This list is BADASS!  i just had to register to tell you this is definitely my favorite Friday Genius Ten of all time.

Not a twit myself, but GO GO GO GRRL!

It was definitely the sort of thing you need after being demoralized by a bunch of lady haters.

1. He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands by The Isley Brothers
2. It’s Fashion by Girls at Our Best!
3. The Crystal Escalator in the Palace by Bill Nelson
4. Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve by Motorhead
5. Heat by Hieroglyphics
6. Country House by Blur
7. Young Boy Blues by Ben E. King
8. Endless Horizon by Electric Skychurch
9. Critical Mass by Aerosmith
10. Home of the Brave by Mr. Lif

Not sure if this fits or not but it feels appropriate:
“Uprising”—Muse

I’m pro-choice, but it’s been interesting watching both sides get sucked into #livetweetingabortion, because I’m pretty sure Angie Jackson is making it up. If you read through her tweets, she claimed that she was using 3 forms of birth control: an IUD, condoms, and spermicide. I think that’s a pretty obvious lie; no one gets pregnant using a 99 percent effective IUD and a 95% (?) effective condom with spermicide. Also, when she was tweeting about *possibly* being pregnant, her writing sounded as if she knew what the outcome would be, which is the case when people are making up stories and know how it will end. Other parts just don’t add up. Despite her extremely detailed account, she never mentioned how her doctors handled her alleged IUD.  Did they take it out? She also claimed that this pregnancy was life-threatening. (Yes, she said that many times.) She refused to say what the complication was, despite offering all the other details of her abortion. And if this was a life-or-death situation, then why was she on Twitter for days at a time?

Overall, I think she raises a lot of suspicions.

She also got massive attention and national news coverage, which might have been her goal all along.

If one method is 99% effective and the other is 95% effective, wouldn’t you expect both to fail one time out of 2000?

Wait, no, those rates are per year, and they’d have to both fail *at the same time*. Still, figure 50 uses per year, and you get 1/100,000 odds. Pretty unlikely, but if every sexually active woman in the US used both all the time, you’d still expect a few hundred to get pregnant per year. Unless my math is still wrong.

And if this was a life-or-death situation, then why was she on Twitter for days at a time?

I believe she said carrying the pregnancy to term was the life threatening part.

Genius List based on: Venus - Television

1. Silver Rocket - Sonic Youth
2. Damaged Goods - Gang of Four
3. Elevate Me Later - Pavement
4. When You Sleep - My Bloody Valentine
5. Speed of Life - David Bowie
6. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) - Talking Heads
7. The Living End - Jesus and Mary Chain
8. The Black Angel’s Death Song - Velvet Underground
9. That’s When I Reach for my Revolver - Mission of Burma
10. Little Fury Things - Dinosaur jr.

The parents of an ex-boyfriend of mine used three forms of birth control and ended up having him anyway (they liked to refer to him as a “miracle” rather than a “mistake”). The three forms were the pill, a condom, and spermicide. I don’t know whether or not the condom broke, but I think we have to assume that it did.

Most people still consider a condom breakage to be an example of the potential failure of a method of birth control, and they will “count” it when they list what they tried—even though obviously if a condom breaks, it probably shouldn’t be counted, because OBVIOUSLY it’s not going to be protecting you from anything at that point. It’s worth pointing out, though, that a condom can break even if you use it properly. Again, there’s some sort of statistic about how likely a condom is to break, which I don’t happen to know.

From experience, I can tell you that extra-thin condoms are far more likely to break, and also I find that spermicidal ones are likelier to break as well (generally because they make the spermicidal ones extra-thin instead of normal thickness, for some reason—probably because the spermicide is supposed to “protect” you if it breaks, but that certainly didn’t do the trick for Angie or my ex’s parents). I recommend the entirely normal ones, as I have never had any issue with those; the only breakages I’ve had were with extra-thin or spermicidal. The stats on condoms breaking must not be very good, because I’ve had about ten happen in my life (but, like I said, never with normal thickness ones).

In short, it’s entirely possible that Angie Jackson is being honest with us all, and I think we may as well assume that she is.

Even if the odds are 1:100000… it may be unlikely that it will happen to *you*, but even though the lottery is even less likely to be won by you, *someone* is likely to win it eventually.

Ashley Herzog - Ms Jackson goes into more details of her health-related issues in a guest post at the Friendly Atheist - http://friendlyatheist.com/2010/02/22/why-im-getting-an-abortion/

Ashley: I can’t get to her blog or tweets at work, but based on her post at Friendly Atheist, I think you’re way off base. I’m going to address your points in order:

Her IUD had come out, and she hadn’t noticed. My understanding from when I got my own IUD is that this is the most common kind of IUD failure. You often don’t feel it when it happens. I was certainly warned about it—and spent the first six months compulsively checking my strings almost daily to make sure the little bugger was still in there.

It sounds like she and her partner were using condoms as a backup method, but weren’t using them 100% of the time. Which is perfectly understandable (to me, anyway) if they’re a backup to a generally extremely reliable form of BC.

As to her behaving as if she were pregnant before it was confirmed by a test, well, she’d been pregnant before and recognized the symptoms. Again, neither uncommon nor unlikely.

The IUD was already out and gone. There was nothing to remove or deal with other than her pregnancy.

As to her health problems that are incompatible with being pregnant, she is somewhat vague about them, but I think she has a right to be. Just because she’s sharing intimate details with the world about this doesn’t mean she has to share everything. Some of her health issues apparently stem from childhood sexual abuse. Her previous pregnancy sounded like it was really rough.

sangetencre at #9 has it. A condition that’s life-threatening at the end of pregnancy probably isn’t at the beginning. She was dealing with it before it became a big problem. Which is exactly the definition of responsible preventative health care.

Unless her tweets or her blog (which work has blocked) directly contradict her post at FA, I don’t see any reason for you to be suspicious of her story.

I didn’t see the part where she said the IUD had come out. So yes, it is more believable that she got pregnant if that was the case.

You know, at least she busted one anti-choice trope, which is dividing women into two categories: good women who redeem themselves and “choose life” and bad women who have abortions. A lot of women have chosen both. Angie Jackson already has a son, and a disabled one at that (disabled fetuses are more likely to be aborted)

Ashley, since the automatic misogynist response to a woman’s truth-telling is “she’s a liar” and “she is out of line wanting attention/having ambition”, I would check your response and where it’s coming from.  We’ve all got internalized sexism, which is why those tropes work.

The funny thing is that Angie fits the profile of the typical abortion patient to a T.  She’s unmarried (2/3 of patients), is already a mother (60% of patients) and was using contraception when she got pregnant (54% of patients).  She indicated that she was probably only using one method (IUD), and it slipped.  She caught her pregnancy extremely early, which used to be uncommon, but is now the most common story—-61% of abortions are in the first 9 weeks.

If you guys haven’t read about it yet, there is a story about how Nebraska is trying to limit the time women have to get abortions because they believe the fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks.
Here’s the link.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/nebraska-bill-citing-fetal-pain-would-ban-abortions-after-20-weeks/19373318

Ashley, I also have to wonder if your intense desire to disbelieve doesn’t demonstrate a typical American unwillingness to consider how very common abortion is.  1/3 of women will get one at some point.  Far more common—-infinitely more common—-are women who have had one and lie about than vice versa. 

Again, the assumption that women are a naturally deceitful sex is something to ward off.

Not that I’m against skepticism, by any means!  But the claim of having an abortion is so incredibly likely as to be pedestrian.  What makes her stand out is that she is unafraid.  What makes people desire to shame her is that she’s doing something kind of unfeminine.

I posted the comment before someone called my attention to the fact that the IUD slipped. I just found it very hard to believe someone could get pregnant with an IUD while using condoms.

I also didn’t know that when she said the pregnancy was “life threatening,” she actually had complications with her son. So, egg on face.

Also, one of the more interesting things Amanda pointed out on Twitter is that most women wish they had gotten their abortions earlier. Antis get really worked up about late-term abortions (while some pretend to see all “preborns” as equal from the moment of conception, that’s a lie, since they target doctors like Dr. Tiller with so much more intensity). But they do everything they can to obstruct women from getting very early abortions like this one. I live in Ohio, and I read a blog about a woman who realized she was pregnant almost immediately and couldn’t navigate the legal hoop jumps til the 9th week.

No worries!

In a way, this was inevitable.  I’m surprised that an internet chronicling of abortion hasn’t happened before.

There was always the Den of the Biting Beaver’s blogging of trying to find Plan B after a condom failure, not being able to find it, and then having to have an abortion because she needed to support and be alive for her existing three kids. 

She had to pull her blog down because of all the Christian Love sent her way ...

Biting Beaver was from Ohio, too.

Good luck finding Plan B in this state. The one time I needed it, I had to go to FIVE pharmacies before I could find it. Everyone told me they were out of stock. I don’t know if that was true, but I’m sure a lot of women here have had abortions because they couldn’t do anything to prevent it, even if they tried.

The kind of fetus that is aborted after 20 weeks is very often dead or lacking a brain.

A little off the topic, but one of my facebook friends, who is from Canada, recently posted on her Facebook that she was shocked! and appalled! that “partial birth abortion” was legal in Canada, and how this has made her physically ill.

So I posted some facts about this type of abortion and how it is done for a reason other than “sucking the brains out of fetuses is super duper funnies!”  And…. it was like I hadn’t said anything at all.  Her other FB friends continued to post responses like, “I saw a video of a third trimester abortion and it was very disturbing, I almost threw up” and “Isn’t that just terrible” blah blah blah.  I thought of posting “I saw a video of a knee surgery and it grossed me the fuck out, too!  Why is this still legal in every state?” but I wasn’t really in the mood to antagonize a friend.

Open heart surgery or a colonoscopy would be a more effective comparison IMO Denise. Assuming your mood changes and you want to antogonize a friend later.

Well, the comparison to watching a knee surgery has the added benefit of being true   That was really nasty.  They took off the kneecap or whatever and then showed how you could bend the leg the wrong way.  EWWW.

Even if the odds are 1:100000… it may be unlikely that it will happen to *you*, but even though the lottery is even less likely to be won by you, *someone* is likely to win it eventually.

And, presumably, there’s more than 100,000 people on Twitter.

The failure rates for contraceptives sound confusing.  What’s needed is someway to tell (teenagers)

“If you’re a normal woman, having sex twice a week, unprotected, you have X% chance of getting pregnant in a year.  Using a condom, in general, Y%.  Using a condom correctly, as I will teach you, Z%. On the pill, XX%. Pill and a condom, YY%”

Actually, I wouldn’t mind knowing those figure myself.

If you guys haven’t read about it yet, there is a story about how Nebraska is trying to limit the time women have to get abortions because they believe the fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks.

There are (controversial) studies showing that plants can feel pain too.  Ban all lawnmowers and chainsaws!  Chopping down a tree ends a life!

I’ve been following Angie since the beginning of #livetweetingabortion, and for quite a while before that, and I think it’s worth noting that this isn’t out of the norm for her. Angie is very open about a variety of issues that most people don’t talk about, including growing up in a religious cult and being sexually abused as a child. *Most* of her posts and Youtube videos could be considered controversial.

The fact that sharing her abortion story caused so much more uproar than her usual discussions is very telling regarding the status of abortion - and the women who abort - in this country.

Piator, it’s hard because people don’t have sex at consistent enough rates. The best they can do is ask people what methods they use and if they have used them correctly every time.  Those who do, get put in the “perfect” column, and those who screw up get put in the “typical” column.  Perfect use is perfectly possible, but only for people with regular access, motivation, and education.

Hi,  I just wanted to throw a random thank you your way.  Your truth bombs on twitter were awesome.

Piator, it’s hard because people don’t have sex at consistent enough rates.

Hey!  Lay off the personal attacks!

No, wait - what did I just say?

Ferget knee surgery ... make them watch a C-section!

Better yet, all advocates of banning dilation and extraction should be legally required to sign a form that stipulates that they are willing to have any necessary emergency appendectomy or gall bladder surgery performed through their nose!

The kind of fetus that is aborted after 20 weeks is very often dead or lacking a brain.

Ah.  That’s why the wingnuts object so much to abortion.

They’re recruiting.