What Ema of The Well-Timed Period said about the difference between 20 year old men and 20 year old women — in general, yes, but under the current administration in particular.

Actually, technically, the difference being that young women with the same political connections, or political sympathies as the young man in question (the 20-year-old guy who got the nod from U.S. officials to supply $300,000,000 worth of shitty bullets and other munitions to the Afghanistan police and army) are permitted to make their own medical/reproductive decisions. Because “they’re different.” They “have their whole lives in front of them.” Because they “weren’t being irresponsible.”

This evening I went to a fundraiser for Cedar River Clinics. It’s one of only a handful of independent women’s clinics left in the United States that provides full services including pregnancy termination. The fundraiser was not for the benefit of the women who get those “free passes,” the ones who, as in the days before Roe simply “needed abdominal surgery, poor thing” with full complicity of discreet medical professionals. Instead it was to help those whom anti-abortion laws are designed to hurt most: those living in poverty, not speaking the dominant language, teenagers, the undocumented, the intimidated, the already ill, the overtaxed with other children, the domestically abused, those who don’t live in the meager 15% of counties where abortion services are available and must therefore travel, and those who don’t have money for a simple, early termination and must therefore race their bodies and the calendar to raise money for a riskier, far more expensive, later termination before it’s too late even for that.

If you’ve got a little extra (where “a little” is as little as ten dollars) you can donate here. And, if you’re up for something a little different, the inevitable anti-choice protesters are being put to good use with the clinic’s creative Pledge a Picketer program.

Classic sarcasm from Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, in a post titled “Medical Procedures Don’t Have To Be Enjoyable In Order To Be A Social Good” says

But anyway, Melissa Clouthier has concluded that I think abortion is great (her words) because I wrote this:

For me, “I had an abortion” should be as morally loaded as “I had a Pap smear”.

There is only one thing to conclude from this.

Melissa Clouthier enjoys getting a Pap smear.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s true! Every medical procedure is just a ton of fun. Colonoscopy? That whole business about detecting and preventing the 3rd most common fatal form of cancer? Huge excuse. I really just enjoy fasting for a day, eating all those laxatives, and then getting snaked with a 34-foot-long flashlight! Heart transplants? Those people really just want those cute “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” t-shirts. And abortions? Yeah, those are just so much more fun than a trip to Las Vegas it’s a wonder women even bother to go.

So I sort of accidentally ran across mention of the decline in abortions nationwide. Don’t know that much about it except for the more interesting-to-me news that…

In 2005, the rate was 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The absolute number has gone down as well, to 1.2 millon abortions in 2005, which is 25 percent fewer than the high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990. This, I think we can agree, is unvarnished good news. I hope that it speaks to the spreading of the birth control, birth control mantra that Melinda was wisely intoning. The Guttmacher Institute notes, however, that more than one in five pregnancies still ended in abortion in 2005, so we’ve got a ways to go.

Source: Emily Bazelon in Slate.com’s XX Factor

Technically I think it’s unvarnished good news if and only if it represents an absolute decline in the percentage of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies as well. But Bazelon’s remark doesn’t make that clear at all. (Instead it sounds kind of troubling.)

Anyway, just a reminder that finding a practical, non-draconian way to drop unwanted, unplanned pregnancies to drop to somehow drop to zero really would pretty much eliminate abortion in America. (Except, of course, for life-saving ones that, ironically, seem the easiest to legislate against. But how long would support for that position hold if ‘wingers were left to argue that every woman seeking an abortion should instead die a slow, generally agonizing, and — worse — highly televizable death? But I digress…)

As I was saying, yes, finding a practical, non-draconian way to prevent all unwanted, unplanned pregnancies would be great because *that’s the goal of the pro-choice movement!” The so-called “pro-life” movement’s agenda is a lot more conflicted — for instance as we know their record on every form of fetal, infant, or maternal death besides abortion is 0 on miscarriage, 0 on stillbirth, 0 on infant mortality, and 0 on early childhood mortality, and negative 123.5 on pregnant-woman mortality which really doesn’t make them actually “pro-life” at all.

But I digress again…

Anyway, I’m sure other people have had more to say about this but I wanted to get out that, at least in terms of Bazelon’s post, there’s insufficient evidence to suggest whether the good is varnished or unvarnished. Or good. (Her colleague Juliet Lapidos has concerns as well.)

Photo by Flickr user marceline. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Scott Lemieux of the political policy blog TAPPED says of the frequent conservative talking point that Roe v. Wade should be overturned on “federalist” principle (so that the “individual states can decide”) or even that abortion should be limited “to protect the life of the unborn” ...

...when evaluating public discourse I’m interested in the implications of the policies being advocated, not in the subjective motivations of the speaker. We know that 1) support for abortion criminalization has a strong tendency in the U.S. to be bundled together with reactionary positions on gender and sexuality, 2) given the choice between a policy that is likely to reduce abortion rates but is inconsistent with regulating female sexuality (such as providing greater access to contraception) American pro-lifers will tend to sacrifice the former principle, and 3) American pro-lifers favor some policies that increase injury to women without protecting fetal life at all. I hardly think it’s absurd to infer from this that American pro-life politics may involve things other than the pure desire to protect fetal life, but at any rate it’s the effect of the policies than actually matters.

He said it here.

Lemieux points out that every prominent nominally pro-states-rights “pro-lifer” has consistently voted in favor of federal abortion restrictions and/or consistently endorsed federal abortion restrictions and/or consistently applauded federal abortion restrictions. And I would point out that neither have any prominent “pro-lifer” consistently… or even intermittently… voted to support pre-natal care, research into prevention of miscarriage, stillbirth, or general post-birth infant mortailty. Which sort of reinforces Lemieux’s points that in the face of their words their actions make them liars.

I’d also like to point out that these guys have to use code words like “pro-life” and “states rights” and even (believe it or not) “anti-abortion” because decent, honest Americans couldn’t stomach their visceral, superstitious, hatred for women and (really uncalled for considering how superior we’re supposed to be) contempt for men. For instance in the rare event they’re honest about their intentions they catch so much grief from even their own constituents they back down claiming they feel their views “weren’t accurately portrayed.”

Which makes them, of course, double liars. Or, as Lemieux graciously permits as an alternative, “implausibly misinformed about recent political events and/or shamelessly unprincipled.”