Any bets on whether the Supreme Court will now reverse their decision?

Recall last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that women must be protected from making decisions, based on... well, nothing at all?

"While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained," Justice Kennedy wrote, alluding to the brief. "Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow."

Given those stakes, the justice argued, "The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed."

No reliable data, but we're gonna rely on this fantasy to write the laws anyways. Well done.

Well, once again, we find that there's no reliable data to support the existence of post-abortion depression.

No high-quality study done to date can document that having an abortion causes psychological distress, or a "post-abortion syndrome," and efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found the high-quality studies showed no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others.

"The best research does not support the existence of a 'post-abortion syndrome' similar to post-traumatic stress disorder," Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement.

"Based on the best available evidence, emotional harm should not be a factor in abortion policy. If the goal is to help women, program and policy decisions should not distort science to advance political agendas," added Vignetta Charles, a researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study.

Of course, if the goal isn't to help women, then everything makes sense.

Via Feministing.
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Go me!

I'm a member of the Culture of Death! Woot!

After deciding to create a campaign to tell people that birth control pills kill babies, the people who came up with this lunacy were shocked that people were getting angry at them and mocking their totally insane ideas! I mean, all they want to do is rob people of their civil liberties and maintain tight control of the sexuality and sexual actions of one-half of the population, and all they're doing to accomplish it is spreading lies and slandering their would-be victims as murderers. What on earth is everyone getting so upset about?

Just to give you a sampling of who is saying what, I am sending you a "short" list of Culture of Death bloggers talking about The Pill Kills website. I don't recommend wasting too much time reading their nonsense, but it is worth noting their overt hostility to anything that "just might" change their worldview of "promiscuity-made-safe."

And little old me made their list!

And it's rather telling that they object to "promiscuity-made-safe." See? They don't give a damn about safety--especially not for women who have sex. How much clearer could it be that they want nothing more than to punish people who dare to yield to natural impulses?
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Unless contained inside each pill is a tiny embryo which is killed during consumption

Pro-forced pregnancy people are organizing a protest planned for June 7, the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut. What are they protesting? If you thought 'abortion', you'd be wrong! They're protesting birth control pills, claiming that "The Pill Kills Babies."

How this could happen when the pill prevents ovulation, and hence fertilization, is anyone's guess. But it hardly matters, since they're only concerned with controlling the sexual activity of women.
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Just as creationists have attempted to redefine science and evolution to mean "creationism", so now we have anti-choice politicians redefining what "consent" means:

Missouri doctors would be forced to give women seeking an abortion pertinent information 24 hours before the procedure if a bill that passed through the state House on Monday also gains Senate approval.

The bill also would require doctors to offer a woman the opportunity to view an ultrasound of the fetus and feel the fetus' heartbeat without cost to her. In addition, it would make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion and would steepen criminal penalties for any criminal conduct associated with the coercion of an abortion.

Coercing women not to get an abortion, however, is not only perfectly fine but the raison d'être of this bill. At least this one doesn't force women to pay for the ultrasound themselves, unlike some others. The article also says later that the woman has the option of refusing the information, although that doesn't justify this.

Rep. Bob Onder, R-Lake St. Louis, said he proposed the bill to allow for a more informed decision-making process regarding abortion. Onder said he thinks the bill would "give the state one of the stronger informed consent laws in the country."

Because all those stupid sluts who want an abortion just have no idea what they're doing, right? They don't know that there's an embryo inside them until you show them an ultrasound of it.

Now, here's where the redefining consent comes in--if you look at the text of the bill, they say that abortions can only be performed if the woman has given her "voluntary and informed consent, given freely and without coercion." Sure, but then they proceed to redefine what that means, so that "consent given freely and without coercion" means "saying yes even after being coerced not to":

Consent to an abortion is voluntary and informed and given freely and without coercion, if and only if, at least twenty-four hours prior to the abortion:

There follows a long list of requirements, including such banalities as this:

(2) The licensed physician who is to perform or induce the abortion or a qualified professional has presented the woman, in person, printed materials provided by the department or an informational video provided by the department, which describes the probable anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child at two-week gestational increments from conception to full term, including color photographs or images of the developing unborn child at two-week gestational increments. Such descriptions shall include information about brain and heart functions, the presence of external members and internal organs during the applicable stages of development and information on when the unborn child is viable;

You know, for a group that generally foams at the mouth about the need to protect the sanctity of the dictionary when it comes to preventing gays from marrying, conservatives seem pretty willing to rob other words of any meaning whatsoever.

Via I Blame the Patriarchy.
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It's fun to mess with pro-forced pregnancy people

Just look!

I decided to go up to the young female students who were passing out their "genocide leaflets" to the students walking by and chat.

I asked each one if they wanted to overturn Roe vs. Wade and make abortion illegal. They all said yes, of course. I asked them if abortion was murder. They all said yes, of course.

I then asked each of them, once this is made illegal, what the preferred prison sentence should be for a woman that has an abortion.

...

Another girl seemed a bit taken aback, but then went into the "well, it's not the women who should be punished, it's the doctor who performs it" line.

"So wait a second, if someone hires a hitman to kill someone, they're charged for murder, right? Then why wouldn't the woman who hires the person to perform the abortion guilty of murder".

Silence. "Well... maybe. I don't know."

"Well, you're out here calling people murderers and accusing them of genocide. What do you mean you don't know?"

"Ummmm..."

Of course, as commenters at LG&M note, this isn't likely to change anyone's minds. They'll just fall back to the idea that "They shouldn't be punished for hiring someone to murder their babies, because women are too stupid to make their own decisions and are therefore blameless."
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Someone needs to teach him about the birds and the weasels

An editorial about McCain's views on abortion and reproductive rights:

What scares me most about McCain, beyond our 100-year presence in Iraq, his itchy trigger finger relative to other foes, and his enthusiasm for tax cuts for the rich, is his fiercely conservative record on women's reproductive freedom. Here, there is no moderate McCain or reach-across-the-aisle McCain. On issues related to abortion and even birth control and sex education, McCain is as ideological as any Operation Rescue activist crawling around in front of an abortion clinic.

...

McCain's voting record is solidly antichoice. He said directly in South Carolina that Roe "should be overturned" and strongly reiterates that position on his campaign Web site. He told the American Conservative Union that one of the three most important goals that he wants to achieve as president is to promote "a nation of traditional values that protects the rights of the unborn."

In accordance with these views, McCain promises to "nominate strict constructionist judges," which is code for "will overturn Roe if given half a chance."

This is true. On McCain's website, if you go to "Issues" -> "Human Dignity", it brings you to this page. A sampling:

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.

NARAL has an entire page up about McCain's consistent votes against reproductive rights.

Sen. John McCain served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1986 and in the U.S. Senate from 1987 to present. During his four years in the House, then-Rep. McCain cast 11 votes on abortion and other reproductive-rights issues. Ten of these votes were anti-choice. In the Senate, through 2006, Sen. McCain cast 117 votes on abortion and other reproductive-rights issues, 113 of which were anti-choice.

NARAL almost yearly produces a numerical score of how "pro-choice" a politician is, based on how they voted on issues of reproductive choice that year. For the years in which they gave those scores, McCain consistently scored abysmally (warning: PDF), with an average of 2% over 15 years in the Senate. If you tally in all the anti-choice votes he made in the years when they didn't produce a score, then he'd get an even lower number.

All that's bad enough. But this is probably the worst part (outside of the comments):

An intelligent person might think that someone as rabidly antiabortion as McCain would be backing approaches to prevent unwanted pregnancies, thereby, ipso facto, fewer abortions. Well, think again.

McCain is an antagonist of sensible family planning and effective sex education. In 2005, he voted "no" on a $100-million allocation for preventive health care services targeted at reducing unintended pregnancies, particularly teen pregnancies. In 2006, he voted against funding for comprehensive, medically accurate sex education for teens.

McCain is much more comfortable with President Bush's wasteful and utterly ineffective abstinence-only approach.

The New York Times Web site reported the following exchange with a reporter in Iowa in March 2007:

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

McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president's policy."

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

McCain: (Long pause) "You've stumped me."

Abstinence-only education at work!

Via LG&M.
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Huckabee: still hates women

Huckabee seems to have problems with the concept of what it means to be human:

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has endorsed an amendment to Colorado's constitution declaring that a fertilized egg is a person.

"This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception," Huckabee said in a statement backing the Colorado Human Life Amendment.

"With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value.

Except for the women who actually have to carry them to term. They're no more than incubators.

And I rather liked this comment by LRM:

Ah, good old Creationist logic! They bristle at the thought that human beings might have evolved from single-celled organisms, then turn around and proclaim that single-celled organisms are human beings.

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Honestly, how does "abortion as birth control" even make sense?

A common wingnut objection to abortion is that these women--filthy whores, every one--use abortion as a form of contraception. Because abortions are so much easier to get than condoms, you know? The logic is flawless.

But it's still wrong:

More than half of Australian women who unexpectedly get pregnant are either on the pill or using condoms at the time, a survey has found.

The report into unplanned pregnancy by sexual health organisation Marie Stopes International shows that 43 per cent of women were on the oral contraceptive pill when it occurred.

A further 22 per cent were using a condom and 21 per cent of the women using contraception were on more than one method.

...

And one third of women who were not using contraception at the time of their unplanned pregnancy had not been planning or expecting to have sex.

Well, yes. People like sex and have sex, and they cannot always set down every act of coitus on their calendar in advance. There is such a thing as spontaneity, and this is not a bad thing, nor should they be punished for it by forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

More than that, though, this survey strikes down the notion that women who get abortions use it as a form of birth control. In addition to spontaneity, accidents also happen in real life. Even if you do prepare for every sex act you ever engage in your entire life, birth control sometimes fails. And in that case, again, women shouldn't be forced to give birth to a baby because a condom breaks.

As the article ends:

The World Health Organisation states that even if couples use contraception correctly 100 per cent of the time, there would be six million unplanned pregnancies each year.

Cait Calcutt, coordinator of Queensland-based unplanned pregnancy counselling service, said the research showed women were not using abortion as a form of contraception, as many people believed.

"When unplanned pregnancy does occur it is vital that women have access to the support necessary for them to make a real choice - everything from paid maternity leave to safe and legal abortion services," Ms Calcutt said.

At least in Australia. I suppose it's still potentially feasible that women in America use abortion as birth control, except that's an incredibly stupid idea.
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Men have abortions in about the same way Dimmesdale had a scarlet 'A'

Uh, wow. This is profoundly disturbing:

Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement — both political and deeply personal in nature — contends that the pronoun is all wrong. "We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

You know why abortion is portrayed as a woman's issue? Because it is. Women are the ones who get pregnant; women are the ones saddled with a developing parasite for months; women are the ones whose lives, futures, and reputations all can be ruined by pregnancy; women are the ones who actually get abortions. The moment all that changes, men can have a say in it too.

And if Mr. Morrow can provide evidence that he truly had an abortion, I think that would probably earn him a Nobel Prize. I eagerly await his articles which will revolutionize our knowledge of biology and anatomy.
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Kudos to them for using the subjunctive tense, though

Not only is it demeaning to liken women to cardboard boxes, but the analogy is completely daft, too.

SCENE: a box factory

NARRATOR: If you thought there was a small chance that a baby was hidden in a box, wouldn't you treat the box as if it held a baby, just in case?

SCENE: an ultrasound image

NARRATOR: So even if you think there's just a small chance that an unborn child is a baby, shouldn't you treat it as if it were, just in case? Something to think about.

The first example is that of a closed box with unknown contents, but you have some (inexplicable) reason to believe that the contents may contain a baby. In this scenario, sure, you might want to err on the side of caution just on the off-chance that someone decided to ship a baby via UPS. Or you might actually look inside the box so that you know what the contents are if you have reason to believe there's a baby in there.

The second case has absolutely no relation with that scenario; instead it relies on the bizarre notion that a fetus has "a small chance" of being a baby. But of course a fetus is a fetus, and a baby is a baby--the desperate need to conflate the two is always bizarre. Further, we might point out that women aren't black boxes. The stages of pregnancy and fetal development are well-known. To compare pregnancy with a closed box whose contents are unknown is just a testament to the determined ignorance of the anti-choice side.
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Probably a large portion of them

It just occurred to me, but I wonder how many of the people who insist that they could never accept "redefining" marriage to include same-sex couples also are adamantly in favor of redefining "human" and "zygote" to be synonymous.
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Abortion leading killer of grown women?

Max Blumenthal has a video up of people at the Value Voters Summit, October 20-21, basically showing what flaming assholes they are. For instance, Star Parker told Blumenthal, around 4 minutes into the video, "Abortion now the number one killer of black women between 25 and 34. We wanted sodomites quarantined."

I'm pretty sure that you can't actually abort people at that age, Ms. Parker.

And I'm pretty sure that your facts are wrong--in fact, since you're a writer for WorldNetDaily, I'm almost guaranteed that they will be. But let's check. The NCHS has a list up of the causes of death in the United States, listing them by 5-year age groups, sex, race (well, black and white), and Hispanic origin, for the years 2002-2004. You can find the PDFs here.

They tell you, completely unsurprisingly, that Ms. Parker is full of shit. I did a search for the word "abortion", which provides the following causes of death:

• Missed abortion (I'm not really sure what that is--they planned an abortion and didn't go through with it?)


• Spontaneous abortion


• Medical abortion


• Unspecified abortion


• Failed attempted abortion


• Failed medical abortion, with other and unspecified complications


• Other and unspecified failed attempted abortion, complicated by genital tract and pelvic infection


• Other and unspecified failed attempted abortion, with other and unspecified complications

Not every year has a page on these, I think because in some years no women at all died from a particular cause. At any rate, after some of these categories they have other pages that include causes of death such as "Complete or unspecified, complicated by delayed or excessive hemorrhage", "Complete or unspecified, with other and unspecified complications", and "Complete or unspecified, without complication." These are, I assume, continuations of each abortion category. So I counted all the deaths of African-American women for the years 2002-2004 by abortion, including every single category above, even the spontaneous abortions. Here are the results:

Deaths of African-American women due to abortion, by age and year

	2002	2003	2004
Ages 25-34	0	2	6
All ages	5	13	18

Huh. If abortion is the leading killer of black women ages 25-34, they must be the healthiest group in all of America.

I also checked for how many deaths among African-American women were caused by pregnancies in the year 2004. Basically I searched the PDF for the word "pregnancy" and included every hit with the following exceptions: the last six, which list the deaths and abortions of newborns and fetuses, and not of the pregnant women; and complications of anesthesia during pregnancy. I also wouldn't have included "retained intrauterine contraceptive device in pregnancy" had it actually killed any black women that year. The other categories are mostly of pre-existing conditions that complicated the pregnancies, which led to the deaths of the women; or else gestational conditions. In total, those killed 181 black women during 2004.

So ten times as many black women died in 2004 as a result of complications during pregnancy as died because of abortions that year. I wonder how many would have lived if they had been able to get an abortion. Furthermore, as people often point out, outlawing abortion would only lead to the deaths of more women, since they would be getting dangerous back-alley abortions. If you're interested in saving lives, abortion should remain legal. On the other hand, if the only interest you have is in preventing people from making the same decisions you did (Ms. Parker herself has had "several" abortions, she says), then moving to criminalize abortion might make sense.

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Strike two, Verizon

In addition to their flagrant incompetence, Verizon has also apparently been censoring their text messages:

According to the New York Times, Verizon Wireless has rejected Naral Pro-Choice America efforts to use Verizon's mobile text-message program to communicate to its membership.

Such text messaging is an important new tool for advocacy organizations seeking to educate and alert their members.


Verizon decision to block this new form of political speech interferes with its users' right to get information that they choose to receive.

Well, actually, they reversed course the moment Times published their story:

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

"The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident," Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

"It was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy," Mr. Nelson said. "That policy, developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters adequately protected customers from unwanted messages, was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children."

...

In reversing course today, Verizon did not disclaim the power to block messages it deemed inappropriate.

Protect people from hate messages and pornography? Really. 'Cause earlier they said they wanted to protect people from controversy:

In initially turning down the program, Verizon, one of the nation's two largest wireless carriers, had told Naral that it does not accept programs from any group "that seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users." Naral provided copies of its communications with Verizon to The New York Times.

...

On Wednesday, Mr. Nelson, the Verizon spokesman, said the initial decision had turned on the subject matter of the messages and not on Naral's position on abortion. "Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position," Mr. Nelson said. "It is the topic itself" — abortion — "that has been on our list."

Uh-huh, sure. "We reject material on a controversial subject"? I've heard that before.
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We should also take away their right to vote because they might regret their vote later

"While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained," Justice Kennedy wrote, alluding to the brief. "Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow."

Given those stakes, the justice argued, "The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed."

In short, Justice Kennedy concluded that women couldn't be trusted to make their own decisions, because they might make choices that they would regret later. Therefore, the government should make those choices for them (recall this cartoon).

This goes a bit to explaining why fundies insist on criminalizing abortion, but not on punishing the women who break the law: they aren't in their right mind!

[Richard] Land doesn't deny that women who have abortions might be addled, but he, along with Yoest, Earll, and Gans, takes exception to them being described as bystanders -- or as enlightened women making free, educated choices.

"It's not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life," Land said.

Of course; they came to a conclusion that you don't like, therefore they're mentally deficient. Those silly women--why should anyone think they could be able to think for themselves.

"choice joyce", commenting at Pam's House Blend has an excellent analysis of this:

They believe that all women are naturally mothers and want to be mothers. They believe motherhood is woman's primary, ennobling, most fulfilling role. They believe it's instinctual in fact, it's what women are made for, and women are ruled by their biology. Therefore, any woman who has an abortion is obviously not in her right mind, because she's violating her natural maternal instincts. There has to be something wrong with her or her decision-making process, or she's being coerced by someone or circumstances, because ALL women naturally want to be and should be mothers.

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Parental notification law repealed

Gov. Lynch of New Hampshire just signed a bill to repeal a parental notification law:

New Hampshire has become the first state to repeal a law requiring parental notification 48 hours before a minor has an abortion.

Gov. John Lynch Friday signed the bill repealing the 2003 law, which he called unenforceable, the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph reported Saturday.

"I strongly believe parents should be involved in these decisions, providing important support and guidance," Lynch said. "Unfortunately, that is not possible in every case."

...

Planned Parenthood had won two lower court challenges and in 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed the law failed to address medical emergencies.

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Christianity--a religion of peace!

Via PZ, I've been alerted to something truly horrific. Remember Paul Hill, the man who murdered an abortion provider and one of his escorts, and wounded another? Well, people are praising him as a hero. Well, that's to be expected. But they're planning "Paul Hill Days", July 26-29, "to honor him as God's man and our hero." And the truly horrible part of it is this:

The highlight of the "Paul Hill Days" stunt is a reenactment of the assassination. It is the exact parallel to sending a noose to a black civil rights leader or a bullet and picture of his child to an Iraqi Sunni living in a Shi'ite town. If this stunt is a success, think of some of the other celebrations we might be subjected to: Southern Nationalists holding John Wilkes Booth Days complete with reenactments of his most famous moment in a theater, Timothy McVeigh Days with a reenactment of the last moments of the Murrah daycare center, and, of course, Mohamed Atta Days with what horrors I'll leave you to imagine.

Emphasis mine.

But remember: only Muslims are terrorists! Christians don't do that kind of thing, and neither do Jews. And of course the real bad people are atheists and anyone else who doesn't accept Jesus.

Most if not all rapes, murders, robberies and thefts are committed by people, like you, who reject Jesus Christ.

Quoth the man sponsoring a celebration of a terrorist and convicted murderer.
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Making the world a safer place for fetuses, but not for women

I'm a firmly pro-choice person, and frankly, I never thought much of people who dismiss the other side by saying they don't really think that a fetus is a person, it's all about controlling women. It just always seemed to me that that bit of rhetoric was more prompted by a typical "No-one could believe something like that!", or even a "Everything is the fault of the man-o-centric male-ocracy!" rather than a position arrived at by examining what opponents of abortions do, in fact, believe.

And then there's this article in the Washington Post, describing a schism between abortion opponents: those who were happy with Gonzales v. Carhart, like Focus on the Family, because they saw it as a step towards overturning Roe v. Wade; and those who hated it because the decision doesn't actually outlaw any abortions at all, it only outlaws a certain procedure because, as the court reasoned, there are other procedures available which they say are just as safe.

But....

In an open letter to Dobson that was published as a full-page ad May 23 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Focus on the Family's hometown newspaper, and May 30 in the Washington Times, the heads of five small but vocal groups called the Carhart decision "wicked," and accused Dobson of misleading Christians by applauding it.

Carhart is even "more wicked than Roe" because it is "not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual" that affirms the legality of late-term abortions "as long as you follow its guidelines," the ads said. "Yet, for many years you have misled the Body of Christ about the ban, and now about the ruling itself."

A Focus on the Family spokesman said that Dobson would not comment. But the organization's vice president, Tom Minnery, said that Dobson rejoiced over the ruling "because we, and most pro-lifers, are sophisticated enough to know we're not going to win a total victory all at once. We're going to win piece by piece."

Doctors adopted the late-term procedure "out of convenience," Minnery added. "The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling."

As this guy puts it:

Got that? The Court upheld the law because the remaining unregulated procedure might be just as safe. Yet according to Focus on the Family, the remaining procedure is markedly less safe for the mother, and that's precisely why the law is a good thing -- because it leaves in place only a procedure that carries a higher risk of danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus . . . which in turn leads to "greater legal liability" for the doctors, and, as a result, fewer abortions.

Score one for candor.

So Focus on the Family is all in favor of families, unless they include gays or women. ...I think we're kinda running out of options here.
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Monday Dead Racist Blogging: Falwell Edition

Today (technically yesterday, but meh) this article about Jerry Falwell appeared in the local newspaper.

Falwell was a theological fatalist but a political activist. If this seems like a common combination today, that is largely due to Falwell himself. Before he came along, evangelical Christianity was inward looking. The Baptists, especially, had been badly burned by the failure of Prohibition and the mockery of the Scopes trial and turned away from politics during the first half of the 20th Century. As a young preacher, Falwell asserted that the church had no business getting involved in such issues.

"I meant well, but I was wrong," he wrote in his autobiography. This change of heart was one of the many unintended consequences of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which galvanized Falwell. He got into politics not out of love but out of hatred for "abortion, the drug traffic, pornography, child abuse and immorality in all its ugly, life-destroying forms."

Well... that's certainly what he would have wanted us to believe. But Max Blumenthal says that it simply isn't so:

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

This page has an excerpt from Mr. Balmer's book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament, which repeats most of this and says further that Weyrich explicitly admitted as much:

"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.

Ed Dobson, Falwell's erstwhile associate, corroborated Weyrich's account during the ensuing discussion. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," Dobson said. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

During the following break in the conference proceedings, I cornered Weyrich to make sure I had heard him correctly. He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement—something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along—and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, "How about abortion?" And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.

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I wonder how many of these people decry moral relativism, too

Via Tapped via Atrios I was introduced to this webpage, full of anecdotes about people who are supposedly pro-life who are suddenly struck by reality and need to get an abortion.

These people apparently cannot fathom the idea that the other patients there are just like them; they have their own set of circumstances that led them to the decision to have an abortion. No, the only valid choice is their own--everyone else are sluts who use abortion as birth control. I think one of the main problems is plain ignorance. They are told lies about people who have abortions, they've never known anything other than that. Since their experiences that led them to obtain an abortion contradict what they've been told, they think that they're "not like those people" and that therefore it's okay in their case. "But it's still immoral for the rest of people because they don't have the same problems that I do."

"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'" (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)

...

"My first encounter with this phenomenon came when I was doing a 2-week follow-up at a family planning clinic. The woman's anti-choice values spoke indirectly through her expression and body language. She told me that she had been offended by the other women in the abortion clinic waiting room because they were using abortion as a form of birth control, but her condom had broken so she had no choice! I had real difficulty not pointing out that she did have a choice, and she had made it! Just like the other women in the waiting room." (Physician, Ontario)

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Hyperbole meets reality

Over at Feministe, there's a post that reproduces a comment from this blog post about a man who was put into the alien situation of having to decide whether or not to abort his and his wife's child.

This anonymous commenter wrote, in part:

I am strongly pro-life (of the baby). I would always choose the life of my child over my own life or anyone else's life, including my wife. Harsh? Think about it. What's more precious, an innocent life of a child who has their entire life ahead of them or a grown adult who has had a fair opportunity to live their life and have whatever experiences they have been blessed to have?

In your case there was no way to save the baby, they tried, they did everything they could but because of the dilation it was an inevitable loss and I'm terribly sorry for that. But I congratulate you on your efforts to do everything within your power to at least try to save your baby, even to the point of losing your wife. And I applaud you for hesitating as to whether or not to abort.

I am not against aborting if there is no possible alternative to saving the mother.. but if the child can be saved at the loss of the mother then I would choose the child. There is no logic to losing both, but it's a risk worth taking, to take it as far as you took it should happen in every case, in my opinion.

Emphasis mine.

At least in this case (and maybe some others) the slogan seems to be true: they simply care more for fetuses than they do for women.
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