Pema Levy correctly identifies sex-that-doesn't-punish-women activist Marjorie Dannenfelser as both a liar and a bastard.

The most important way for conservatives to roll back access to family planning is to link it to abortion. To wit, at the Faith and Freedom Conference last week, Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser declared: “Every year that contraception and family planning increases, the abortion rate also increases in direct proportion. … This is an undeniable fact.” SBA List will not support a candidate that does not want to defund Planned Parenthood because of this faux-causal relationship between contraception and abortion.

Source: TAPPED

To equate a correlation with a causation is to be either stupid or a deliberate liar. Presiding over a major nationwide political organization requires considerable intelligence; to be president of the Susan B. Anthony List means categorically that Marjorie Dannenfelser not stupid. Therefore she's a calculated, categorical liar.

To a) deliberately lie about a causal relationship between contraception and abortion when b) there is no causal relationship and c) there is in fact considerable credible evidence that women who lose access to contraception instead increase their rate of abortion when d) your stated purpose of making such a correlation is your opposition to abortion and e) you've been previously identified as not stupid enough to make such a mistake in error is... to identify one's self as a mendacious bastard. Marjorie Dannenfelser and her coven of supporters are aggressively performing items A-E. Consequently Marjorie Dannenfelser is a mendacious bastard.

So if access to contraception does not in fact increase the rate of abortion for those who have access to it but instead decreases it, but the decidedly non-stupid president of a nominally anti-abortion organization makes that claim she must be making it to advance an agenda that's... well... not actually causally related to reducing the rate of abortion.

I'm thoroughly prepared to acknowledge that other people have a different view of the origin of human life. And consequently I can acknowledge that other people can honestly and ethically oppose abortion on the basis of their view of when life originates. Even if I disagree with their view. Even if I bitterly disagree!

But by moving beyond the debatable question of when human life begins into the thoroughly unambiguous question of opposing contraception itself, Dannenfelser and her ilk surrender any and all right to claim that their motivations are, at all, about protecting unborn human life.

So if, as I think is an inescapable conclusion that Dannenfelser's organization is interested in far more than opposing abortion, what is their intention instead?

Pema Levy concludes, as do I, that (emphasis mine.)

Dannenfelser's statement has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the idea that women should, literally, bear the consequences of having sex.

I think that's about right. We can quibble about why the sam hill anyone would want women to think about sex in terms of consequences to be suffered. But there's no quibbling that that is indeed the only conceivable purpose of opposing contraception.

Want a little tip about contraception?

Not one single woman I know has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man who's had a successful vasectomy. Not a single woman on earth has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man after having a successful tubal ligation.

Amanda Marcotte lays out the "Right to Life" community's attitude towards women who violate the bogus Two Rules of Desire in black and white as expressed in the "Conscience Protection" provisions of the recently passed H.R.3.

HR3 had bundled in it the assumption that women who have sex forsake their right to life, because of the amendment that allows anti-choice hospitals to refuse to save a pregnant woman's life if doing so would kill the fetus.  The only possible reason they can imagine for keeping a pregnant woman alive is to make sure she has the baby---if you're not going to have a baby, you might as well die, too.  When you had sex, any value you had as a human being in your own right evaporated, and your only role now is a baby carrier.

Source: Pandagon

In their mindset an entirely non-erotic desire for pregnancy is the only conceivable and indeed the only tolerable reason a woman may ever consent to sex. A woman who seeks emergency contraception or an abortion after sex, or one who wants contraception before sex, is by-definition not interested in becoming pregnant. And that, my dears, is both inconceivable and intolerable. They'd literally rather see women dead.

It's worth noting that their assumptions about women and sexual desire helps explain why they're so committed to "helping" women have their rapist's babies: as far as they're concerned sex for women is always against their will, so for them having a rapist's baby should be absolutely the same to a woman as having her husband's. I mean, yes, yes, the the woman's father or husband and his family might have problems with the genealogy of the resulting baby, but any pregnancy being a pregnancy, inside their mindset that shouldn't worry the woman's pretty little head in the least.

I mentioned earlier that by hard-core no-exception "pro-life" standards a rapist is morally equivalent to a forced-birther because both are doing God's will by forcing a pregnancy on the victim. And how consequently by their standards rapists who impregnate their victims should be praised rather than punished.

Since some forced-birthers are sure to object, and that no, in fact, (quoting the same "ProLifeBlog" comment as last time...

No. We should never punish the innocent baby for the crime of her father!

We have it exactly backward as our March for Life speaker, Brian Rohrbough, so noted this year.

The guilty rapist should receive the death penalty, not the innocent pre-born baby.

Source: Lesley Hanks in comments at "Pro-Life" Blogs

April is Sexual Assault Awareness month

... ok, so let's examine the hard-core "pro-life" position rapists should still be executed even when they impregnate their victims.  I don't think they're going to like the consequences of that much better.

If it's possible to execute someone for creating a baby that it was God's will to be born it must be the case that one can commit evil even while doing God's work.

And if it can still be an act of evil to participate in the impregnation of a rape victim, even if the resulting child is God's will then...

It can still be be an act of evil to participate the same victim to undergo the economic, social, health, and medical consequences, not to mention the horror, of extending her assault from a few moments to nine months and beyond.  Even if the resulting child is God's will.

So once again, whether a perpetrators should be blessed or should be Damned, within the "pro-life" framework those who would force victims to bear their attacker's babies are morally indistinguishable from rapists who impregnate their victims in the first place.

%#*&@!

Sungold has what might help explain the right's otherwise inexplicable* intolerance of contraception.

Here’s an item from the annals of “no shit, Sherlock!” science: A UCSF study shows a stunning decrease in unintended pregnancy and abortion when women are dispensed a year’s supply of birth control pills at once. What’s stunning is not the basic trend line, but the magnitude of the study’s findings. Science Daily recaps it:

"Researchers observed a 30 percent reduction in the odds of pregnancy and a 46 percent decrease in the odds of an abortion in women given a one-year supply of birth control pills at a clinic versus women who received the standard prescriptions for one — or three-month supplies."

Can I rephrase those numbers? Pregnancy declined by nearly a third, and abortion by nearly half!

Source: Kittywampus

More contraception means fewer abortions.  Since at least the 1980s hard-core anti-abortion activists have worried (correctly in my view) that there's an abortion rate threshhold below which the "squishy middle" will lose interest.  Since the hard-core's goal is absolute elimination of abortion (or at least abortion rights), again at least in the 1980s, they made a strategic decision to oppose any and all initiatives that only reduce abortion rates.

Consequently contraception is to an anti-choicer as garlic is to a vampire: a horror to be avoided and eliminated at all cost.

Cutting abortion demand by half is the last thing those assholes want.

See also

• Proposed Legislation: The Responsible Education About Life (or REAL) Act
• Prevention Promotes Predictability and Peace of Mind
• The Prevention First Act: Reweaving the Fabric of Society
• Gaining Ground With "Common Ground" Initiatives
• For Crying Out Loud! "Common Ground" Is About Recruiting the Moderate Majority, Not Compromising With Hard-Core Anti-Choicers
• Radical thinking on abortion politics
• First they came for my belt, then they came for my suspenders

*Until maybe the middle 1970s there were on balance probably more highly-placed Republican supporters of birth control than Democratic ones it seems particularly hard to understand.  In 1947 George W. Bush's not particularly liberal grandfather Prescott Bush was nevertheless the first nationwide capital fundraiser for Planned Parenthood!  This connection probably cost him a Senate seat in Connecticut when Democrats teamed up with Catholic churches to oppose his election.  He lost by only 1,000 votes, but he still lost.  Nor was the Bush family unusual.