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?

Scott Lemieux, piling on to his colleague Pema Levy's "excellent response to William Saletan" on whether we should restrict late-term abortion in order to protect what he seems to think are, I dunno, more "legitimate" ones says

In Canada, late-term abortions are not legally restricted, and Canada also doesn't have the other kinds of restrictions found in many American states and doesn't exclude abortion from guarantees of health care. As far as I can tell, there's no evidence that Canadian women get late-term abortions at significantly higher rates (and historically overall abortion rates in Canada have actually been lower). Essentially, absent evidence to the contrary, I think the presumption in favor of a woman's decision-making capacity is justified, and further restrictions are likely to do more harm than good.

Source: TAPPED

Levy and Lemieux both note that, gee, maybe the reason for Saletan's hand-wringy concern that many women seeking 2nd- and 3rd-trimester abortions waited so long, compared to our generally demographically similar Canadian cousins, might be that getting an abortion in the U.S. is already pretty frickin' hard.  So Saletan's right on one count:

Contraception or abstinence is best, emergency contraception is next best, early abortion is next best, and we should make these options more accessible, not less.

Source: Slate.com

What he doesn't add, of course, is that by and large the same core group of extremists who go around cooking up the most egregiously intrusive restrictions on abortion are the same ones who also are most bitterly opposed to any and all forms of contraception as well.  So as far as they're concerned making it as hard to avoid unplanned, unwanted pregnancies as it is to terminate them is a win-win situation.

For that reason I wish Saletan would spend more of his time really digging into that and less time hand-wringing about "circumstances," as if those circumstances weren't the result of calculated political activism.  He's a professional, well-inside-the-mainstream journalist so he knows all the parties involved, he knows the history, and I think he's really, genuinely committed to reproductive rights.  I just disagree with his tactics of "maybe if we stop the lastest of late-term abortions they'll stop agitating to restrict condom sales."  Good faith efforts work only with those who are acting in good faith.

So here’s yet more fallout from Catholicism’s culture of sex abuse: Why, exactly, would the church hierarchy be so intransigent about producing unlimited numbers of children?

According to the Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press,

U.S. Catholic bishops say pregnancy is a healthy condition, not an illness. In comments filed with the Department of Health and Human Services, the bishops say they oppose any requirement to cover contraceptives or sterilization as preventive care.

“We don’t consider it to be health care, but a lifestyle choice,” said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, a Philadelphia think tank whose work reflects church teachings. “We think there are other ways to avoid having children than by ingesting chemicals paid for by health insurance.”

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Forget about their well-documented anger and fear of women. Forget their even better known anxiety about sexuality. And let’s not even worry about their deep-seated ties to capital-P patriarchal concerns about paternity, property, and propriety.

Instead ask yourself if an institution that at times seems so dedicated first to abusing children and then covering it up can ever be truly disinterested when it comes to limiting further production of more victims children.

I don’t know why this subject always sets my teeth so far on edge. But wow does the institution behind Haas’s think tank have zero moral standing on this issue!

Scott Lemieux of TAPPED is logically correct but, I think, tactically mistaken for dismissing pro-choice efforts to look for “common ground” with anti-abortion conservatives.

To follow up on Monica’s post about Dana Goldstein’s terrific article about the coming battle over contraception, it’s also important to emphasize what Republican opposition to contraception reveals about cultural conservatism.

...

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the broader set of assumptions about women and sexuality on which actual opposition to abortion is based. Consider anti-choice Republicans, who consistently opposed expanding contraceptive use: Given the choice between reducing abortion rates and controlling female sexuality, they will always choose the latter. Thus the idea that contraception can be a means of achieving a ceasefire in the culture wars has always been a fantasy. Liberals and conservatives aren’t just divided by abortion but by broader questions of female equality and sexual freedom.

He said it here.

I agree strongly that there’s a hard core of social conservatives who just flat-out hate the idea of women having sex (or possibly instead hate the idea of men having sex with women) and “getting away with it.”

And for those people abortion is virtually a red herring, relevant only to the extent that abortion, like contraception, amounts to a get out of jail card on the “wages of sin.”

Fine. You’ll never reach compromise with those people.

The trick, though, is that the hard core hides behind a heck of a lot of people who are squishy on abortion, sometimes really squishy, but 100% fine with contraception.

Those people you can find common ground with. And for logical and tactical reasons it’s extremely important to do so.

The point of engaging in “common ground” rhetoric isn’t about getting to compromise with the acid right. It’s to flush them out, to drive a wedge, to starkly separate them from their nominal allies in the squishy middle.

Maybe 20 years ago someone from Operation Rescue very bluntly said it was their policy to oppose initiatives that only reduced abortions because, in his opinion, unless abortions continued in big, big numbers the majority of opponents would lose interest in the issue.

“Common ground” solutions like contraception availability amounts to calling their bluff.

Would it be great if the majority of people were willing to back abortion rights 100%? Oh yeah, definitely. But the bad guys wish the majority were as enthusiastic about letting women die of preventable pregnancy-related complications. Since neither side seems likely to get such support, it becomes a question of who can provide intermediate solutions that are most appealing to the majority in the middle.

I happen to think the most appealing intermediate, a.k.a. “middle ground” solution is pressing hard on contraception. First of all because all but the fanatics are comfortable with it, and second because while nearly all the squishy middle are squishy about the boogeyman of “abortion on demand” they’re actually extraordinarily tolerant of abortion as a backup when contraception fails. That’s exactly Terry Randall and the American Bishop’s worst nightmare and… I just can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t give it to them.

So. Bottom line: you can’t compromise with fanatics, but by appearing reasonable (heck, by being reasonable!) you can peel off millions and millions of their nominal supporters.

I say go for it.