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A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:
Relax and enjoy it, ladies. Here comes the Progressive Democratic Party with another plan for you to take care of its needs.
I don’t actually care all that much about the women who will have to pay for their own abortions after Representative Stupak and the others added their amendment. There are only a few hundred thousand insured women needing abortions, compared with the millions of really poor women trying to buy their constitutional rights after the (Democratic) Congress took abortion out of Medicaid in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. Hey, women rich or lucky enough to have private insurance, welcome to the crowd of the people who can’t protect their interests (“women”). Your fate was sealed when the Democrats sold out poor women 30 years ago. And women let them do it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily and Meredith, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I greeted the passage of the Stupak amendment with more of a cheer than a groan. However unfair it might be that well-off women have more access to abortion than low-income women, the solution should not be to compel those who are morally opposed to abortion to pay for them with their tax dollars. Just because the government recognizes a right to something does not mean that the government must also provide for it. If you can indulge me for a moment in a mildly absurd thought experiment (with emphasis on absurd and thought experiment), how would you feel about a program that provided guns to those who cannot afford them?
When this topic came up in August, Meredith wrote an article for Slate proposing a private fund to cover the cost of abortion for poor women. Citing data from the Guttmacher Institute, she wrote that it would cost $311 million a year to pay for abortions for low-income women. Compared with the numbers that are getting tossed around in the House and the Senate in the health care debate, that’s not that much money ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Since the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which barred federally funded Medicaid from paying for abortions, the whittling-away of reproductive rights has almost always affected poor women much more than better-off women. We have in this country a right to abortion that’s relatively easy to access if 1) you can pay for it, and 2) you live outside the large mostly rural swaths of fly-over country where abortion clinics are vanishingly rare. The geographic gaps (here's a map) come back to affordability, too. If you have the money to travel hundreds of miles and stay overnight, then you can exercise your right to have an abortion mo matter where you live. If not, then not.
And now in this same dreary tradition we have the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Andrew Sullivan careens very close to revelation
about the anti-choice movement today, asking, "What are the odds that
the Christianists are prepared to do the one thing that would actually
reduce abortions dramatically: guarantee free contraception as part of
a public option." Answer: somewhere between zilch and nada. The
Christianist movement that brought you abstinence-only education
doesn't feel much better about contraception than they do abortion ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Sharon Lerner:
Of course abortion and birth control
have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as
they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half
writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not
an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline
in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to
become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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By Amanda Marcotte
In today's utterly-unsurprising-but-still-necessary news, the Guttmacher Institute has released a report detailing how women living in households making less than $75,000 a year are responding to the recession by losing the desire to have a baby anytime in the near future. (PDF of the report here.) To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women. In many cases, in fact, economic hard times make it all the much easier to get pregnant on accident ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Abortion didn't get much air time during the Sotomayor hearings, but
it's become a flashpoint in the fight over Obama's health care
legislation. Conservatives are saying that the various bills Congress
is considering would increase access to abortion and subsidize the
procedure with government funding. Meanwhile, a separate bill with
support from both the pro-choice and pro-life sides designed to prevent
unwanted pregnancy, with more money for contraception, could get caught
in the crossfire ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Sunday night was when I first found out abortionist Dr. George Tiller had been murdered. But unlike Elizabeth Weil, I knew exactly who he was. I grew up in a conservative Christian family: loving my dad's lapel pin of tiny baby feet, dropping change in baby bottles to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers, and keeping up with relevant legislation. My family and I are probably a pretty good representation of 99 percent of the pro-life movement—people who wouldn't sabotage a clinic or use violence to stop abortion, but do our best with community involvement, prayer, and our votes. So I knew who Tiller was. I've prayed for him before.
I was following the lead-up to his trial for 19 misdemeanor counts all through March. Updates hit my inbox... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Stats sweetheart Nate Silver ran abortion-rate data from the CDC and has found that states with higher numbers of people who identify as pro-life have lower rates of abortion than pro-choice states. But, this finding is somewhat deceptive. As anyone who receives Guttmacher Institute press releases knows, 87 percent of counties do not have abortion providers,
and the CDC data does not always count state of residence, only the
state where the abortion is performed. Additionally, since CDC abortion
data is self-reported by each state... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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A second friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic:
In July 1993, my husband and I received the worst news about our son's impending birth: He suffered from multiple, severe fetal anomalies, both internal and external, thought to be the result of a rare blood disorder. If he could survive his early birth at 24 weeks he most likely would not survive his blood cancer beyond the age of 9.
After several years of trying to conceive our second child, the news could not have been more devastating. When we heard the news, I had been in Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC for more than two weeks, hooked up to a subcutaneous pump delivering a medication to stop contractions. While still reeling from the shock, we were told we could take our chances and let the baby be born, but that the state would be forced to intervene if we did not then take every measure to keep our son alive. Or, we could consider two late-term abortion clinics—one in Wichita, Kan., the other in Holland! Our initial thoughts were...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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It was horrible. We were driving onto the grounds and the protesters were there with their ugly pictures yelling at us. Just yelling. Then we got inside and it was calm, very professional. Those people are miracle workers, every last one of them, from the littlest nurse to the admin guys. They had to know their lives were in danger, and there was security everywhere, but they just wanted to reassure us... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The murder of Dr. George Tiller in his church this Sunday sent a special chill down my spine; not the kind one gets when someone young, or important, or defenseless is gunned down in cold blood, but the kind one gets when domestic terror strikes. I don't mean to be too alarmist about the first killing of an abortion provider since 1998. Of course, any such assassination is illegal and wrong. But the lawlessness and vigilantism of this particular murder—or, as the anti-abortion zealout who allegedly shot him might put it, judgment—is very worrisome. Is total anarchy just around the corner?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The killing of George Tiller on Sunday is a reminder, as if we needed one, of why so few doctors dare to become abortion providers outside big cities, why even fewer perform late-term abortions, and of the bravery it takes to be a member of these small bands. Tiller, 67, performed late-term abortions in the rare cases in which his state, Kansas, allows it. (Two doctors have to say independently that a woman would be irreparably harmed by giving birth.) For his willingness, Tiller was hounded throughout his career... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I’ve been mulling the responses I got, via email and comments,
to my question about
why a recent Gallup poll might show a seven point jump in the percentage of
people who define themselves as prolife (from 44 percent last year to 51 percent
this year). Several theories from readers:
The Election.
I think this past year forced me to think about how I really felt. The election
has something to do with it . . . Obama’s mother also set me on a course of
reflection. As an intelligent, curious single mom who struggled to give her son the best, I could relate.
I really want to be liberal, but in my life the most tangible support as a
poor, single mother came from people who looked, acted, and talked just like
Sarah Palin. Other high-status women didn’t give me chances; they were the first
to complain when I needed time off for a sick child. Academics can write about
women’s issues but the evangelicals made sure I could afford to go to work. In
contrast, my university still doesn’t offer onsite child-care.
The Aging Population.
Perhaps when folks pass the age at which their daughters may be faced with
this decision they can more easily be moved...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double
X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of
our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and
the "Culture
Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at
Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote
about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his
campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues.
I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m
right with the president on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The striking jump in the new Gallup poll of people defining themselves
as pro-life—7 percentage points in one year, for a total of 51
percent—doesn't explain itself. You may be right, Hanna, that scientific advances or a truly deep shift in attitude aren't the rationale,
given that the breakdown didn't change when Gallup pinned people down
further by asking them if they think abortion should always, sometimes,
or never be legal. But the words "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have long
been... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Just when you thought the right was dead or dormant, and it was safe
to say the word "abortion" on the campus of a Catholic university,
reality hit back hard. In his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame
yesterday, President Obama said all the right things (clips of the
speech are below). He acknowledged "admirable" convictions on all
sides. He said abortion had heavy moral and spiritual consequences. He
did not stop at the old tepid "safe, legal, and rare" but took it one
step further, saying he wanted to work to reduce unintended
pregnancies, and make adoption easier. Still, a woman outside called
him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bea Arthur, the irrepressible star of classic sitcoms Golden Girls and Maude, died on Saturday at the age of 86. The New York Times coverage of Arthur's death was notable for two reasons. First, when the Times initially put up the obituary, the headline was "Bea Arthur, TV Battle-ax, Dies at 86." Certainly the characters Arthur played—the titular Maude and Dorothy Zbornack on Golden Girls—were outspoken women, but to paint them with the "battle-ax" brush seems unwarranted and sexist. No wonder the headline was switched to "Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86"
And speaking of Maude's outspokenness, the Times also focused on the controversy surrounding the character's choice to have an abortion:
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.
“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”
What's remarkable to me is that since this very special episode of Maude aired, the incidence of abortion on TV has been nearly nonexistent. The only semi-realistic abortion I can remember on TV happened on HBO's Six Feet Under. I have started referring to this phenomenon as "reverse-quicksand." You see movie and television characters get stuck in quicksand all the damn time, though death by quicksand is nearly impossible. Abortion, however, is something that 35 percent of American women will experience before the age of 45, and yet it is almost absent from our popular culture. Why has Hollywood, that bastion of supposed liberalism, kowtowed so completely to the far right on depicting this issue in fiction?
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Sarah Palin attracts national scandal so effortlessly, it starts to look as if she does it on purpose. Courtesy of Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast, here’s a little background on her pick for state Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross. Some of these claims are disputed, but Ross has allegedly called homosexuals “degenerates” and is rumored to have said in a 1991 speech to a fathers' rights group, “If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?” and “There wouldn't be an issue with domestic violence if women would learn to keep their mouths shut."
What's undisputed is that Ross has a voluminous collection of writings, frequently penned in the key of Limbaugh. He opposes, among other things, animal rights activists, environmentalists, legalizing marijuana, allowing Alaska natives to maintain their lifestyles, and abortion. He supports guns, fathers' rights, anti-government militias, and has defended a college student who created an “art project” featuring "a hooded and robed stick figure of a KKK member, bearing a cross in one hand and a flag in the other." Lauding the artist’s “courage” Ross then berated the African American student who objected to the work: “It might have been more fun to see Ms. [-----] try to remove the display. Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”
Remember back in October when Gov. Palin couldn’t recall a single Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed, other than Roe v. Wade? Probably not a surprise, then, that her pick for the state AG says “his big remaining task on Earth is to help stop abortion, a practice he sums up as ‘killing kids.' ''I feel I have a good relationship with the good Lord (but) if I could overturn Roe v. Wade, I figure I got my ticket.”