Kaili Joy Gray asks yet another big WTF to what she calls Feminism™. The issue? What one would imagine to be the premier pro-choice/abortion-rights organization in America, NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica, waited till... the week before the election to comment on Mississippi Initiative 26, the so-called "Personhood Amendment" that would have outlawed not only abortion and stem-cell research but miscarriages and as many forms of non-barrier birth control as opponents could think of.

Seriously? Just a week before? Yeah, seriously, just a week before.

[T]hank god NARAL sweeps in, just days before the election, to educate us about something we apparently know nothing about. Excellent timing, isn't it? Because if we are really as ignorant as Nancy Keenan thinks we are, a few days is plenty of notice to launch an effective campaign to defeat the bill, isn't it?

Source: Daily Kos

What really seems to chap Gray's ass is the headline of NARAL president Nancy Keenan's press release at Huffington Post: "The War on Women You Haven't Heard of."

Seriously? Yes, seriously.

Just for the record, a) whereas Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment has been going wall to wall since roughly minutes after it was first introduced back in March of 2011, and b) whereas even the National Organization for Women, which can sometimes be, um, slow to respond was mentioning the the amendment last summer, and c) whereas even the NARAL branch Pro-Choice Ohio was all over the admendment, a fairly detailed search of the NARAL site suggests that, indeed, the organization that's nominally the premier pro-choice organization and certainly one of the biggest sources of pro-choice donations first mentioned Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment on November 1st! Seven days before the election.

Oops. Except Keenan mentioned it first in the Huffington Post. At NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica it was first mentioned... the day after the election!

Which kind of leaves me in the same camp as Kaily Joy Gray. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if NARAL does not want to use its public platform and fundraising prowess to advance the cause of choice, I know some people who would like to borrow it for a time, provided they could see how it could be made to do something.

Because seven days before election night?!?!?! Sweet mother of pearl!

Lest you think NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica focuses only on choice at the national level, and prefers to leave minor issues like Initiative 26 to state an local chapters, Gray points out (correctly as far as I can tell) that the national organization has been equally mum on any of the several groups in Congress and the Senate who are currently circulating "Personhood" amendments to the Constitution.

Which leaves me wondering (as does Gray) whether NARAL intends to wait to start fundraising organizing till seven days before Congress tries to pass "personhood" Amendment, or perhaps till seven days before the 38th (and therefore last) state ratifies?

!#%*&%@!

Speaking of the Republican's murderously extremist anti-choice provisions in H.B.3, Amanda Marcotte adds that effectively passing the Two Rules of Desire into law isn't just a fluke but instead effectively the core social policy of the contemporary Republican Party.

If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the sheer amount of attention and legislation Republicans are giving towards this task of making sure women pay for having sex. Nearly 1,000 anti-choice bills in state legislatures, a state-by-state attempt to defund Planned Parenthood after nearly shutting the federal government down to do it, and of course the radical expansion of federal powers in an attempt to keep women from spending private money on abortions that passed the House yesterday.  This is clearly issue #1, neatly disproving the skepticism I often meet from liberal men that conservatives really care that much about rolling back women's rights.

Source: Pandagon

I mean... nearly 1,000 bills! There haven't even been that many bills to bust unions.  There haven't been nearly that many bills to cut taxes.  There haven't been that many bills to fuck over immigrants.  There haven't been that many bills to gut environmental protection, consumer protection, bank regulations, to force prayer in schools, to outlaw teaching evolution, nor any other nominally "conservative" agenda item.  Hell, there haven't been that many bills increasing penalties for "false rape reporting" and you know those motherfuckers are all about empowering rapists.  In other words there really, literally, isn't anything more important to the Republican Party than shutting down women's ability to make reproductive choices.

And it's no mystery why: to permit woman to make reproductive choices would be to acknowledge that women might ever consent to, let alone desire, sex for its own sake.  And they find that notion both inconceivable and intolerable enough that they'd literally rather see women die first.

Robin Marty produces yet another demonstration of the complete lack of seriousness of the "pro-life" movement.  (Emphasis mine.)

I've read enough anti-choice literature now to know that if you are against abortion, at the moment of conception you now have a separate and unique individual.  That's how personhood works, and those are the words that doctors are expected to recite to you if you want to obtain an abortion in certain states.

But that only counts inside the clinic.  On the sidewalk, it's a different story, one clinic escort shares:

"Yesterday, the clinic had to call the police (again) because the protesters had (again) violated the terms of the injunction. There were four women on the sidewalk and together they had three kids in strollers. In my world, four plus three equals seven. When told they were violating the injunction, they argued that "four people" did not include children."

Source: RHRealityCheck.org

Oh, and speaking of failures to take "life begins at conception" seriously, I still haven't heard back from the smug "fetal harm" vigilanties and "fetal death" execution proponents about whether their draconian penalties intended to terrorize abortion providers would apply to those who harm fetuses via dispersal of pollutants, pesticides, or manufactured products that cause fetal defects and/or death.

I wasn't holding my breath, of course, because their opposition to abortion has nothing at all to do with concern either for fetuses or (as in the case of the clinic demonstrators who don't even see their own, born children ad people) considerations of personhood.

This is actually perfectly consistent once you get that their opposition to abortion is all about confining and controlling women: Since children are literally the "wages of sin" for that crowd, and since abortion in their eyes is a way for women to avoid their just deserts, thinking of their own children as people instead of punishment isn't really part of their frames of reference.

The mistake, I think, is believing them when they say they're "pro-life."  Their utter disregard for born children as human beings is one example.  A more telling one is their complete and utter indifference to miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, and so on, which generally only "stops a beating heart" of wanted children.

Following up once again on the odious position that victims of sexual assault should be forced to bear their attacker's children I want to turn once again to a general sentiment expressed in comments at "ProLifeBlog"

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

So if it's a matter of the rights of the innocent (well, except, obviously, the rights of the actual, you know, innocent victim!) then shouldn't the victim also be forced to let her assailant's presumably-innocent parents visit their grandchild?

April is Sexual Assault Awareness month

Because, after all, if the victim has no rights to choice, agency, or autonomy before she's forced to give birth then how, by the same logic, should she suddenly develop any rights after she's forced to give birth?

I mean, sure, if you didn't agree that a victim should be denied rights accorded to human beings then the whole question would be insane.  But we're talking about activists who believe victims should be denied the rights accorded to human beings.

So, for any forced birthers who might be reading this, what's the answer?  Why should a forced-birth victim be allowed to deny access to her child's grandparents?  Compared to the enormity of forcing the victim to bear such a child in the first place forcing visitations by the attackers presumably-innocent family members is scarcely an imposition at all.

And show your work.

%#*&@!