What’ s really interesting, Jesse, is that at the same time Beccah was putting up this little hoax, there was a Canadian woman who did carry and blog about her anencephalic baby. First, arm twisting doctors to give her a c-section instead of a vaginal birth because it would give the doomed and brain lacking “child” a “better chance at survival.” The blog paints quite a sympathetic picture, because readers see her growing more and more delusional as the “child” lingers, mechanical life prolonged by massive amounts of steroids, which eventually causes the usually excruciating bleeding ulcers that kill it.   

At first there was some pop about it on prolife blogs, but as soon as it was revealed that the pregnancy was the result of an adulterous affair/date rape (with a goofy “street preacher” who she met while working at his ministry? i.e. harrassing and haranguing people at venues like farmers’ markets) they all dropped her like a hot potato.  Yeah, there’s that support for pregnant women who carry to term and beyond, all right.

My 20 year old niece had a baby girl with DeGeorges. The doctors were either stupid or dishonest, and kept urging surgeries which didn’t work.  Perhaps because Her Baby was on Medicaid.  Anyhow, after 6 weeks watching her child suffer horribly, (the baby used to scream when she heard certain nurse’s or technician’s voices. Thse were the persons who’d performed many of the non surgical, but painful, procedures) my niece requested the tubes & wires be removed.  She was able to hold her baby while she (the baby) died.

It was HORRIBLE for everyone, including doctors & staff at the Natal ICU.  It was AGONY for my niece.  If she’d known of the foetus’ severe defects early on, she would have had an abortion, if possible.  This poor baby’s life added substantially to a couple of surgeon’s bank account, but was pure suffering and misery for everyone else involved.  It also cost my niece quite a bit of money for the funeral, grave marker and so on, and extended her suffering.  She & her husband broke up shortly afterward.

It is a pity anti-abortionists can’t visualize anything other than a cute, healthy little baby in these circumstances.  Maybe visiting an infant Intensive Care Unit would make them think a little.

So the hoaxer is a anti-choice wingnut as well. So it’s basically just a fanfic forum where fetus worshippers can jerk off to sexy stories about babies being born without brains dying painful deaths. Wow, and they think gays are perverse.

reading up more on beccah i discovered she also attended olivet nazarene university in my hometown. olivet just recently had jill stanek speak at a pro-life event, and every year they invite the giant dismembered fetus photo people to line up on the road their campus sits on for a handful of days, one of the major roads through town. so basically beccah is a sort of crazy that was grown and trained by the larger anti-choice movement via a far right university that steeps its students in an anti-choice culture.

i’m not sure if the trib article said so or not, but she also had people donating to a crisis pregnancy center in the area on her and her fake baby’s behalf. http://www.pass-networkofcare.com/ who also appear to do business in abstinence only sex-ed, and housing for unwed mothers. yipes!

http://babyfaithhope.blogspot.com/ is the blog about the anencephalic baby who lived about two months or so after birth. Her mom was convinced that her child could live and function while missing most (all? she claimed there was brain matter “up to the eyeballs”) of her brain, and insisted that the baby was “advanced” for her age.

I feel really badly for her because her baby died, and she obviously loved the kid and had to grieve not only for what could have been (a healthy baby) but also the actual baby’s death. And I feel badly that she attracted so much crazy attention, involving tons of hate mail and apparently real death threats. Keep it classy, internet.

But I hate and resent the fact that she used her swollen pregnant belly and sad, sad story at anti-abortion rallies as an argument against abortion. I love and adore my son, but if I’d found out he was developing without a brain, or with a condition that would lead to chronic excruciating pain or whatever, I’d want to end his life as soon as possible for both of our sakes. I really don’t appreciate others pushing their beliefs on me (like the belief that a developing child has a soul, for instance).

Wow, just wow—1st Jesse, that was powerfully written. Usually your stuff has a bit of tongue-in-cheek, which is totally fine, but this was palpably resonate with a cleansing anger on behalf of women in the exact kind of doomed pregnancies that Tiller helped. This hoax played the right-wingers disgusting fantasy of the woman as selfless womb (with the possibility that some “miracle” might result in a healthy baby through enough prayers to the Sky-Fairy by loyal blog readers). I bet at least a third genuinely were expecting a healthy baby to be the result of their fervent anti-science thinking/magical interventions through prayer. These fucking sickos have no regard for reality, let alone women’s human rights, so when they actually have to face that one of their pedestals is really a con—well, irate probably doesn’t describe their full reaction. They’re probably praying for proper punishment of the woman in question (though they are probably using more biblical terms like harlot to describe her…jezebel..etc).

Anyway, its amazing how the far-right has really been showing its cards with this push to end the rights for what might be called the “most sympathetic abortions,” those later terms abortions that are necessary because of fetal death, abnormality, or the life of the mother. Fuckers—and yet the mainstream media has yet to state clearly that Tiller’s procedures covered these most difficult and tragic abortions—fuckers. Even NPR didn’t point out that 3rd trimester abortions are illegal except under these circumstances—fuckers.

Okay, I need to go get an icy drink.

Thanks for the post!

My 20 year old niece had a baby girl with DeGeorges.

I wonder how Sarah Palin’s story would have played out last year if Trig had genetic defects more serious than Down syndrome.

She didn’t cause a panic?! She merely set out to force women in dire circumstances to give birth.  Since it only hurts women that aren’t Ann Althouse and can be demonstrated to be sexual people, I guess it doesn’t matter, though.

I love and adore my son, but if I’d found out he was developing without a brain, or with a condition that would lead to chronic excruciating pain or whatever, I’d want to end his life as soon as possible for both of our sakes.

I’d go further, and say that what makes me love my daughter is the fact that she has a personality I like, which in turn requires a functional brain. The lack of a brain means the lack of my daughter, full stop, in the way that, say, the lack of an arm never would. How anyone can say that a woman carrying an anacephalic fetus should carry to term is beyond me, any more than those who say we must keep people in persistent vegetative states hooked up to life support indefinitely. Of course, the people saying that are usually the same people.

Right wingers have discovered Münchausen by Internet. How quaint. I guess they think it’s OK to lie for God.

As long as it was thought that she was carrying a terminally ill fetus to term, her decision making process was proclaimed to be “Teh One”, and, as has been pointed out here,  she was being used as a cause célèbre by those who want to force all sorts of cruel and dangerous suffering on pregnant women. The moment it was found out that her “decision” was, in fact, a hoax, looky look what her supporters have to say about her decision making:

Secondly Beccah is a severly damaged soul . She has suffered serious trauma in her life and is quite disturbed. The details of her life I would never post as that would only cause more damage. You can be assured that Beccah will be getting the help she needs.

over @ my blog we have taken to calling them the “pre-life” movement.

Of course Althouse isn’t upset.  She only gets upset when women do bad things like having breasts and bringing them to a bloggers’ lunch with Bill Clinton.

How anyone can say that a woman carrying an anacephalic fetus should carry to term is beyond me, any more than those who say we must keep people in persistent vegetative states hooked up to life support indefinitely. Of course, the people saying that are usually the same people.

And many of those people also oppose universal health care.

Religious people have a habit of implicitly trusting anyone who claims to be one of them.

Well, if you’re willing to kill for your cause; what’s a few lies among…whoever.

I wonder if that’s a million hits or a million page views for the climactic period. If it was hosted at a typical blogging service, that would be page views. Multiply by a penny or two for the ads and that’s a pretty nice haul for fiction writing.

It isn’t as if there is anything particularly special to this story - I know of pro choice women who have finished pregnancies that ultimately claimed their own lives.

By choice. 

That’s the point ... BY CHOICE!  Even “pro choice” women choose not to end pregnancies when they develop melanoma.  They don’t always have abortions.  What they do is choose.

There was a recent story in the Boston papers about a local woman who delayed cancer therapy and had palliative treatment only so she could carry to term.  She died shortly after her daughter was born.

The cancer was found during her pregnancy and she did not have a good prognosis regardless. It was not likely that she would have lived with aggressive treatment (it was that ugly type of non-smoker’s lung cancer that claimed my friend’s twin sister at age 39), but she chose not to abort her pregnancy in favor of brutally aggressive treatment.

One very important note: this particular woman chose to remain anonymous and permitted press of her situation only after her death (her code name was trinidad).  There was no sermonizing about being pro-life, no martyrdom, no allowing herself to become a face and a name for a woman-hating movement.  There was also no permitting people who would have chosen differently to assail her for her choices.  There was only her own goals, values, and choices that were not anybody else’s business.

My friends baby died inside her theday before they were going to induce labor. She was about a week past her due dat (IIRC). The umbilical (sp?) cord had gotten wrapped around her neck and when she went in the next day there was no heartbeat. She had to deliver the baby. The doctors wouldn’t let her have a c-section because they thought the mental scars would be tough enough & she didn’t need any physical scars to go along w/them. The thing that pisses me off about this story is that this lady faked the whole thing w/out realizing how traumatizing it REALLY is. Not just to me friend & her husband. But to their families & friends as well. Ever been to a funeral for a baby that was born dead?

I realize this doesn’t fit the narractive of the baby having a disease that causes its death. It’s just that I get the feeling these anti-choicers have never had to deal with a baby being born dead. Accident or disease. And that pisses me off when they blow off these fake stories as “just fiction”.

It’s just that I get the feeling these anti-choicers have never had to deal with a baby being born dead.

in my aunts case, where she had to deliver her baby via induction 5 months along after he died in-utero, it actually became the trigger that drove her to be a crazed anti-choicer. her doctor also refused a C section in case she wanted to try to have children later and he feared the C section might impeed that (although from what i’ve read C sections don’t pose much threat to future conception). she had this super intense long difficult labor to deliver a baby she already knew was dead. it pretty much destroyed her reality forever. i have sympathy for her suffering but i can’t stand the false equivalency she makes between her miscarriage and other women’s abortions. she says she opposes abortion because she doesn’t want other women to experience what she did, but she seems to miss the part where women who get abortions choose to do so, and if a woman has a fetus she knos is going to die then the best way to spare her the pain my aunt went through would be to allow her to make the choice to abort.

So when is this woman going to be portrayed as being a librul/atheist? 

That’s how it works, doesn’t it?  You can be a conservative/fundamentalist until you say the wrong thing or make them look bad — then you are and always were a liberal.  It’s like instantaneous or something…

Treated her friend really nice, too:

Raechel Myers, a friend of Beushausen’s from college, heard from someone that Beushausen was going through a difficult pregnancy. Myers and her husband, Ryan, had a daughter who died at birth, so they did more than most to support Beushausen.

“When I heard that she was pregnant, I called her and said if she needed anything, I was there for her,” said Myers, who lives in Nashville. She said she spoke to Beushausen almost every day for the last few weeks.

They want it to be easy, and clear cut. Babies are babies, you are the good people, protecting the babies. From their moms, if need be.  From evil abortion providers, definitely. Who want to kill babies for some inexplicable reason. Demon possession, possibly.

The true complexity of the issue, the way in which a fetus really is a part of its mother till birth, how complicated that makes health decisions, how many things can go wrong, and how you cannot intervene between the two without causing massive human rights violations…none of that is as easy to grasp and as satisfying as “I’m here to preserve the lives of babies.”

It’s about being a hero, in the minds of many of these folks, but like most hero-fantasies, it does not really allow for the idea of morally complex decisions.

I had a Trisomy 13 baby.  Not by choice, we didn’t know.  The sonographer missed the facial signs, and we were right on the cusp for age so we skipped dagnostic testing.  It was so awful.  The baby had no frontal lobe, and an open cavity where her nose and mouth should be.  She had one eye, with some sight in it.  One ear, no hearing.  She had seizures where she would stop breathing for up to a minute and turn blue.  She screamed when we fed her by the last couple of weeks of her life, she lived for over two months, we had to give her morphine, her last week and a half was comfortable becaus she was sedated most of the time.  Alot of the abortions Dr. Tiller did were for Trisomy 13.  There is an idea prevalent with some of these pro-life folks that it’s no big deal, you “give” these children the gift of life, after a bit they die, and you just move on.  Well, that is bullshit.  I have PTSD, I still hear her cries of pain in my sleep sometimes, it’s why I’m up tonight.  My two subsequent pregnancies and deliveries were gut wrenching.  My husband still suffers from severe bouts of depression, and this is 2 healthy kids and more than half a decade later, because of the suffering we had to watch.  We both feel guilty about the horror of her brief life.  Life is not in fact a made for TV movie.  There are alot of people that only value women as martyrs.  I cried when I heard about Doctor Tiller’s murder, and I went to church and prayed for him, not because I’m religious, I’m not, but because he was religious and he deserved sincere prayers from someone who knew the depth of his compassion and his bravery.  I think you have to be an emotional cripple to torture people like the women who need Dr. Tiller’s services.  Sadly there are more than a few.

The true complexity of the issue, the way in which a fetus really is a part of its mother till birth, how complicated that makes health decisions, how many things can go wrong, and how you cannot intervene between the two without causing massive human rights violations…none of that is as easy to grasp and as satisfying as “I’m here to preserve the lives of babies.”

I think they can’t conceptualize this, in part, because it is in direct conflict with their very simplistic understanding of their own religion.  If Jesus is wonderful and everything Jesus flavored and loved is sunshine, roses, kittens, and plump healthy babies, then how can things so horrible, difficult, and traumatic ever happen?

Simple: they don’t happen.  Because Jesus is love and I have his phone number and text him daily, that’s why!

The doctors wouldn’t let her have a c-section because they thought the mental scars would be tough enough & she didn’t need any physical scars to go along w/them.

What?? So the baby she had been making died because doctors didn’t want to mess up her pretty abdomen?  Great.

re: c-sections. The going rule right now in the OB community is two c-sections = no more vaginal births. Some providers are not even comfortable doing any vaginal births after one c-section. C-sections, despite how common they are, are still major abdominal surgery, with a much higher risk for bleeding, infection, etc. It isn’t so much that women who have c-sections can’t conceive, it is that they’re at a higher risk for birth complications with subsequent pregnancies, and if they have had one there is a very high chance they won’t be “allowed” to avoid another.

Anyway, as such I’m not really too surprised this went over so, there are plenty of people happy to lie on the internet about themselves to further their cause - THEY did such and such, so why should anyone in the same position be whining about x, y or z? (were homeless and pulled themselves up by said bootstraps, had a doomed pregnancy, etc.) Like I was telling the boyfriend the other day - newsflash, people lie on the internets.

By the way, I told you this fad was up to no good.

I want to be impressed, but if Ms. Munchkinhausen is really an anti-choicer, I have no sympathy at all. There is a certain part of me that is impressed with affinity fraud whose main point is embarrassment rather than profit (i.e. the Sokal Hoax), but… let me tell you a bit of a story.

I read Frank Partnoy’s Fiasco years before the derivatives crash last year and found it a horrifying book about Wall Street as a house of cards. Among other things, though, I realized who the super-rich dunces were who buy six-figure stereos and Noka Chocolates—the sort of people who push cash around the way janitors do pushbrooms. They have money hand over fist and have neither a rational use for it nor the good sense to spend it wisely—why should they? It doesn’t matter to them except that they get more. It occurred to me that there really isn’t anything immoral about scamming greedy bastards like that, except for two things:

1. Many of them are borderline sociopaths who take pride in screwing the defenseless (the aspect that drove Partnoy out of investment banking),
2. The funny thing about Veblen goods is that everyone wants them, not just dumb schmucks with money.

I’m a foodie, and a broke-ass one at that who spends most of my foodie dollar on cookbooks rather than restaurant crawls. If I were to create one of these products and start marketing it, there would be no reasonable way to steer someone like me who goes after a product like that with the sole purpose of having One Nice Thing. So not only would I be getting rich off of someone else’s blood money, I’d be screwing exactly the sort of person I’d prefer to take aside and say “you should know better than to be buying this. Let me give you a hint as to what you should really get.”

So I could, perhaps, congratulate Ms. Nüsshausen on scamming people who deserve to be scammed. However, the anti-choice community isn’t made up just of dumb fundamentalists; there’s plenty of people who are against abortion choice who are otherwise mostly rational and normal people. Considering there aren’t many dogwhistles for the relatively ordinary as opposed to the barking fanatics, there’s just no way to pull off a scam like that in a morally acceptable manner.

Brian: “However, the anti-choice community isn’t made up just of dumb fundamentalists; there’s plenty of people who are against abortion choice who are otherwise mostly rational and normal people.”

No, the kind of anti-choicers who revel in this fetus-porn are neither rational nor normal people—they are deeply moved to control the bodies, choices, and families of women who have had the audacity to be sexual. Okay, there are those “pro-life” people who simply vote Republican, but don’t take an active role in the anti-choice community, but those weren’t the people targeted here because they probably aren’t fetus-porn lovers or trolling the internet for blogs about terminally ill foeti. I find the scam gross, but I find her “loyal fans” grosser because they look for an opportunity to prop up a martyr for their cause: the oppression of women.

They were thoroughly convinced that George Tiller was doing frequent “frivolous” abortions.

Then they must believe that the judiciary is in on the conspiracy, since my friend who obtained a late term abortion had to go to court to get authorization because she was beyond the viability limit.

Of course, a public record of the reasons for these procedures is a bit of reality they probably aren’t interested in.

“So the baby she had been making died because doctors didn’t want to mess up her pretty abdomen?”

Ursula, Please re-read my post. The baby was already dead. Apparently (as I understand it), the ultrasound did not show that the unmbilical cord had gotten wrapped around her neck and that’s how the baby died. The doctors felt that giving birth to a dead baby would be mentally traumatizing and that a PERMANENT physical scar might make it that much harder for her to ge over.

One more thing: these idiots want to have laws that go way beyond those pre-Roe when it comes to complications of pregnancy.  I have been through the medical records of thousands of cancer patients.  In those records there were several pre-1973 cases where a woman was pregnant and had an abortion so that she could be better treated for her cancer.  These required court orders, which appeared to be issued without question, and were performed at the hospital where they were treated.  Seems that before 1973, in many cases, abortion would be performed for medical reasons without question.

Mark, a c-section would have been medically ridiculous given the gestation and the fact that the child was dead and the complication rate for c-sections.  If the reason was the scar, that’s ridiculous too, but the medical reality is that c-sections are far more dangerous to women than vaginal birth.

That said, why the hell didn’t they just totally sedate her for the duration?  It wasn’t as if that would be bad for the infant, who was already dead.

A woman at the church I used to attend chose to have an anencephalic baby even after several doctors told her the child would die in a matter of minutes. She was one of the song leaders so instead of doing her job, she took time out from the service to talk about how she gave birth and held the baby for the half an hour it took for her to die. The entire talk was just dripping with self-righteousness and disdain for anyone who would even think of making a different choice. The church had 1,200 members so I’m pretty sure there were some women sitting in the pews who had had an abortion. I don’t think church is supposed to be a place to exalt yourself and denigrate others so the fact that the pastor gave his blessing to her little lecture is reason #2 that I stopped going to that church.

Reason #1 is the horrible, abusive backlash that same pastor (who is white) got for actively trying to integrate the church.

In defense of the author of the fake blog, the post on Jezebel mentioned that the author had lost a child with a severe genetic defect in a miscarriage a couple of years before she started writing the blog.  The way she is now saying things happened (and I realize she is suspect) is that she didn’t expect as many readers as she got, and things got out of hand.

So I think she deserves some measure of compassion (how much is up to each individual) because some of what was going on in her head probably had to do with working out some issues she still had with regard to her miscarriage.

That said, it absolutely kills me that people want to force others to carry fetuses to term with severe birth defects.  People grieve in their own ways, but I remember what one blogger, geodhe, wrote about her own decision to end an anencephalic (and very wanted) pregnancy at around 9 weeks, which was that she had a great deal of respect for women who chose to carry anencephalic pregnancies to term, but that she simply could not bear it.  And I can relate to that.  Having to deal with the symptoms of pregnancy, the well wishes, the excitement of others, all the while knowing that even if this wanted pregnancy makes it past being an embryo, it may well die in the fetal stage, and if not, will die, probably in an unpleasant manner, shortly after birth-that would have to be agonizing.

It is unfortunate that the victims of this hoax - the pro-life community who sought validation for their cherished beliefs - should have been played in such a shameful way.

What’s unfortunate is that they’re such dumb-cluck sitting ducks of marks.  It’s hard to avoid taking advantage of people who cultivate this kind of deliberate blindness in themselves…the very nurture of which (I admit) takes a certain amount of effort and thought. 

(They’re your beliefs, you see, and you cherish them, because and not in spite of the fact that they’re not a close match with reality.  If they were hardier, more perdurable beliefs, based less on faith and more on experience, they might not need so much cherishing, right?  So you coddle your beliefs the way you might coddle a sickly child where a healthy one would be told to run along and play and to quit pestering mommy so much.  How’s that for an analogy?)

It’s always a shame when people get played, but when people walk around polishing and spit-shining and examining their beliefs to the extent that they become subject to absence of mind, they turn into targets for those who are screwier and less scrupulous than themselves.  And then, of course, the inevitable transpires—-they get had. 

If I were a young woman desperate for approval and warm fuzzies and blog hits, and if I knew my audience, this is exactly the kind of scam I might be motivated to cook up.  My readers, I would tell myself, are the kind of people who regard real babies as game-counters.  Why should they not be fooled by the substitution of a doll for an infant?  Besides, serves ‘em right.  (It doesn’t make me proud to acknowledge this, but nevertheless, it’s true.)

TO Scout:

Read your post.  I think it should be required reading for all anti-choicers - again, and again, and again.  I’m assuming it’s a real post.  I had to go through watching my parents die pretty drawn out, agonizing cancer deaths.  I cannot imagine what it would be like with an infant.  Best wishes in coping.

Ismone, there’s lots of doubt about that story, too. She’s lied about her credentials and so forth.

Phylosopher,
My story is quite real, I changed a few minor details so I could be assured anonymity.  I wish I thought it would help to tell my story in the pro-life community, but I don’t think they’d care.  Alot of my family are pro-life and they change the subject when I try to relate what happened to us to larger events, like Dr. Tiller’s murder. I actually have little or no sympathy for somebody who would knowingly carry an anencephalic baby to term, so they could use it to as part of their witnessing at church, those baby’s brief lives are, like my daughters was, full of nothing but pain.  I see such women as part of the nasty “mommy marytr” phenomenom.  I see it all the time in the mothers in the upscale neighborhood where I live.  Most of these women have waited, for good reasons of their own, to have children until their late thirties or even early to mid forties, and about 2/3rds will say they never had amnio or cvs, because “no matter what” they’d keep the baby.  I don’t know what’s sadder, that most of them are lying (the number of children born with Downs has dropped 70% even as the age for 1st pregnancies keeps creeping up),the fact that they feel they need to, or the women sitting there that have had an abortion under those circumstances, who this public shaming either turns toward lying or silences.  I will sometimes in circumstances where several women are present when such statements are made, tell my story and say that there are circumstances where I would terminate, because I figure there is somewhere there who needs to hear it. Regarding your kind words on coping, it’s getting easier.  I wish I’d gotten to mourn a miscarriage, or an abortion.  I hate regretting that she lived for so long, when so long was so short.  I was angry with myself for not having amnio for a long time, and before that angry with my doctor for the failures of the sonographer.

Scout, for what it is worth, please consider that having choice means that some women will choose to do what you would have chosen not to do.  You don’t have to agree with their choice or respect them for what they chose, but they do have a right to their choices nonetheless.

Unfortunately, fundies don’t seem to see it that way.

Ms Kate. I don’t know why the Dr.s chose a c-section. I assumed it was the reason I was told. I wish Her situation had been different. I can only assume (as my wife, being the life long friend, and therefore, the source of my info) told me was that the Dr.‘s thought that was in the best interest of the mother (a nurse in the hospital where Natalie was to have been born).

I don’t know if she was sedated or not. I was just trying to console her husband & extended family while the proceure took place

Ms. Kate,
I not only concede, I support the idea that other women might choose differently than I.  What bothers me about the anencephalic example, other than the complete failure to emphathize with the fetus you suppposedly love, and consider what is coming for it, is the fact that such women have helped to rather effectively shame and silence everyone else who would make a different choice, and that is, in fact, the majority of women.  Very few women will admit publicly to having an abortion even in these horrific situations, and when they do they frequently change their names etc. to protect their anonymity because of harrasment.  I know what I’m talking about.  I was on a Trisomy 13 support group blog for awhile, where they were frequently having to issue reminders to folks that they could not stigmatize or judge women who’d aborted their Trisomy 13 babies.  Keep in mind these are other Trisomy 13 mothers and in some cases fathers, who knew that this was a fatal abnormality with horrible consequences where survival is typically less than a year.  Granted there were only a few at any given time.  They also had security for the site because of abusive pro-lifers coming on to ask women aren’t they sad they killed their baby etc…  So, do I support their choice in the sense of their own agency as human beings to make decisions about their own bodies?  Yes, I do.  But I do not sympathize with them or respect them, because knowing some personally, I find them repugnant. Talk to them awhile, I’m talking anencephalic Trisomy 13 etc, and you find that their decisions are often made to get their “buzz me miss blue I’m a credit to womanhood” pin, and they can’t feel mo better unless those other selfish unwomanly bitches feel worse.  So I will not give them the drug approbation that they crave.  Moreover, I will say that they are partners in a growing culture of shame and silence which is toxic to women.  They are in there, right along with Andrew Sullivan and Saletan and the other (mostly male) Lord High poobahs of uterine politics.

Neopharisees wearing the Christian banner ... oh the irony!

They e-mailed her photos of their children dressed in pink

Wow, I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s extremely cruel to send pictures of cute, healthy babies to a woman whose baby can’t possibly survive for a few hours after birth.  It’s like rubbing the tragedy in her face.  Or, it would be cruel if this hadn’t been a hoax.

Anyway, even if these events had been real, it doesn’t say anything for the anti-choice movement.  The point is that women have a choice.  No one wants to round up women and force abortions on them.  Some women will choose to have abortions, and some won’t.  It doesn’t matter how many choose not to have an abortion; it’s still their choice.