Photo via TPMKaili Joy Gray of Daily Kos says

Thank god someone finally has the courage to stand up to the rape and incest cheats who, for too long, have been defrauding the system with their bogus allegations just to cash in on all the fabulous perks and benefits that come with being impregnated by a rapist.

Source: Daily Kos

You probably don't even need to guess, but follow the link if you're not sure. In a way it doesn't matter which state they try it in first, they'll try something worse in another state next week.

If there was ever any doubt that the current rash (and I do mean rash in numerous senses of the word) of various state's abortion restrictions is purely about fear and hatred of women and not even slightly about protecting the unborn, Matthew Yglesias reminds us

Meanwhile, from Andrea Nill I learn that at least five babies have died in Nebraska since they started denying prenatal care to undocumented mothers. Life, after all, begins at conception, ends at birth, and doesn’t count if you’re from Mexico.

Source: Center for American Progress

No wonder I've been feeling depressed lately.

Tonight in Chicago Clarisse Thorn will be hosting two short films about the days before Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade established the rights, respectively, to contraception and abortion without prosecution.

Tuesday the 8th, my sex-positive film series in Chicago will be screening two films about feminist icons and feminist history. Here’s the event description:

Many laws, policies and social mores have tried to restrict women’s ability to take ownership of our bodies. To kick off the new ACTIVIST SEX and SEXUAL HISTORY themes of SEX+++, we’re going to show two documentaries about amazing feminists who fought for our right to make our own choices!

• “Jane: An Abortion Service” is a fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women’s history. It tells the story of “Jane," the Chicago-based women’s health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training. As Jane members describe finding feminism and clients describe finding Jane, archival footage and recreations mingle to depict how the repression of the early sixties and social movements of the late sixties influenced this unique group.
• “Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance” highlights this pioneer’s strategies of using media and popular culture to advance the cause of birth control. It tells the story of her arrest and trial, using actuality films, vaudeville, courtroom sketches and re-enactments, video effects and Sanger’s own words.

SEX+++
pro-SEX, pro-QUEER, pro-KINK
a free documentary film series for people who like sex

Second Tuesdays, 7pm
FREE, all are welcome
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
800 S Halsted
RSVP: (312) 413-5353
Here’s Facebook, here’s the Google Group email list

Source: Feministe

I'll be there. I'm old enough to have been a high-school-age peer counselor in the days before Roe, and at least technically old enough to remember Griswold. But it was all pretty vague to me. So I'm looking forward to the refresher.

According to Greg Sargent, South Dakota Republican Phil Jensen's bill to expand "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus isn't about legalizing the murder of abortion providers. Pinky promise! Here's Sargent:

I just had a spirited conversation with the bill's chief sponsor, State Representative Phil Jensen, and he defended the bill, arguing that it would not legalize the killing of abortion doctors. "It would if abortion was illegal," he told me. "This code only deals with illegal acts. Abortion is legal in this country. This has nothing to do with abortion." In other words, since abortion is not "homicide," the law could not apply.

....When I asked Jensen what the purpose of the law was, if its target isn't abortion providers, he provided the following example: "Say an ex-boyfriend who happens to be father of a baby doesn't want to pay child support for the next 18 years, and he beats on his ex-girfriend's abdomen in trying to abort her baby. If she did kill him, it would be justified. She is resisting an effort to murder her unborn child."

Source: Washington Post

Being the generous souls we are, let's take Mr. Jensen at his word. abortion is legal in this country so he's explicitly exempting abortion providers.  The example Jensen provides actually makes his intention quite clear: it should be justifiable homicide to kill anyone who knowingly jeopardizes a woman's planned, wanted fetus.

So.

Turns out there are quite a few activities and behaviors that could put a woman's wanted pregnancy at risk, which as long as the woman resisted would justify homicide under Mr. Jensen's proposed law.

For instance from Sax's Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials (available for $540.00 on Amazon!) here's a nice list of two thousand fifty seven pesticides, industrial chemicals, and pollutants that are known to or else strongly suspected of inducing spontaneous abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and of course minor and gross birth defects. 

In other words any one of those pesticides, industrial chemicals, and pollutants can reasonably be believed to harm fetuses.

And there are certainly women, even in South Dakota, who've expressed the desire not to be exposed to any of those substances lest they harm their fetuses.

So it sounds to me as though Mr. Jensen (who, remember, says his bill still protects legal abortion providers) is nevertheless proposing to give those women, their families, partners, friends, or... fellow environmental activists carte blanche to out and out kill polluters, careless employers, and even upwind farmers and crop dusters who use pesticides!

Who knew South Dakota Republicans were such aggressive environmental activists.  I'm confident even the Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! wouldn't have proposed going that far!

Now figleaf, you might be saying, doesn't Mr. Jensen's disclaimer that his bill exempts only illegal harm to fetuses?  And isn't it perfectly legal to expose women to chemicals known to harm or kill their fetuses?  Go back and check what he told Greg Sargent: "If she did kill him, it would be justified. She is resisting an effort to murder her unborn child."

Surely Jensen isn't proposing that just because abortion is legal a provider could perform an abortion on a woman who was actively resisting, right?  And surely simply punching someone in the stomach, say, during a boxing match, a karate exhibition, or even a drunken bar brawl doesn't ordinarily justify homicide.  So clearly what distinguishes his bill isn't the legality of the act itself but the fact that a) the act can harm a fetus and b) the prospective mother is resisting.  Consequently it's hard to see how the fact that it's legal to irresponsibly expose a pregnant woman to a fetus-harming pesticide sprayover would vacate a claim of justifable homicide should she or even an interested bystander use deadly force to resist it.

Meanwhile, if Jensen and his cohorts amend his bill to specifically protect fetus harming and killing when it's committed by by industrialists, farmers, and other polluters it'll make it pretty fucking hard to hide behind the facade of "concern for unborn life."  Because by their own logic a life's a life, no if's, and's, or buts.

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Back in 2008 I first proposed that "concience clauses," life-begins-at-conception definitions, and other anti-abortion and "fetal harm" laws could be used against polluters and other environmental offenders.  I wondered then how well that would go over.

At the time I wrote

Proactive Activism Opportunity

Oh yeah, and while we're at it if those "life begins at ejaculation" types get their way, especially if they get their way with the broad language they all shoot for then here's an other question. There's an extraordinary correspondence between "pro-lifers" and major polluters and opponents of occupational health and safety and product-safety regulation. So I wonder how happy they'll be when anyone from mainstream environmentalists to consumer activists to a revived EPA to the anti-vaccination/anti-fluoridation crowd starts throwing everything from civil lawsuits to criminal complaints to shareholder activism to survivor's benefits claims for nominal "life" that was "cut short" by exposure to, say, spontaneous-abortion-inducing, miscarriage-inducing or even implantation-inhibiting chemicals, manufacturing byproducts, and toxic waste?

And remember, according to the Bush "administration" appointees it's enough to imagine a product causes the "loss of a human life" at the fertilized-egg stage so science? Who's going to need science to back up their claim of irreparable (if possibly also undetectable) carnage caused by mine tailings, sediment dredgings, pesticide oversprays, plastic-packaging outgassings, packaged-food preservatives, food-coloring agents, "sick building" workplaces, and on and on and on?

Note: now obviously it would be pretty terrible if the 'wingers finally landed a "life begins at conception" ruling from, say, the Supreme Court. But there's no reason, at all, at all, for a nice, healthy group of pro-choice-oriented legal activists to set up a highly-visible operation issuing (or even just promising to issue) white papers detailing all exciting new ways activists could use a "life begins at conception" against asbestos producers like Dick Cheney's old Halliburton-Dresser subsidiary to liquor distillers to air fresheners manufacturers to oil refiners to non-organic farmers. A heck of a lot of "pro-life" money comes from sources in those industries and I think it would be wonderful if they were taken to task for their support.

I said it here.

I wonder how they're going to feel about this.  Don't you think someone should ask them?

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon discusses exactly what kind of monster "pro-life" columnist Ross Douthat really is.  At the end of the day you get the strong impression that, like a lot of other "pro-life" assholes, his opposition to abortion and contraception are 100% about the annoying shortage of white babies available for adoption.  She begins with this snipped of Douthat's latest pro-forced-pregnancy screed OpEd in the New York Times (emphasis mine)

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Source: New York Times

You'll notice in the last line that while his piece is nominally about how awful abortion is, his emphasis here isn't about abortion at all.  By definition the decline of pregnancies "relinquished" for adoption at birth weren't terminated!

Amanda correctly hands Douthat the toilet paper he needs to wipe his mouth

Well, obviously, having your life plans to have a baby thwarted is a humiliation no Caucasian should ever have to suffer. Clearly, there is only one solution, which is to return to an era where being a sexually active, unmarried woman was de facto criminalized so that your labor could be forcibly extracted from you to benefit people who do a much better job than you of keeping up appearances.

There’s a lot of human rights violations that Douthat glossed over in his chillingly inhumane euphemistic phrasing “this gap used to be bridged by adoption”.  By “bridged by adoption”, what he means is young white women (and some young black women, though there was less demand for their babies, and subsequently less forcing them into maternity homes) who turned up pregnant were forced to give birth to babies and forced into maternity homes where they were restrained and often subject to torturous behavior so they couldn’t resist when their babies were snatched from them against their wills.  He’s right that Roe v. Wade had a lot to do with turning this around, and it’s not just because women had an option to abort instead.  It’s also because once it was enshrined in law that even pregnant women have rights, it became harder to justify the existence of maternity homes and coercing women to give up babies.

This is why the concern for women’s mental health is such obvious bullshit.  Anti-choicers who blather about “post-abortion syndrome” have exactly no problem with reinstating a situation where women are put through the very real and often lifelong trauma of having a baby taken from you against your will.

Source: Pandagon

Got that right!  Having been a sex-ed peer counselor as a teenager I know and am still friends with a number of people, mostly but not all women, who were involved in teen pregnancies that ended in two of the three cases that Douthat deplores and the one he extolls.  One or two women of the many who had abortions in their teens say they think about what might have been, though most don't.  The one or two women who kept their babies (which was extremely rare in those days) are pretty darn happy they did.

The ones who were forced by society in general and their parents in particular to "relinquish" the babies they give birth to?  30 and 40 years later most are still trying to find the children Douthat would have gleefully torn from their arms at birth and sold through and adoption agency to "nice white couples" like... himself and his wife.

Did I mention Douthat's a monster?  Did you notice I didn't say "I think he's a monster?"  He's just a monster.  An inhuman, unfeeling, heartless, sick, woman-hating, avaricious, predatory, and (despite his protestations of nominal Christianity) godless monster.

Because unless you're just evil then if you're going to work as tirelessly against contraception as Douthat and his coven do, and if you're genuinely interested in alternatives to pregnancy termination, then the biggest possible cause for celebration on the planet would be the increase in "unwed" mother's ability to keep and raise their own infants to adulthood.  And the way to do that, of course, is to alter society so that women in need can have the support they need early on, and the opportunities for education, for work, and for decent, equal wages for equal time worked, such that they... and often their equally "unwed" partners... can provide for their own children.  The big difference since the 1970s?  We've made changes to society.  And if major shitheads like Ross Douthat would stop working to actually thwart the process we could do even more.

To Douthat, though, and to far too many others of his festering ilk, a young woman selfishly raising her own children (surprisingly often in conjunction with her equally young partner, by the way) rather than "relinquishing" them to people like himself is a far larger tragedy than abortion.

Fuck him.  Him and the horse he rode up on.

And just to be clear, I'm not knocking adoption per se.  To name just one instance where I think adoption can work out well: a good person and a good friend I hardly see anymore adopted two genuinely wonderful children from a mom who really, seriously couldn't support them.  (Being a good person my friend keeps the birth mother as involved as she can safely allow.)

But here's the thing about that: the adoptions took place because the mother needed it, and her children needed it, not because the adopting family "needed" them or otherwise wanted to.

Douthat's case isn't about what children, or even "unwed" mothers need.  At all!  Notice how meticulously he parses the statistics of race in his lamentation.  There are, as we probably all know, entirely too many children who need... sometimes badly need adoption -- far more than the ostensible "demand" for adoptees.  The only problem... and for Douthat the only problem!... is that there aren't enough available white adoptees... born of "prime breeding stock" young, healthy, suburban teenageers from whom they can be forcibly taken away.  And sold.  Into the families of white-skinned but black-hearted fuckers like Douthat's.

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Oh yeah.  One more thing.  One possible area where Douthat and I might possibly intersect -- though I think saying "common ground" would be way too strong a term.  While Douthat's obviously 100% fine with families that force their younger members to throw their babies away into to the adoption industry's maw, in the past he's expressed concern that sometimes families, or partners, will pressure young women to have abortions they'd rather not have.  Since, unlike Douthat, I'm strongly pro-choice I agree that a pregnant woman's choice should be honored, deferred to, and, especially, supported. A woman who doesn't want to either terminate her pregnancy or surrender her baby shouldn't have to!

Sheesh!  It shouldn't be hard to get that across to someone with even a tiny little brain.  And Douthat doesn't have a tiny brain.  Quite the opposite in fact.  That something as simple as honoring choice should easily percolate but doesn't is further evidence of exactly what kind of monster he really is.

Update: See also Jill Filipovic's take.  Read the whole thing (the first paragraph's great.)  I especially liked this though: "It’s also absolutely true that birth control has decreased the pool of potentially adoptable babies. I suppose in Douthat’s world, that’s a bad thing too, since any control over your reproduction is suspect. But for most of us, being able to prevent pregnancies we don’t want is a net gain."