire has to be balanced with a commitment to the truth. Additionally, people cannot form fully informed opinions on reproductive rights without this history. Once you realize that anti-choicers have historically not just worked to suppress abortion rights but also to compel non-consenting adoptions, you really see how the movement isn't "pro-life" at all, but just about controlling female sexuality, using childbirth as punishment for fornicators and reducing babies to tokens that are taken from the "undeserving" and handed to those who appear to be following the rules by being straight and married.
Look, folks: there isn't going to be a male birth control pill. Some version of this article comes out every six months, and people swear up and down there's interest and the drug companies are going to clue into that any day now, and then it dies down and we're never going to get any closer to it. I used to be one of those people who, with naive stars in my eyes, somehow believed that I knew better than the consumer research folks at drug companies who crunch the numbers and say there's no way on earth that a male contraceptive would make enough money to justify the R&D spending. Now I've seen 8 million variations of this story and have been unable to delude myself any longer. The evidence that men will use the pill in large enough numbers to justify spending money on it just isn't there. But the evidence that they won't use it is pretty damning.
To be clear, I'm not saying men are irresponsible monsters. I'm saying that people are generally unmotivated to step up unless they have to. (Here's a good article that really lays out why people don't do stuff they know they should do until it's really pressing itself upon them.) Men don't use contraception because women are already on it. It's the same principle in play as toilet-cleaning. I'm sure many men in heterosexual relationships imagine themselves to be the kind of people who would totally clean a toilet. But since the toilet miraculously is cleaned before they can get to it, their noble intentions are rarely tested in the real world. For men to go on the pill in large numbers, large numbers of women would have to collectively start refusing to use contraception, and that's about as likely to happen as the pay gap closing up tomorrow.
It's technically possible that drug companies are, for no good reason, sitting on a profitable gold mine and are just unwilling to rake in the dough that they'd get from putting out a male birth control pill. I find that unlikely, especially with all the media pressure on them to develop such a pill. I think the more likely story is that drug companies have done some consumer research and decided, quite rightly, that there's no money in it.
We out in the world can kind of guess at what their research says. To determine interest in a pill, it's not enough to ask men if they'd use it. People have a tendency to overestimate their nobility to pollsters. (For instance, Americans claim to attend church far more than they actually do.) You have to actually measure real world willingness to take on that responsibility. One way to do this is to look at forms of birth control men do have, and look and see how much responsibility men take towards using these.
One good place to look is rates of sterilization. Vasectomies are safer, less invasive, and quicker to heal from than tubal ligations, but the rate of female sterilization in the U.S. is twice the rate of vasectomy. (Actually, according to the CDC, women get sterilized at three times the rate of men.) If men, on average, were invested in taking responsibility for contraception, we should see those numbers basically reversed, since tubal ligations are more dangerous. In addition, sterilization is a form of birth control that's most commonly chosen by people in long-term relationships who've had all their children, i.e. people with the maximum amount of commitment to their partners. In the group of people we're talking about, the woman has likely been using contraception, has had a couple of pregnancies, and now they're deciding together to go for sterilization. This would be the time that men are most likely to feel like taking one for the team, and yet they do so at less than half the rate of women.
When it comes to other male-controlled methods, the numbers are also not compelling to suggest widespread male interest in taking responsibility for birth control. The two most popular forms of birth control are the pill and female sterilization; vasectomies don't even rate as popular enough to get their own pie slice, but are bundled into "all other forms". Female sterilization and the pill combined are three and a half times more popular than condoms, even though condoms have added protection against STDs. And that's not even the entire story on condoms. I couldn't find any research on who in sexual situations is making the decision to use a condom, but it's clear that condom companies have some internal research that shows women are more likely than men to insist on it. Condoms are framed as being women's business, just like all other forms of contraception---most drugstores stock them next to the tampons, i.e. the aisle where men are not expected to go. Condom advertising is increasingly addressing itself to women's desire to use condoms vs. men's desire not to use condoms. Trojan's heavily covered "Evolve" campaign, for instance, was based on this premise, and I'm guessing they had internal research to back it up. PSAs are working that premise heavily, too.
I read Tracy Clark-Flory's interesting examination of the question of whether or not men will use a birth control pill, and the thing that struck me is that the evidence that there's interest is really, really thin. Basically, the claim is that the pill could work for men who are worried about knocking someone up that they really don't want to get pregnant, such as the mythical man-trapping girlfriend or the mistress that you don't want your wife to find out about or the one-night stand whose contraception use is iffy.
In other words, all the examples are of men who already won't use condoms.
I'm sorry, but if I'm a drug company looking for an investment opportunity, I'm not going to bank millions of dollars on men who can't be bothered to go to the drugstore and buy a box of condoms being willing to go to a doctor, get a prescription, and use a pill every day to prevent a health condition in someone else.
Which isn't to say that I think men as a rule are irresponsible. Most men are responsible. They are aware that their partner is using contraception, and they basically figure she's got a handle on it. That's my point. From a drug company's perspective, the only potential market for this drug are men who are probably too irresponsible to use it and a very small percentage of men who have partners who have exhausted all other potential forms of birth control, and that number is tiny. There is some demand, sure, but not enough to justify the R&D from a profit-driven perspective.
The problem is that contraception is simply viewed as a woman thing in our culture, for reasons that are obvious (they're the ones who get pregnant) and reasons that are kind of sexist (women tend to be given responsibility for the less glamorous work in our society, and making sure that the sexual experience is free and fun and feels unencumbered is right up there with the other support staff kind of tasks that women dominate).
I don't say that lightly; there are many dumbasses in the world. But this clip really puts O'Reilly over the top. He makes, in quick order, three mind-boggling claims:
1) That the Institute of Medicine recommended that the HHS use tax dollars to pay for every woman's birth control.
2) That free birth control won't reduce unwanted pregnancy rates, because the reason women get pregnant is they're "blasted" and don't use birth control.
3) The third claim is implicit, and it's that the birth control that's under discussion---he specifically mentions the pill---requires you to remember to use it while you're having the kind of wild, drunken sex O'Reilly has failed to invite into his life with loofah references. If he can't get any, ladies, neither can you!
Anyway, all of these claims are manifestly stupid. Let's take them one at a time.
1) Actually, the IOM recommended that the HHS classify contraception as preventive medicine. This would not affect taxpayer dollars at all, because what it would do is require insurance companies to cover contraception without a co-pay. I have no idea where this stupid $4 billion figure he's bandying around comes from, but it's irrelevant. The move is universally understood by serious people to be one that will save money in the short and long term, with the hopes that it will lower costs overall to the consumer. The reason is pills, IUDs, etc. are cheap, but childbirth and babies are expensive. Even though it would benefit consumers and insurance companies over the long run to cover prevention completely, the reason it's not done is insurance companies gamble that some other company will have you when you get diabetes/have an unwanted pregnancy/have a stroke. So the government will just regulate it, and that takes that problem away. But the takeaway is this: he's lying about the government paying for it, and that it will cost money. It will actually save money.
2) This is basically a moral claim. O'Reilly is framing unwanted pregnancy as a woman's just punishment for being a dirty, drunken slut. He doesn't, however, explain why he thinks it's such a great idea to have women he considers irresponsible, slutty drunks put in charge of raising the next generation. This is typical anti-choice thinking---putting punishing "dirty girls" above all other concerns, including the well-being of children.
Anyway, there's no reason to believe that his claim has any basis in reality. O'Reilly may only get laid on New Year's Eve after some heavy drinking, but most Americans have sex on average of a little over twice a week. His implication that we're a nation of mostly celibate people who get trashed and then give into temptation doesn't fit the realities.
3) But even if this were true, it wouldn't matter. O'Reilly clearly doesn't understand how the birth control pill works. His statement only makes sense if you assume that the pill works by a woman taking it right before or during sex to prevent conception, which is why being drunk might make you forget it. But in reality, that's not how the pill works at all, as roughly everyone in the world over 10 years old that isn't Bill O'Reilly understands. You just take it during the day and it covers you for having sex roughly whenever, as long as you're up on your pills. If you haven't been taking your pills and you take one right before sex, it doesn't offer any protection.
O'Reilly's lies about the IOM recommendations and about how only drunk sluts get pregnant are toxic. But beyond all that, I want to emphasize this: Bill O'Reilly is 61 years old. He has been on this planet for 61 years, and he knows so little about female biology and sexuality he literally thinks you have to use the birth control pill during sex for it to work. O'Reilly has both a wife and a daughter, and yet he's so ignorant about female biology, I bet you could tell him that women get their periods out of their urethras and he'd probably believe you. But despite knowing less about female biology than your average 6th grader, O'Reilly feels entitled to rail on and on about abortion, birth control, reproductive rights, women's sexuality, and health care. This is in part due to our toxic culture that treats white men like authorities, even when they're so stupid you have a strong feeling they need their wives to tie their shoes for them in the morning.
As I noted during the Elevatorgate debacle, I had just recently written an article about the link between the atheist movement and broader social justice movements, and how that link could be explicated and strengthened. It turned out to be ironic, because it came out right as this controversy was causing a number of atheists to expose how low their opinion of women really is, and at least how unwilling they are to support feminists even if they quietly believe in feminist goals. That's too bad, because the two worldviews, as I noted, are firmly intertwined and the alliance could be of great help all around.
Take, for instance, elections. I'm uncomfortable comparing the levels of oppression atheists face with the levels of oppression other groups face---look, I don't get my opinion cavalierly dismissed or harassed on the street because I don't believe in god, but I do get both of those on a regular basis for being female---but it's definitely true that extreme amounts of fear and hatred towards atheism in the country does result in forms of oppression. One that movement atheists like to dwell on is the prejudice against electing atheists to office. The best way to combat that prejudice like that is to take it on directly. Start supporting atheist candidates, and if you do, they'll start having a better chance at winning office and that prejudice, which is based as much on fear and ignorance as anything else, will fade.
Now here's where I'm going to tell you that atheists would be wise to actually pay attention to feminists. Because---and let's be clear, many movement atheists really do get this---feminists and atheists face a common enemy, the religious right that wants to shove anti-woman theocracy down our throats. If feminists are able to pound these misogynist fuckwits out of office, atheists will find that the political support for the theocratic agenda will decline. Take, for instance, the case of Heath Shuler.
Feminists hate Heath Shuler, who is a first class misogynist and a member of the religious right who happens to be a Blue Dog Democrat instead of a Republican. Sarah Jaffe explains why he's such a fuckwit:
Feminists are angry with Shuler for his position on abortion and his role in co-sponsoring bills that would defund Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations, that would further restrict abortion access, narrow the rape exception that allows women seeking abortions to access federal funds, and allow hospitals to turn away women who need emergency abortion services. Shuler supported H.R. 3, for example, the controversial bill that once included a clause that would limit abortions paid for with government funds to victims of “forcible rape.”
He's also opposed to gay marriage and laws that forbid discriminating against gays in employment. All this makes sense when you realize that Shuler is a member of the religious right. He's a member of The Family, the theocratic organization that works, somewhat in secrecy (which has eroded due to the brave work of journalist Jeff Sharlet), to push their imperialist form of fundamentalist Christianity into the government. They also backed the organizations in Uganda that promote the "kill the gays" bill. As a religious right Democrat, Shuler is basically working to undermine the Democratic party as a reliable source of support for women's rights, civil rights, and religious liberty. He has to go.
Luckily, Shuler is being primaried by an atheist feminist, Cecil Bothwell, who has gained some attention for being an openly atheist (he prefers the term "non-theist", but whatever) city councilman in North Carolina. Bothwell has been facing some horrible attacks for his atheism. If atheists really want to step up and stop oppression against atheists, they need to throw their full support behind Bothwell to fight attacks like these:
During his Asheville City Council campaign in 2009, two direct mailings were sent around warning voters of his non-belief, and after his election opponents tried to prevent him from being sworn in. The U.S. Constitution, of course, forbids religious tests for office, so the former green builder, journalist, and author (of a political biography of preacher Billy Graham) was able to take his seat.
Don't let the people wringing their hands about expanding the Democratic caucus by any means necessary scare you off this. Shuler is a snake in the grass who spends his time on the Hill trying to undermine Nancy Pelosi, who is, last I checked, the main source of hope this country still has. The seat is probably not going to depend on Bible-thumping and being a moderate Republican posing as a Democrat, anyway, as the district has been severely redistricted. But this is a good time to take a stand and send a message that the Democrats just can't be embracing the religious right or overt misogynists in an ill-advised bid to somehow win over the good ol' boys.
So, folks, let's give Bothwell some support! Let's blog about him as a feminist and an atheist standing up against the religious right in North Carolina. Let's get some donations going. There's no time like the present to start taking a stand against this bullshit.
It's not, by the way, that I oppose finding Democratic candidates with crossover appeal in the South. For instance, I see no reason not to start a campaign to draft Tim McGraw to run against Rand Paul in Kentucky, which would mean exchanging an actual liberal with buckets full of redneck appeal for prissy little Rand "I can't flush my toilet twice wah" Paul. We need to be more strategic about it is all.
Think Progress reports on the redonkulous arguments made by Ohio legislators supporting the ban on abortion that just passed the Ohio house, and while all of the arguments are shockingly stupid (like arguing that fetuses should get the vote, which would just mean pregnant women get to vote twice, which might not work out as well for Republicans as said legislator thinks), I want to highlight the arguments of Robert Mecklenborg, who is at the top of the video.
REP. ROBERT MECKLENBORG: The easiest way is also to look at it in the context of Nazi Germany, where during the 1920s, these were the arguments postulated by the proponents of abortion as the Third Reich was growing in power. Note they will sound very similar to you because they are exactly the same arguments put forth to support the current positions in support of the abortion laws as we have them on the books.
He goes on to argue that we should ban abortion to increase fecundity, because he feels there aren't enough workers, which strikes me as a particularly strained argument during a time of 10% unemployment. But to be clear, as Mecklenborg's support for English only laws demonstrates, he's not wanting an increase in fecundity across the board. He's clearly imagining a forced uptick in the "right" kind of babies.
For what it's worth, Mecklenborg's argument about the Nazis quite literally couldn't be more wrong. The Nazis were not pro-choice, and on the contrary, demonstrated an eagerness to control the uterus and push the "right" kind of women to have more babies that Mecklenborg could really get behind. The Nazis increased the punishments for abortion, discouraged contraception, and bribed couples to have more babies for exactly the same reason that Mecklenborg wants to ban abortion, in order to create more workers and soldiers for the Fatherland. It's simply an objective fact. When it comes to this issue, Mecklenborg is on the side the Nazis fell on and pro-choicers are in opposition to the Nazi point of view.
But wait, there's more! This same Robert Mecklenborg, the one who believes that women's sexual liberation is basically the end of life as we know it, was arrested back in April for drunk driving with a woman half his age in area where the only real businesses are a strip club and a Burger King.
Oh yeah, he had Viagra in his system. Probably because he intended to make more soldiers and workers for the Fatherland.
My only real response to Ross Douthat's column is that we could probably remove the vast majority of rationales for genetic selection through abortion with straightforward efforts to combat sexism, racism, income inequality, and lack of access to healthcare.
So, hop on that shit, women. We'll be over here watching TV while you get that figured out.
I have to admit, I was genuinely surprised that readers of this blog showed up in comments on this post to spread the glib myth that abortion rights aren't actually under real threat in this country. This is a myth that has two major proponents: glib liberal men who use it as a way to insinuate that pro-choice activists are hysterical bitches who need to calm down and let a rational male presence set their priorities, and people who voted for Ralph Nader and don't want to admit that there's any difference between Democrats and Republicans, which requires pretending that the Supreme Court appointments don't matter. Ironically, these two couldn't be more different in many ways, but they share a glibness that I suppose causes the sort of dogpiling-based-on-ignorance that was occurring in that thread.
But in fact, abortion rights in general and Roe v. Wade specifically are in very real danger. I thought I'd do a quick sheet running down the glib attacks on this claim, and why they're wrong.
If the Roberts court was going to overturn Roe, they would have done so already. This one was strongly insisted upon! But I kept asking, until the insister gave up, what court case gave the court this opportunity. The court hasn't actually considered the state right to ban or severely restrict abortion since 1992, with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That decision was a devastating strike against abortion rights in and of itself, because it was decided by a Republican-controlled court, but the presence of Sandra Day O'Connor meant there wasn't a complete overturn of Roe. The court simply hasn't had a chance to overturn Roe. But that's about to change. Realizing the court is actually in their favor, anti-choicers have been busy passing legislation in the states that directly challenges Roe, because while glib liberals don't think it could be overturned, anti-choicers who have held off on overt challenges for two decades strongly disagree. An attempt at an outright ban failed in South Dakota and again in Louisiana, but states are passing laws that declare fertilized eggs "persons" or ban abortions pre-viability on the made-up grounds that a fetus at 20 weeks can feel pain. If just one of these laws goes up to the Supreme Court, it opens up the possibility of a Roe overturn.
The conservatives have five seats on the court if that happens, but one of them is a slightly more moderate conservative, and the only possibility that Roe will be upheld depends on him not being a completely sexist pig. So, where does Justice Kennedy fall on the "sexist pig" continuum? Well, just this week he voted with the conservatives in Wal-Mart v. Dukes. The argument of the majority was that the only possible way that something could be called "gender discrimination" is if there's an overt policy in a company stating that women are inferior to men. Even in the "Mad Men" era, this wasn't how sexists rolled, so basically the court is saying there is no such thing as gender discrimination. And Kennedy agreed with this. Moreover, Kennedy wrote the last decision the court passed on some kind of abortion legislation, when the court upheld a ban. In his decision, he characterized women as walking wombs who are too stupid and fickle to know that their only purpose in life is giving birth, and so they must be forced to do so by a male-dominated government. That doesn't really sound like the opinion of someone who can be counted on to uphold abortion rights. In fact, when given the chance to do so, he dismantled them.
Meh, okay, even if the current court is anti-choice, don't worry. Obama is going to win and his appointees will be pro-choice. Look, I'm not one of those paranoids who think that Obama is secretly a member of the religious right, and I agree that given a chance, he'll appoint pro-choice justices. His two appointees have been pretty liberal, in fact. But this argument depends on being completely ignorant about the make-up of the court and Obama's likelihood chance of replacing an anti-choice court member with a pro-choice one. So, conceding the highly disputable point that Obama is going to win in 2012 (really, it's far from certain, people!), the question is what justices are likely to die or retire between now and 2016.
And the answer is, in two words: the liberals.
The indominatable Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only justice that's really in poor health. She suffers from pancreatic cancer. Two of the conservative judges are getting up in years, but they're both in good health and it's far more likely than not they'll still be serving into their 80---and both turn 80 in 2016. The odds are against Obama making another appointment. Now, obviously someone's health can take a turn for the worse, causing them to pass away or retire, but I just wouldn't bank on it. Especially not when you consider that they have the best health care imaginable. As I noted in comments, the technology that keeps Dick Cheney alive is so advanced that he actually doesn't even have a heartbeat. If you take a random group of three elderly men, sure, it's a safe bet that one of them will suffer from poor health and have to retire in the next four years. But that's not so certain with Supreme Court justices, who have access to fake hearts and the like.
Republicans don't actually want to kill Roe v. Wade. They need it to keep the base going. Ah yes, the Thomas Frank argument. This was more plausible before a) a Republican-controlled federal government arbitrarily banned one abortion procedure, mostly because it was the safest way to perform later term abortions b) Republicans showed how seriously they hate reproductive rights by focusing most of the House's energies into attacking them in 2011 c) Bush's appointment of a bunch of rabid anti-choicers to the bench and d) the explosion in anti-choice legislation on the state level that has dramatically raised the odds that Roe will be reconsidered in the Supreme Court by said anti-choice radicals. Considering that Republicans have basically made abortion illegal for many classes of women, I think it's safe to say they really don't have a problem with banning it. Yes, they like to reserve the right to have one for themselves, but that will still be there for them post-Roe, because while abortion will eventually be illegal in most states, you could always travel to New York or California, if you have the money.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands what motivates the religious right. The assumption underlying this argument is that anti-choicers oppose abortion because they oppose abortion---which is it takes seriously their facetious claims to be "pro-life", even though they don't care much if fetuses die in women who are civilian casualties in our wars or fetuses who die during illegal abortion. Or even fetuses who die during miscarriage. And if you believe their blather about "life", you might think they'll pack up and go home when abortion is banned.
But if you believe, as I do, that the religious right are in fact a bunch of culture warriors for whom abortion has become a symbol of all their resentments about sex and women's liberation, then you have to assume that not only would they not pack up and go home after abortion is banned, but that they would be emboldened to start demanding more, which works out really well for Republican organizers. Imagine Roe is overturned. Will women's hemlines start cascading downwards, will women quit their jobs en masse to become housewives, will teenagers quit fucking, will women who carry to term while single give up their babies for adoption now, will cohabitating couples get married, will half the adult women who are living without a spouse now renege and get married? No. Banning abortion actually does nothing to change any of these things that the religious right hates, because none of these are caused by abortion rights. Hell, women will still be getting abortions. The religious right gets that the fight is only just beginning, and already they're moving on to Phase II: Attack on Contraception. That's what all this Planned Parenthood shit is about. The widespread enthusiasm for attacking Planned Parenthood shows that anti-choicers will switch off from abortion to contraception without missing a beat.
So, in fact, for Republican party organizers, banning abortion is the best possible thing that could happen. It signals to their base that they can get big wins, and emboldens them to give more money and organize harder in order to roll that win up into the next one.
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So there you have it, folks. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Roe is definitely in real danger. If you want to be complacent, the better strategy is to figure it's out of our hands anyway, and to let it go. But I don't think that it really is---the more people who take this seriously on the ground, the more obstacles we can put up between anti-choicers and actually getting a case in front of the Supreme Court. Look at what happened in South Dakota. Voters were able to keep a challenge to Roe from reaching the court by overturning a ban on abortion the legislature passed. And that's all because people weren't complacent.
These are very serious times. Our military is engaged in wars in multiple nations. Our economy is in the tank. Our unemployment rates are staggering. Global warming continues to get worse without much action being taken to slow it down. But one national crisis rises above all others as the number one threat our nation faces.
Young women are having sex with men who aren't elderly GOP legislators. And they aren't getting punished for it. Clearly, you can understand their point of view. Who can worry about issues like the state of the environment or chronic unemployment when there are women who are probably out there right now with sleepy smiles on their faces, having had unauthorized orgasms? Many of them are probably getting up and going to work, rubbing shoulders with other people as if they had a right, spreading their slatternly cooties all over our once-great nation that knew how to keep bitches in their place.
If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the sheer amount of attention and legislation Republicans are giving towards this task of making sure women pay for having sex. Nearly 1,000 anti-choice bills in state legislatures, a state-by-state attempt to defund Planned Parenthood after nearly shutting the federal government down to do it, and of course the radical expansion of federal powers in an attempt to keep women from spending private money on abortions that passed the House yesterday. This is clearly issue #1, neatly disproving the skepticism I often meet from liberal men that conservatives really care that much about rolling back women's rights.
In a way, it's sort of amazing how quickly the anti-choice movement took complete ownership of the Republican party. There used to be a distinction between the two, believe it or not. For one thing, the movement is not just anti-abortion but anti-contraception and generally opposed to any measures that might allow sexually active people to be healthier and happier. They've promoted abstinence-only, held rallies protesting contraception, fought against the HPV vaccine with fallacious claims that threatening young women with cervical cancer is an effective strategy to keep them virgins, and well, let me repeat that: The anti-choice movement has openly promoted the argument that you need to kill women off in order to scare other women into virginity. Conservative groups opposed the HPV vaccine on the grounds that fewer women dying from the results of a common STD was a bad outcome because they like pointing to the corpses in order to scare girls into virginity. They're operating under the assumption that women who have sex forsake their right to live. But not very long ago, these anti-choicers were kept in check by the Republican party, who just kept on about abortion but by and large ignored demands to restrict access to STD prevention and contraception.
Not anymore. These fringe characters now own the Republicans. HR3 had bundled in it the assumption that women who have sex forsake their right to life, because of the amendment that allows anti-choice hospitals to refuse to save a pregnant woman's life if doing so would kill the fetus. The only possible reason they can imagine for keeping a pregnant woman alive is to make sure she has the baby---if you're not going to have a baby, you might as well die, too. When you had sex, any value you had as a human being in your own right evaporated, and your only role now is a baby carrier. That some women back this view of women is kind of amazing, and should be the subject of research into the efficiency with which human beings can compartmentalize.
Not a single Republican voted against HR3, and sadly, sixteen misogynist Democrats joined the chorus of people who are willing to sign off on the idea that a woman who is pregnant has lost her right to life except as a life support system for her fetus. And, of course, the bulk of the GOP is getting behind this idea that we should cut off family planning funds, which is a wet dream for anti-choicers, who've long dreamt of the day that STDs run rampant and unplanned pregnancy is a given, because they feel that then and only then will they be able to scare young women into not fucking. What keeps coming back to me is this post at Think Progress chronicling the Republican party's wholesale embrace of the idea that we should invite this health crisis into our country. A single Indiana state senator---unsurprisingly, a woman---balked at the agenda to increase unplanned pregnancies and STD transmissions by cutting off family planning funding, and she had this to say about the situation:
In an interview with ThinkProgress this afternoon, Becker said that a lot of people share her view but are too intimidated by the political climate to voice their opposition.
My question is how. How did anti-choicers manage to get an entire party's leadership to adopt their worldview, even though I struggle to imagine that even ordinary Republican voters really believe, deep down inside, that contraception is a menace to society and that pregnant women who can't go to term might as well die? What does this intimidation look like? How have anti-choicers gained so much power over Republican politicians that said politicians will do pretty much whatever they ask? And if anti-choicers have this much power, what's next on the chopping block? Right now, legal contraception still isn't being challenged directly, though folks like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee drop their hints. That seems like it's still beyond the pale, but then again, cutting off family planning subsidies was considered beyond the pale not so long ago. At what point does the radical anti-choice agenda start to run against Republicans who are more intimidated by losing their seats than by whatever the fuck it is that anti-choicers have over them?
The House just passed HR3, which was misnamed the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. In reality, the law has nothing to do with taxpayer funding. What it does is revokes the tax credit or deduction for health care for any individual or employer who purchases private insurance that covers abortion. It also has an amendment allowing emergency rooms to turn away women who need life-saving care that could endanger the pregnancy or will require a termination. Here's Nancy Pelosi explaining what's up:
The redefinition of rape to exclude raped teenage girls that was included in the bill and then taken out and then snuck back in has gotten most of the attention. But there are two other aspects of HR3 that are even more frightening. This is a radical piece of legislation, folks.
1) Lots more dead women. The legislators who wrote HR3 really, really like the idea of pregnant women paying for fucking with their lives. The bill attacks the lives of pregnant women in two major ways. First of all, the bill will force all insurance companies in the country to drop abortion coverage. For women getting first trimester abortions of choice, this will be a burden, but since this is more of an attack on women who already have insurance, they're likely to be in a slightly better financial situation than the women who get screwed daily by the Hyde Amendment, and therefore more likely to be able to get the $500 together for an abortion.
Not so for women who are 20 weeks along, develop eclampsia or cancer, and need an abortion or they'll die. That procedure can costs thousands of dollars, well out of the reach of many women who need it. So they'd be screwed.
More than that, you have the amendment to the bill that would allow hospitals to turn away women who need emergency terminations. If you have an ectopic pregnancy, for instance, they would be able to turn you away. Some times women who miscarry don't miscarry all the way, and they need to get D&Cs at the hospital in order not to die of blood poisoning. Hospitals would now be able to turn them away.
2) Drastic expansion of federal powers to control your money. The logic of HR3 is kind of complicated, but basically they're arguing that if you get a tax credit or deduction, all of your money---all of it---is "federal" funds, and the government can limit how you spend it. Right now, they're defining that narrowly to say they'll take your tax credit or deduction if you use your private funds to pay for abortion or for an insurance package that could cover abortion. But there's no reason they have to stop there, as David Waldman explains:
Frankly, I'm not sure why, under this theory, individuals should even be eligible for federal tax deductions, credits, etc. if they make private purchases from such a targeted company. After all, all money being fungible, it could well be said that you're using "federal dollars" that are in your pocket by virtue of any tax deduction you take (whether related to health care or not) when you buy products from such a company, and that those "federal dollars" are going into the coffers of a company that uses them fungibly with the dollars they're using to pay for their health care plan.
So, they are opening a door to denying you the deductions and credits you take if you do things with your own money they don't like. Situations like denying mortgage deductions if you use your home for purposes they don't like, or denying your charity deductions if they don't approve of the charities, or just taking away your standard deduction if you pay union dues, or denying you the right to claim your children if you spend money on educating them on things like the realities of global warming. The door is wide open here.
Check out this video; some of the statements coming out of the mouths of these straight white dudes who are so opposed to women having rights will make your jaw drop.
The fuss over HR3 flared up and died a couple of months ago, and it was mainly focused on the fact that the GOP legislators who wrote it tried to erase the rape exception for federal funding for abortions, narrowing it down to "forcible rape", a move that would define rape in such a way as to eliminate something like 85% of rape cases. Of course, the entire bill itself is atrocious, since it's an attempt to ban any insurance funding whatsoever for abortion, and I suspect their next move will be to make it illegal for women to use any transportation---including roads---subsidized by taxpayers to get to the clinic to have abortions. (I'm only half kidding.)
Well, the vote on HR3 is tomorrow, and while the GOP claimed they were going to take the "forcible rape" language out, lookee here, they found a way to put it back in:
The backdoor reintroduction of the statutory rape change relies on the use of a committee report, a document that congressional committees produce outlining what they intend a piece of legislation to do. If there's ever a court fight about the interpretation of a law—and when it comes to a subject as contentious as abortion rights, there almost always is—judges will look to the committee report as evidence of congressional intent, and use it to decide what the law actually means.
In this case, the committee report for H.R. 3 says that the bill will "not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape." The bill itself doesn't say anything like that, but if a court decides that legislators intended to exclude statutory rape-related abortions from eligibility for Medicaid funding, then that will be the effect.
This is all a little confusing, so let me break it down: They've written an addendum to the bill that clarifies that the one group they will absolutely not be letting have abortion under any circumstances are teenage girls that have been exploited by grown men. Said grown men can still go to jail, but the girls themselves will not be allowed to have their abortions funded, no matter how coercive the sex was.
The GOP really wants teenage girls to have babies. The "if she bleeds, she breeds" defense of this report was in full force:
Why would Republicans try to sneak in this language? A look at the history of H.R. 3 provides some potential answers. Both Richard Doerflinger of the US Council of Catholic Bishops and the NRLC's Johnson, arguably the two most influential anti-abortion lobbyists on Capitol Hill, have offered the same explanation for why the "forcible rape" language was originally introduced: Johnson said it was intended to fend off a "brazen effort," by abortion rights groups to exploit the rape exception in Hyde. Abortion rights groups were, in Johnson's words, planning to "federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers." Doerflinger argued in congressional testimony that the language was "an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager."
In other words, because teenage girls physically can have babies, they should be having babies, otherwise known as the "grass on the field" defense of statutory rape. You or I may look at teenage girls and see young women who have their whole lives ahead of them. We see these girls as people with minds and hearts that should be nurtured and allowed to flourish. We see these girls and see so much potential: the valuable work they may do, the educations they may receive, the choices they may make in adulthood to better make a happy home with the kind of family that works for them, and their future hobbies and intellectual goals.
The GOP looks at teenage girls and sees a bunch of healthy uteruses being shamelessly unused. Think of all the babies you could be having if you started at 12 or 13! My god, the average age American women have their first baby is 25, meaning that a solid 12-15 years they could be making babies is just wasted. But the GOP is working hard to make sure that's not true going forward, both in making it much harder for teenagers to get abortions and in shutting down Planned Parenthood, so that teenagers can't get contraception either. If this trend continues, I imagine the GOP will be demanding that we ban tampon companies from making this "Your First Period" videos that schools use for sex education, and instead require that schools distribute baby blankets along with anti-choice propaganda instead. Perhaps they can roll back Title IX and redirect all the money going to girl's athletics to mandatory classes in diaper-changing and how to pick the best Bible stories for your growing brood's entertainment. Every time you get a period, ladies, remember that you're failing Jesus.
But this conservative loathing for teenage girls is just indicative of the larger principle at stake here, which is an all-out assault on women that is concentrated on the most vulnerable. If you're poor or young, they really have it out for you. If you're both poor and young, they will go out of their way to make sure you're giving birth against your will. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't find even more vulnerabilities they could exploit. Maybe the next bill will be a ban on wheelchair ramps at family planning clinics or something.
So, here's some steps you can take, since the vote is tomorrow. You can go to A Huge Step Back and hit the Take Action! button and follow instructions to write your congressperson. Or, since this will also have to go to the Senate, you can contact your Senator here and let them know that you cannot support politicians who don't support women's rights. Folks are also trying to warm the #dearjohn Twitter feed up again; if you join in, make sure to ping the Twitter account of John Boehner or of your representative.
Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) Paul Waldman explains the problem and some potential solutions here. One issue that keeps coming up is the public's ignorance of what this is actually all about:
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found only 16 percent of respondents saying the ceiling should be raised; a McClatchey/Marist poll pegged the number at 24 percent (see more here). It isn't surprising; after all, asking whether the ceiling should be raised sounds a lot like asking whether we should be borrowing more money, and borrowing more money doesn't sound like a good idea when we keep being told that we're being crushed by debt and that government should "live within its means." At the moment anyway, most Americans have no idea what the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be.
He advocates that Obama take a no-negotiation stance in dealing with this. I want to agree, but I don't think that's enough. If the problem is that the phrase "debt ceiling" is confusing, then Democrats can do something about that. Why don't we just start saying that the vote is on whether or not to default on our loans? Or to cease government spending entirely? There's got to be ways to avoid this whole problem of erroneous comparisons to family finances, though it's worth pointing out that Americans are not above borrowing money to pay for medical bills or to keep from sleeping on the street, which is what the federal government is facing right now.
Anyway, one of my promises if we made $2,000 or more for the Bowl-A-Thon was to record webcam videos answering a question asked of me on Formspring. I got two in rapid succession that totally worked, so I did both. Here they are. I'd be happy to get some feedback on whether or not these were fun for you, and if I should do more like them in the future. There is one tech problem I would like help with, if anyone has tips. The top of each video is all weird-looking and then gets better rapidly. I recorded them through Quicktime and uploaded them through the "Share" function. Is there another way to do this that will prevent that problem? The videos look just fine on Quicktime itself.
Thanks to you guys, we not only met the fund-raising goal for abortion access, but exceeded it: $2,815! You've just helped a lot of women get their lives back. You also got me into a spot where I have a long list of promises to keep! I knocked out two on Sunday at the Bowl-A-Thon. As promised, I bowled in the dress I wore to the WAM! Prom. I wore my jeans under it, just because once you're bowling in a prom dress, you can't do anything else to look more ridiculous.
You donors caused a lot of feminist bowlers to have a merry laugh at me. So thanks all around. I also promised to post my score, so you can laugh at me. On this, I feel a little strange. Just as last year, that promise was predicated on the fact that I choke under pressure at competitive sports, but for some reason, I bowled a better game than I usually do. Maybe it was the dress. But I bowled a 125.
If you missed this particular fundraiser, but still want to donate, there are still others going on! May I suggest Michelle Bruns, who tweets as Clinic Escort? Her page is here, and she's raising money for a fund that serves women living in poverty in Pennsylvania. I want people to donate to her for two reasons: 1) She was gracious enough to be interviewed for Reality Cast, and we had a great discussion about her Tumblr blog The Inevitable Pregobelly and about how media coverage distorts the realities of abortion. 2) If she raises $3,000, she's getting a pro-choice tattoo. That's the best promise I've seen yet in abortion fundraising, and so we should really help her get to her goals. I recommend the word "BARREN" across her stomach in Old English lettering, a la Tupac's "THUG LIFE" tattoo. (Kidding.) She's about $1,200 away, so a number of people donating a small amount can get her there.
Thanks again! I'll try to get the last promise filled tomorrow, which is to answer the next question I get on Formspring in video form, as long as it's not some right wing harassment. I'll have to see if I still have a YouTube channel for this.
Man, lots of stuff about reproductive rights to discuss! I spent the entire weekend in a fury over how the mainstream media kept calling funding for contraception, STD treatment, and other forms of reproductive health care that isn’t abortion “abortion funding”, so I wrote a primer for journalists at RH Reality Check on how to tell if what’s being funded is an abortion or not. I did see one TV report that actually addressed the fact that birth control pills, STD testing, and condoms aren’t abortion. Naturally, it was on “Rachel Maddow”.
Unlike almost everyone else, Rachel Maddow was willing to call bullshit on the anti-choice narrative where any health care going to a sexually active woman whatsoever is “abortion”. She is the only person I saw who linked this recent war to defund contraception to other anti-contraception activism on the right. She’s the only one I’ve seen who gets that when people are fighting a war on contraception, it should be characterized as such.
I’m thinking of starting a Change.org petition to address this, probably to the New York Times, but am still a little stymied about how I’d phrase all this. Suggestions welcome.
Of course, part of the problem that confuses this issue is that liberals generally do think that abortion should be funded, and so we’re stuck between saying that and making it clear that these budget fights are about contraception and STD treatment, not abortion. But abortion funding is simply not on the table at this point in time. Which is why abortion funds exist, to help make up some of the gap, and why we’re doing another fundraiser for abortion access, like we did last year. Yep, it’s bowl-a-thon time, folks, and I’ve started a bowling team and we’re actually going to bowl with everyone else on Sunday at The Gutter in Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Our team is called The Silver Ring Strikers. Abortion funds operate deliberately with very little overhead, so the vast majority of any funds you donate will go directly to women who need abortions in New York. New York Abortion Access Fund is a busy one, because many women who live in areas where anti-choice legislation and anti-choice harassment and terrorism have made access hard come to New York to get abortions. So you’re really helping the neediest when you donate. If you want to join the team and help raise money, you can do so from that page.
But in case that’s not enough, as I did last year, I promise to humiliate myself if we reach fund-raising goals. Our team’s goal this year is $2,500 (though more is always welcome). So here are the various things I will do if we make certain amounts:
*If we reach $1,000, I will post my bowling score, like I did last year, so you can laugh at it. I’ll do this even if we reach other fund-raising goals, so don’t feel like you have to cap it off at $1,000 to get this.
*If we reach $1,500, I will post a poll on whether or not I’ll continue to post Food Saturdays, so people who have strong opinions on my cooking skills, food untasted, pay attention and open your wallets.
*If we reach $2,000, I’ll do a webcam video answering the first question (that’s not of the right wing harassment variety) asked of me on Formspring after we reach that goal.
*If we reach $2,500, I’ll bowl in the dress I wore to the WAM! Prom, and of course, post a picture. To get an idea of how ridiculous this will look, here is a photo of me wearing the dress:
So, please start donating!
Anyone can donate for the cause of making me look stupid/helping fund abortions in the New York area, but if you’re actually in New York, there’s an event tonight you don’t want to miss. It’s called “Ain’t I A Woman”, and it’s at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. It’s a suggested $10 donation, and it’s going to be doors at 6PM. There will be three rapid-fire panels from 7PM to 9PM, and then the rest of the night is schmoozing, drinking, and a DJ playing, so it’s going to be way more fun and relaxed than most panels. The three panels will be discussing the intersection of race and feminism, and I’m moderating the second one, about the reproductive justice movement and the role race and racism plays in reproductive health care access. The panelists will be Lori Adelman and Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, and the other panels will be about pop culture and feminist blogging. Good times, good conversation, so come on out!
Steph Herold, writing at Feministe, put up a post that’s been gnawing on my brain for a few days, and I want to post a couple of points arguing with Steph and a larger point offering an answer to her question. Steph asks why the gay rights movement is ahead of the abortion rights movement, observing that “Glee” had an episode with two dudes kissing and it was considered sweet and romantic, and you’d never see such a positive portrayal of abortion on TV. She is right that positive portrayals of abortion on scripted TV—-at least, as positive as you can get, which is to say portraying it as an acceptable decision that, while no fun for the woman involved, doesn’t cause permanent damage either—-are rare. I can only think of two, one in 1972 on “Maude” and one recently on “Friday Night Lights”. But I would hardly say that the gay rights movement is ahead of the abortion rights movement for that.
To dial this down a little harder, I think Steph is a tad vague on her terms, even saying at one point, “To compare the gay rights movement and the feminist movement is an impossible task,” which I disagree with, since I think few movements in the liberal world have so much overlap. I realize there are liberal feminists and some gay rights activists (mostly male) who don’t see it that way, but overall, I feel that the two movements are functionally fighting for the same goal, an overturn of the patriarchy. It’s natural to ask ourselves why we’re making better ground on this front than that, such as how within feminism you might ask whether anti-rape activism is doing better or worse than pro-choice activism. What I think Steph is talking about is specifically the gay marriage movement versus the abortion rights movement, because her example—-the applauding of a monogamous gay teenage romance—-is indeed part of the larger shift towards accepting same-sex relationships that follow the models we accept for opposite-sex relationships in our society.
On this front, I dispute that gay rights are doing better. When we talk about “rights”, for instance, we are duty-bound to look at one’s actual rights to do something, and not just certain cultural markers like “will they show this on TV?” Bluntly put, abortion rights are much more widespread than gay marriage rights. You can legally get an abortion in all 50 states in the country, even though it’s really hard to nearly impossible in some. You are still allowed to cross state lines to get an abortion in states that are more favorable to the right. With gay marriage, neither is true.
I also want to quarrel a little with Steph, who switches gears from gay marriage to AIDS activism, to laud ACT UP for its 80s and 90s success in overcoming legal and cultural barriers to a proper response to the the AIDS crisis. She is implicitly contrasting ACT UP from that era to some of the more fearful and small-c conservative pro-choice orgs nowadays, but I have to point out that the pro-choice movement also used to be more like ACT UP used to be. ACT UP is comparable to the Redstockings and groups that organized abortion speak-outs, which are like the pride events that Steph longs for. And in both cases, as the demands were actually met to a degree, the radical activism faded away—-the radical pro-choice movement that had ACT UP-style actions faded away after abortion was legalized, and ACT UP hasn’t really been raiding places in a long time, now that HIV is taken seriously as a public health issue. In the gay rights movement, the behemoth orgs face the same criticisms as they do in the pro-choice movement—-being fearful and conservative. For instance, many of the big wigs, from what I understand, are trying to avoid a Supreme Court showdown on gay marriage for fear of losing.
I bring these criticisms up because I don’t think that the problem Steph is talking about isn’t there. She’s right that the gay marriage movement has forward momentum and the abortion rights movement has been losing ground since Roe v. Wade, and lately at an accelerated pace. I just think she wants to lay blame on the activists and the movement where it doesn’t apply, and I understand this urge, because our movement is within our control and if it’s just a matter of fixing that, then we win. But I don’t really think that’s it.
There are a couple of alternate theories. One may just be regression to the mean. When a group makes a big leap forward, there’s often a backlash that sets them back. Two steps forward, one step back is the nature of progressivism. You see this with the anti-racism movement, for sure. Desegregation was a major victory, but then there was a backlash that resulted in white flight, a massive de-funding of anti-poverty programs and an escalation of the prison-industrial complex, and so the dream has definitely been deferred. For all we know, anti-gay organizers are already working on the backlash strategy to find a backdoor to depriving gay people of their rights after they’ve been formally recognized across the land.
Even The Liberals: it’s a nickname I’ve now made up to describe a particular kind of writer/pundit. This is a person whose inadequacies as a thinker and writer prevents him/her from making it in the business as a straight liberal, but who has discovered that pretending to be a liberal while mouthing right wing arguments for right wing media outlets provides steady work and attention. And they don’t care if you’re a hack! In fact, so much the better, because that means you’re drawn to the easy, but well-compensated work of trying to mainstream hard right arguments by pretending that you, Even The Liberal, agrees with them.
ETLs are a breed I usually ignore; their hackery is so obvious that it’s not even fun anymore. But I did pay mind to Kirsten Powers, who mouths right wing arguments while pretending to be a liberal on Fox News most of the time, recently, because she was trying advance really fringe anti-contraception arguments in The Daily Beast recently. In my piece at RH Reality Check, I linked other people refuting her argument, but it was honestly so obvious that Powers was cherry-picking and misrepresenting statistics to argue that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion that I didn’t really think it required much more than being intellectually honest to see what she was up to. Yes, she maintains that she’s pro-contraception, but that’s part of the ETL schtick. In reality, she argued that Planned Parenthood should be defunded because they can’t prove that their services prevent abortion. (Never mind that family planning services are a good in and of themselves, regardless of abortion.) My main argument was that Powers is a privilege-blind twit, whose ready assumption that everyone else in the world shares her ability to pay for contraception, find endless amounts of time to pursue it, etc. is just wrong.
Much to my chagrin, I was reminded that Powers has remarkably thin skin, because she flooded my reply column on Twitter with screeching demands that I “retract” my honest, fact-based assessment of her hackery. Really, she should develop a thicker skin; there’s no reason to think that a single person calling bullshit on her “I’m a liberal, but I agree with radical right wing arguments” act is going to bring an end to the gravy train. There’s just too much demand for faux liberals trying to give fringe right arguments a veneer of moderation for Powers to really worry about that, I’d think. Still, if she’s going to basely accuse me of misrepresenting an article she has already had to retract for factual errors, I feel bound to respond. Not by retraction! Unlike Powers, I’m in the right and not a liar. But I will perform the close reading she demands of her piece to demonstrate that it is not a matter of a liberal coming around to the idea of defunding federally subsidized contraception for millions of women because of the facts. I will instead argue that she is taking fringe right wing arguments, polishing those turds up, and pretending that they’re moderate instead of radical anti-contraception arguments.
Though I will happily grant, and have granted on Twitter and on RH Reality Check, that Powers supports legal contraception. I imagine she and her friends find a lot of use for it! Her article was merely an attack on contraception access for women who don’t share her privileges. She’s a soft anti-contraception person, not a hard line one, though I imagine that she borrowed these hack arguments from hard line anti-choice sources, and hard line anti-choice sources are linking her argument all over, agreeing with the obvious fact that she’s pushing for reduced access to contraception.
Let’s start our close reading from the top of her article:
During the recent debate over whether to cut off government funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization claimed that its contraceptive services prevent a half-million abortions a year. Without their services, the group’s officials insist, more women will get abortions.
I’ll admit I bought the argument—it makes intuitive sense—and initially opposed cutting off funding for precisely that reason.
Then I did a little research.
The “I used to believe X, until I saw the evidence, and then” rhetorical device is about setting the audience up for an argument about why you don’t believe X anymore. In this case, X is the contention that contraception services prevent abortion. Indeed, this is an intuitive argument, as most people take contraception precisely so they don’t get pregnant on accident and require abortion services. It’s so intuitive, in fact, that the only people who argue that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion are anti-choice nuts, who have elaborate conspiracy theories to explain their belief that contraception causes abortion. Part of the process of being an ETL is learning to take these wild-eyed conspiracy theories and put a moderate-sounding spin on them so that they don’t sound like nut-brained screech-a-thons, and that’s what Powers is trying to do here. She took great pains to demand that I pay attention to the rhetorical flourishes that make her seem moderate, but I’m more interested in the fact that she thinks it’s appropriate to try to take truly fringe ideas and make them mainstream.
And in this paragraph, she establishes that she intends to do that by making like she had a sober-minded, open-minded engagement with all the evidence, and was forced to conclude, more in sorrow than glee, that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion, so neener neener defund Planned Parenthood. I contend that someone actually looking at all the evidence would do that. And that someone who has determined to make an argument against widespread access to contraception would instead choose to cherry pick and distort evidence to support an anti-contraception claim.
So which does Powers do? Well, if you guessed “cherry picked and distorted”, give yourself a cookie.
Turns out, a 2009 study by the journal Contraception found, in a 10-year study of women in Spain, that as overall contraceptive use increased from around 49 percent to 80 percent, the elective abortion rate more than doubled. This doesn’t mean that access to contraception causes more abortion—though some believe that—but that it doesn’t necessarily reduce it.
Her plausible deniability line is to claim that she isn’t necessarily saying that contraception causes abortion, but hey, she’s not saying it doesn’t. It’s a mystery, but wow, look at that there correlation! (That she probably grabbed off an overtly anti-contraception source.) A reader would be forgiven for thinking more contraception caused that abortion rate to go up! It’s just such a mystery what else could have happened!
Look, folks: there isn't going to be a male birth control pill. 
As I noted during the 
I have to admit, I was genuinely surprised that readers of this blog 
Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) 
Even The Liberals: it’s a nickname I’ve now made up to describe a particular kind of writer/pundit. This is a person whose inadequacies as a thinker and writer prevents him/her from making it in the business as a straight liberal, but who has discovered that pretending to be a liberal while mouthing right wing arguments for right wing media outlets provides steady work and attention. And they don’t care if you’re a hack! In fact, so much the better, because that means you’re drawn to the easy, but well-compensated work of trying to mainstream hard right arguments by pretending that you, Even The Liberal, agrees with them.