Misplaced Protest at Walgreen's?

Jill at Feministe links to a protest planned this weekend based on Stephen Colbert's really hilarious sketch on a Fox and Friends misunderstanding of what kids of things you can actually obtain at Walgreen's.

FLASH MOB ALERT!!!

FOX & Friends thinks we don’t need Planned Parenthood because women can just get their breast exams and pap smears at Walgreens (which is not true). Let’s prove them wrong by demanding these health services at Walgreens across the country and seeing what happens.

Here’s what to do this Saturday at 12 PM:

1) Pick your favorite local Walgreens
2) Get a group of friends together or connect with people via this event page.
3) Go try to get your pap smear!
4) Don’t forget to bring your video cameras and share your footage on YouTube!

View the Colbert Report’s take on Planned Parenthood: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/381282/april-11-2011/pap-smears-at-walgreens

PLANNED LOCATIONS:

New York City: 1471 Broadway, between 42nd and 43rd street http://tinyurl.com/4xpc3kz

DC: 1217 22nd Street NW, between M and N Streets.

Madison, WI: 15 E. Main Street (on the Square)

Jill calls it brilliant, but I'm not so sure. No offense to the organizers, because I think their heart was in the right place, but it seems to me that this protest at best will be ignored and ineffective and at its worst could turn people against the cause who previously had no stake in the debate. But then, I wasn't involved in the planning of the debate. Thoughts?

One Small Victory for Reproductive Rights

Over the weekend, my work email was flooded with press releases from Catholic bishops, the Family Research Council, the National Partnership for Women and Families, and Planned Parenthood. They all hated the Nelson compromise on abortion.

Still, there's a quiet victory for reproductive rights that happened late last week: D.C. has had a ban on local tax dollars used to pay for abortions under its state Medicaid program that has been imposed by Congress since 1988 lifted.

I did a piece for The American Prospect about it:

"This is really something to be celebrated from the point of view of women who live in D.C. who are low-income," said Healther Boonstra, senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute.

At its core, lifting the restrictions gives D.C. "home rule" like other states and allows autonomy over its own funding. Now, D.C. can once again put local funding toward Medicaid that would pay for abortion services and care. Medicaid is paid for through a combination of federal and state funds. Federal funding can't be used for abortion because of the Hyde Amendment, but states have autonomy to fund abortion services with their own dollars. But D.C., because it isn't a state and technically falls under Congress's rule, has faced additional restrictions.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Understanding Stupak

The Stupak amendment, an amendment that would essentially create incentives for private insurance plans to drop abortion coverage, has whipped the reproductive rights community into a frenzy. But there's been some confusion about the details of the Stupak amendment. But there's been some great work published in the last couple of days. Here are some great resources for understanding the amendment:

• Planned Parenthood's "real life" analysis of the whole House health care reform bill. [RH Reality Check]
• Ruth Marcus says that the health care reform bill is supposed to increase choice, but apparently not for women. [Washington Post]
• A New York Times editorial calls the amendment a "sharp departure from current practice." [NYTimes]
• Robert Pear reports what's next for the Stupak amendment, and what Obama's position is on it. [NYTimes]
• Robin Marty, the director of special projects at the Center for Independent Media, asks the essential question of how the Stupak amendment will affect women who miscarry. [RH Reality Check]
• Former Campus Progress associate editor Dana Goldstein reports on the activists fallout from the amendment's passage. [Daily Beast]
• Emily Douglas does an analysis of how the bill will affect women. [The Nation]
• And finally, the director of CAPAF's Women's Health and Rights program, Jessica Arons lays out why the Stupak amendment is a "monumental setback" for women's rights. [Wonk Room]

Cross posted.

Update on Montana "Personhood" Amendment

Yesterday I wrote about Montana's personhood amendment. It passed barely in the state senate, by 26-24. Today I caught up with Planned Parenthood's Stacy Anderson, who is working on this issue there. It turns out that pro-choicers shouldn't be too worried about Montana and what Anderson calls "extreme" legislation.

"This is actually a repeat of legislation that we beat in 2007, not only in the legislature but also in the ballot initiative process. So maybe they're thinking that the third time's the charm but they don't have the votes to get it out of the House," Anderson said.

She also told me the anti-choice legislation is about 100 votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment, which is what this is proposed to be. She also had some things to say about the language, which I wondered about yesterday. While she wasn't totally sure where it had come from, she noted that there's a reason they went with this particular language, "That language has been approved by our attorney general in the ballot initiative process so I suspect they wanted to just stick with the language that they know will get though," she said. "It's literally the exact language that was used in 2007."

It also sounds like there was a broad coalition that fought the legislation in 2007, so even if the anti-choice movement in Montana did somehow manage to get enough votes, they'd still have to fight groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other medical groups. In other words, Anderson doesn't think this legislation is going anywhere.

"It's just unfortunate that we have to continue to talk about such an extreme piece of legislation when there's real situations with the economy and children's health insurance and prevention strategies that aren't getting near the amount of attention that they should be," Anderson said.

Rescinding HHS Regulation

I blogged before about the horrible midnight HHS regulations that President Bush tried to enact in the last months of his presidency. Today, there's good news. President Obama's administration has begun the process of rescinding the regulation that were supposed to "protect" doctors and other medical professionals from being "forced" to administer abortions or birth control if it went against their conscience. The regulation would've actually restricted women's access to abortion or birth control, giving the federal government the power to cut off funding to entire institutions that employ doctors or nurses who object to procedures like birth control and abortion but the institutions themselves conduct them.

This regulation was misguided, allowing sweeping government intervention to limit women's access to health care while pretending to make the controversy about individual right to religion. The right to religion is already protected under numerous provisions of the law. The regulation Bush proposed wasn't about protecting freedoms or even about good public policy. It was about finding ways to limit women's access to reproductive health care. It specifically targeted the kinds of care that only women receive. The Bush administration, in other words, wasn't rushing to make a "conscience" rule for the distribution of Viagra.

The Obama administration is slowly seeking to undo some of the most egregious policies the Bush administration pursued on reproductive health. That is, except for abstinence-only programming.

Big Love: Family Planning Episode

I know most people probably don't watch Big Love anymore because it's been more than a year between seasons, but I'm still totally into it, even as a feminist I should object to everything it stands for. Last night's episode might as well have been called "Family Planning" because of all the (spoilers ahead) reproductive talk.

At the beginning of the episode, we also see third-wife Marge and Bill in the middle of their "marital duties" and Marge begging Bill to "pull out." Marge has just had a baby and isn't ready to have another. I should take a minute here to note that pulling out is not a recommended form of birth control for anyone who doesn't actually want to get pregnant. It also puts you at just as much risk of STDs as if you didn't pull out. Marge asks Bill, "Why can't Nicci have the next child?"

Marge gets suspicious about the fact that second-wife Nicci, who came from the Mormon compound, hasn't been pregnant in over 4 years. It turns out that Nicci is more than reluctant to go through another pregnancy -- she has secretly been on birth control the entire time. Finally, after some shame from her husband and sister wives, she stops taking the pills. When hauled into a fertility clinic, she admits to the gynecologist that she's been on birth control. The gyno (a dude) asks Nicci to be honest about whether or not she wants to have more children and adds that it's her choice. Nicci objects that she's never had a choice about anything in her life. When the doctor asks her if she wants another prescription for birth control, Nicci nods.

To me this is a big message about coercion of having a large family. Oftentimes women that most strongly desire control over their own reproduction are women that already have children. They don't want to have more for one reason or another, and might lie to their husbands (and, in this case, their sister wives) about taking birth control. Both Nicci and Marge have both had two and three children respectively and don't want more. But their religion points to the role of women as child-bearers.

Additionally, Marge voices a desire to go into sales, something she discovers she has a knack for. She is restricted by the family, and first-wife Barb says that they all agreed it was Nicci's turn to work. Barb herself in this episode is terrified of a return of cancer, something that caused her to have a hysterectomy seven years earlier. She dares not tell anyone but her husband until the results of the biopsy return.

Finally, the oldest daughter, Sarah, is sobbing at the end of the episode. At her feet is a book about options for expecting mothers. Sarah, who became sexually active at the end of last season, breaks up with her boyfriend because she's not in love with him and tells her parents she wants to go to college out of state for nursing. Sarah, because of her conservative Christian upbringing (even if she wasn't raised as a polygamist until late in life, her family had always been a member of the LDS church before), is unlikely to have an abortion. I'll be interested to see how they deal with Sarah's pregnancy moving forward. She has always been one of my favorite characters on the show because she protests her family situation.

More Roe v. Wade Stuff

I have a piece over at Campus Progress today about how the pro-choice movement needs to really commit to reaching out to communities they traditionally haven't. Such reaches will only strengthen the cause.

[T]he reproductive rights movement is incomplete. Many people believe the movement, with its obsessive discussion of choice, Supreme Court justices, and slogans like “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,” seems to be speaking past some key groups that could—and should—be its strong allies. These groups—people of color, young people, and straight men—all tend to think of feminism as we know it as something purely under the domain of white, relatively privileged women. If the movement hopes to achieve broad victories during the Obama administration, it must better engage these constituencies. If it doesn’t, it will have wasted this once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly make an impact on as many people’s reproductive lives as possible.

I also went down to the Supreme Court today and took some pictures of the rather small rally of anti-choice activists that were gathered there. One thing I noticed was that the group was mostly white, and seemed to be either of the boomer generation or high school kids. There were few Millenials to be found. For more, you should see Annika Carlson's 2006 piece on how the anti-choice movement relies on indoctrination of young people through "hip" culture. The problem is that the movement ends up ultimately being based on a lack of substance.

Back to Violence

Today a van, apparently driven by a male anti-choice activist, crashed into a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul today. This seems incredibly stupid. After all, what person thinks to himself, "Van v. building? Van totally wins!" It's also a deviation from the anti-choice movement's recent kill-them-with-kindness strategy.

Sarah Stoesz is the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota and I interviewed her for this piece for RH Reality Check. She's one of the few people in the pro-choice movement that is willing to make the language less divisive and have real discussions with people about what making the choice to have an abortion -- one often made by women who are already mothers -- really means. Sarah will be part of a live discussion on RH Reality Check today, which you can see by going here.

Blog for Choice Day: Pro-Choice Hope for a New Administration

Today is the 36th anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. It is a very important day to both pro-choice and anti-abortion activists, but most of America is preoccupied with the release of the Oscar nominations. But despite the public's inattention to the subject of abortion access, it is one of the foundations of freedom in our country today. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out in her dissent of the court's decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart, a case that confirmed the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban as constitutional, women must have control over her reproduction to have full and equal access to citizenship.

The list of tasks for this new administration is long, but today is a day for many pro-choice activists like myself to ask the administration to make choices about women. My list is long as well, mostly because women's health has been under attack for the last eight years.

1. Rescind what is known as the "global gag rule." This regulation, one of Bush's first acts in office, withholds funds from any group that also provides abortion services or includes abortion as an option for women seeking family planning, even if the U.S. funds aren't used for abortion itself. This has caused massive budget cuts in organizations like Planned Parenthood International. When clinics like these shut down, women in third world countries often have no where else to turn to for family planning or other medical care.

2. Repeal the Hyde amendment. This is a domestic law that forbids federal funds from getting used on abortion services. Although many may not want "their" tax dollars used for abortions, abortions, like other kinds of health care to poor people, are extremely difficult to fund privately and repealing this amendment would do more to increase access to family planning to poor women than almost any other action.

3. Fully fund Title X. Family planning funds have remained roughly stagnant since the beginning of the Bush administration. Just to get the funds to where they were, adjusted for inflation, in 2000, the Obama administration must allocate more than $700 million (the previous administration allocated $300 million), and even that number doesn't do enough to hire translators or bilingual staff at family planning clinics, increase the service to women who might require more attention, or allow family planning clinics to open in states where there may be so few.

4. Restore U.S. funding to the UNFPA. As Michelle Goldberg outlines in her forthcoming book, antichoice activists used false allegations of UNFPA officials using coercive abortion practices in China to de-fund the United Nations Population Fund. By restoring funding to the organization, it would show the world that the United States is willing to become a leader on family planning again.

5. End funding to abstinence-only programs in the United States. Such programs have been proven, through study after study, to be ineffective at reducing teen pregnancy or delaying age of sexual initiation. Our young people deserve the information they need to use condoms and other contraception when they do decide to become sexually active.

6. Begin looking at ways to increase access to abortion and family planning services, rather than just stopping the losses. Many women today, especially women in southern states where abortion is unpopular, have a serious lack of access to abortion and family planning clinics. The most recent study shows that more than 87 percent of counties in the United States don't have an abortion clinic and Mississippi and South Dakota only have one in the entire state.

7. Include women's reproductive health care in any future reforms to the health care system overall. Women use health care very differently than men. Women visit doctors more often and spend more on prescriptions because of birth control and other contraception. Pregnant women often aren't covered under individual insurance plans, and even if they are, they pay more for marginal care. Women need to be fully included in future health care reforms.

8. Make reproductive health something that everyone cares about. There is often an urge to allow reproductive health groups to be the ones to care and talk about access issues, but reproductive health and family planning affects everyone. By leaving the burden on certain groups to talk about these issues, they often become ignored or marginalized in public discourse. They are considered less important or serious than other issues like foreign policy or the economy when reproductive health and rights is intricately linked with these issues.

9. Become a world leader on reproductive health and rights. Women around the world suffer from the inequalities of their societies, are subjected to rape as a weapon and are forced into child marriages or genital cutting before they can make the decisions for themselves. By becoming a world leader on addressing these issues, we can show the world that we are a humanitarian nation once again.

10. Develop new methods of contraception. There are many available options of contraception today, but they're not enough. Many hormonal contraceptions make people sick. We need to develop new ways for people to access contraception -- and yes, this includes men.

UPDATE: This list is by no means definitive. I ask you to leave your requests to the new administration in comments.

Winning on Language

Today over at RH Reality Check my piece is about how the coalition that fought for choice in South Dakota ended up winning. Hint: It's not by using language like "my body, my choice":

Sarah Stoesz, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota, credits the win to a well-run campaign with broad grassroots support. But it wasn't a strategy run only by outside consultants, with slick advertisements and catch phrases like "My Body, My Choice" or "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries." In fact, the word "choice" was abandoned by the coalition fighting the abortion ban in South Dakota altogether. Instead, the coalition took a pro-family approach, using the word "baby" where mainstream pro-choice groups would have used the word "fetus." One Healthy Families ad featured a woman named Tiffany Campbell, who appeared with her husband and son. In the television ad, Campbell explained that during her pregnancy they discovered twin-to-twin syndrome, a condition in which one fetus would need to be terminated for the other to survive. Campbell phrased it this way, "I would have buried two babies." Much of the language in the ads talked about families making decisions without government interference.

"We were completely ready to and did redraft all of the usual rhetoric that is used by people on our side," Stoesz said. She noted a lot of feminists on the national level were upset at a pro-choice campaign that would abandon rhetoric built on for decades, but Stoesz isn't sorry she abandoned the rhetoric. "As the head of Planned Parenthood [in the region] I'm responsible for keeping the sole abortion clinic in South Dakota open and I'm responsible for making sure there is a strong base of support for women's reproductive health in South Dakota," she said. "South Dakota isn't Manhattan. It isn't San Francisco. It isn't even Chicago and it's not even Minneapolis. It's so different. The culture is so different."

Go ahead and read the whole thing here.

Yes, the Proposed HHS Regulation Is Sexist

The Los Angeles Times has a good recap of a Health and Human Services regulation that’s bad news for women (Planned Parenthood has a petition here). The article points out what feminist bloggers have been saying all along: the rule wouldn’t just grant doctors the right to refuse to perform an abortion; it would allow doctors and nurse practitioners to refuse other treatments like birth control, emergency contraception, fertilization treatments, and many others.

While some have argued that there’s no harm in allowing doctors to exercise their right to freedom of religion (although this is technically already covered under the Civil Rights Act of 1964), it’s important to take a moment to examine the embedded sexism in this regulation, buried under layers of cultural “norms.” The legislation is targeted explicitly at women. Women are the ones that use the reproductive treatments outlined in this regulation. None of the treatments were specific to men. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg outlined in her dissent in the Gonzalez v. Carhart case, women simply can’t enjoy equal access to citizenship as long as they can’t control their reproduction.

So long as there are regulations or laws that specifically control or limit the rights of one gender and not the other, the legislation is unequal. The regulation is allowing doctors to deny treatment to women based on their sex, using religion as a defense (one also wonders why a doctor would become an OB-GYN if he or she opposed abortion and birth control). Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex lately, but many of the things we accept as cultural norms or based in religion are actually age-old notions of treating the woman as someone or something to be controlled.

Much of The Second Sex is devoted to outlining all the ways women are painted as the Other. They are either condescendingly thought of as less than human, incapable of achieving the plane of male thought, or elevated to some kind of superhuman inspiration for chastity and artistic inspiration. While this is certainly very centered on the gender question–after all, there have been many Others in society–it certainly points to all the double standards that women are subjected to.

By forcing women to stick to abstinence as means of birth control, women’s lives are restricted in ways that men’s just aren’t. The regulation doesn’t put restrictions on Viagra or fertility treatments for men. Even though it is framed as a religious rights issue, it is ultimately about controlling the reproductive lives of women. Ultimately, controlling women’s reproduction means controlling their freedom and equality as citizens.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Thoughts on Daschle

While President-elect Barack Obama's transition team is busy announcing his appointments to State, Defense, and OMB, in my column at RH Reality Check this week I take a closer look at the choice of Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services Secretary. Some are pleased, others aren't:

Gloria Feldt, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood from 1994-2005, was less than excited to hear the news of Daschle's appointment. "Tom Daschle's strengths are that he is well-connected in Washington, he is well-connected in the health care industry, although some may say that there are conflicts there, he fully understands and knows the congressional process of making legislation, of policy creation, and he I think enjoys a great deal of respect from members of Congress. That said, many of those very strengths are his weaknesses as well," Feldt said. She notes that Dashle wasn't particularly known for a strong leadership style, but came to the debate as a compromiser, especially following the Democrats' electoral defeat of 2000.

In particular Feldt pointed to meetings she had with Daschle in the early days of the Bush administration about anti-choice judicial nominees. "Tom Daschle's response was to essentially roll over and play dead," she said. "His first answer was, ‘These guys are going to get confirmed anyway. Why are you asking us to fight?'"

Read the whole thing here.

Anti-Choicers and Obama

Jessica over at Jezebel has a good summary of a Washington Post article on pro-choice groups that are figuring out what to do now that they've lost on, well, almost every front this election. Some are outraged, others are more reasonable. But the article talks about the conflict between the Pope and Obama's plans to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, something that lifts many restrictions on abortion. The Pope sees this as an affront, and is threatening to drag his feet on other issues where he and Obama agree, like foreign policy and the environment. Apparently everyone sees the fact that the Pope might be less willing to work with Obama as a problem, but that seems weird to me. The Pope doesn't make public policy in America. Obama does.

I recall a documentary I saw on JFK's primary race once. People were concerned that JFK, the first and only Catholic president, might be secretly working for the Pope from Washington. Additionally, Catholics are increasingly distancing their politics from the Vatican, so perhaps Obama should just focus on working with Catholics themselves instead of the Pope.

Case to Watch

Via Emily at RH Reality Check, the Fourth Circuit Court has agreed to re-hear a Virginia ban on late-term abortions, something prompted by the Supreme Court's ruling on Gonzales v. Carhart, the case that upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. Originally the court determined that Virginia's ban was "substantially broader" than the federal abortion ban. Virginia's Republican attorney general, Bob McDonnell, asked the court to re-hear the entire case. Now we'll have to wait and see if the court will uphold its previous decision or if it will change the ruling.

Debating Kennedy's Position

I wrote a follow up to my previous piece on the Supreme Court for my column this week over at RH Reality Check. Some legal scholars are debating the position of Justice Anthony Kennedy -- someone most find far more to the right than to the center despite his "swing vote" status.

[Ann] Bartow's theory, then, is that the Supreme Court is simply waiting for Bush to leave office to overturn Roe and throw a wrench into the plans of a new administration, one that looks likely to be Democratic. "They have the votes to take a case now, [what] they're waiting for is a Democratic president and Congress," Bartow told me over the phone. "It would really stall any work they want to do." The Court did just decline to hear three abortion-related cases this session, but has time to accept a direct challenge to Roe later in its term – which either the South Dakota abortion ban or the Colorado personhood amendment, both on the ballot this November, could supply later this year.

Bartow's argument sparked a heated debate in the pro-choice blogosphere. Scott Lemieux, an assistant professor of political science at Hunter College in New York and contributor to the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, disagrees with Bartow that the Court is "that crudely political," even though he acknowledges that "to some degree, the Supreme Court follows the election returns and it's not a completely apolitical body." Lemieux says that the Court elected to hear Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 just before another high-stakes presidential election. The ruling on Casey upheld the right to an abortion, but established that regulations and restrictions could be placed on that right, as long as it didn't place an "undue burden" on the woman. Kathryn Kolbert, the ACLU attorney who argued the case, specifically tailored her argument to force the justices to address the central holdings of Roe before the 1992 presidential election.

Read the whole piece here.

Weekend DVD Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days

This weekend I watched an incredible movie. It was a foreign film called 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days about two college-aged women in Romania who seek an illegal abortion for one of them in the last days of communism there (spoilers to follow). The movie was chilling and very emotional. Not only did the plot lend itself to such a riveting plot, but the film was crafted beautifully -- shot composition and cinematography was incredible.

The abortion scene was cringe-inducing, especially considering that the abortionist negotiated sex with both the woman having the abortion and her college roommate as part of the payment. To me this became a huge message for why abortion shouldn't carry legal consequences. It's not as if abortion would just cease to exist if it were illegal -- instead abortions would turn to the black market and all that goes with it. Suddenly women are subject to terrible conditions when they are desperate to get an abortion. They were expensive, risky, and terrifying. It's not something I'd be eager to see return here in America.

Interestingly enough, I wondered why a communist state would outlaw abortion, since presumably it wouldn't do so for religious reasons. A quick search into the New York Times archives points to the fact that Nicolae Ceausescu, communist leader of Romania for nearly two decades, strictly outlawed abortion and contraception as means of population promotion. This is the ugly side of anti-abortion laws -- ones that promoted population growth at any means. Although the Times article from the 1990s says that Romania still had an alarmingly high abortion rate, especially when compared with other European countries, an updated statistic from the United Nations Population fund shows that the rate has been dropping dramatically in the last several years (from 7,185 cases in 1999 to 2,892 in 2004). Romania does this by promoting the use of contraception through it's public health system.

An interesting aspect of the film was that it told the story not through the woman seeking the abortion or the abortion provider, but rather through centering on the woman's companion. By doing this, the film showed that the woman was fearful about needing an abortion of her own one day, even getting in a terrible fight with her boyfriend (who seemed to care for her, but was unable to understand the risks). It also focused on the struggles of the role of a caretaker for someone who is going through such a risky and terrifying illegal abortion.

Ultimately, abortion isn't going anywhere, even if it should become illegal. Instead it becomes more about the barriers the law places on a woman who is desperate to obtain one. It will be the marginalized women that will suffer the most.

Anti-Choice Democrats

Via Matt Yglesias, this New York Times article on anti-choice Democrats shows that while Democrats seem to be making gains in a lot of traditionally conservative places (the article's key example is Bob Casey as an anti-choice Democrat from Pennsylvania), they tend to be electing very socially conservative people to those positions.

The article noted that the nation is "divided" on the issue of abortion, showing Americans roughly split between identifying as "pro-life" and "pro-choice." The piece I wrote recently on pro-choice Republicans shows that this ultimately comes down to branding. The pro-life movement has a done a good job of promoting "a culture of life" and "choosing life," but their framework fundamentally hinges on a pro-choice stance -- that women can make a choice not to have an abortion. Many people might identify as "pro-life" because they don't like abortions. They're icky. They wouldn't have one. But the answer to the question of whether or not abortion should be legal changes those proportions slightly. Responses also slant a lot more pro-choice when you ask whether or not the government should have a say over someone's right to abortion.

When you get down to the specifics, it seems that there are a lot of Americans that are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, but they don't exactly want it to be illegal. The very fact that exceptions like rape and incest (conditions that are very difficult to "prove" to have a timely abortion). The very label "pro-life" could very well mean that you don't think people should have abortions, but they're not really willing to make such a private choice subject to the law.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how the Democrats the Times profiled fall into that paradigm, but what this does say to me about party politics that while Democrats have been willing to take on a strong pro-choice platform, when it comes down to getting more seats in Congress, pro-choice is still negotiable. Obviously both parties want to be "big tents" with differing views on various issues, including choice. But when women's health and autonomy is still considered negotiable that's very disheartening to a lot of pro-choice activists.

“Personhood” Wouldn’t Make Abortion Illegal … Yet

Dana Goldstein over at TAPPED points to some ads being run about the Amendment 48 ballot initiative in Colorado–most commonly referred to as the “personhood amendment.” The amendment seeks to define a fertilized egg as an individual with full constitutional rights. There’s been a lot reported on this (including some research I’ve done), namely that it would make things like not only abortion but also Plan B and contraception illegal. But while researching a forthcoming piece on the Supreme Court, I found that there’s one important thing to keep in mind about ballot initiatives like this and the abortion ban proposed in South Dakota: the right to abortion is still protected under the Constitution.

Such initiatives are, of course, designed to directly challenge Roe v. Wade, but if and until the Supreme Court hears such a case, a federal or state judge would be obligated to immediately place an injunction on such a law. That means that even if it passes, it would be immediately frozen. Now it’s hard to say if the Supreme Court is interested in overturning Roe or not (this is actually under great dispute among pro-choice bloggers), but even if Colorado managed to pass a law restricting such rights, abortion still wouldn’t be illegal in Colorado until the Supreme Court declares that it is.

It’s understandable to be worried about the Supreme Court, especially since it made a pretty sweeping restriction on abortion recently in upholding the legality of the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. (Note that “partial-birth abortion” isn’t anything close to a medical term.) While pro-choice activists worry about the implications of the Colorado and South Dakota amendments, the result won’t be instant–the bans will only go into place if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Catholics “Swing” on Choice

The New York Times has an article about Catholic “swing” voters making their decisions based on a candidate’s position about abortion. There was a lot of buzz about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi recently debating choice. Biden and Pelosi, both Catholic, seem to abide by the idea that there needs to be a separation between belief and public policy when it comes to choice, something supported recently by a poll. The Times article says that:

Progressive Catholics complain that by wading into the history of church opposition to abortion — Mr. Biden brought up St. Thomas Aquinas, Ms. Pelosi discussed St. Augustine — Democratic officials are starting a distracting debate with the church hierarchy.

But this is because the church hierarchy is engaging in something it should never do–attempting to make public policy. More than 70 percent of Catholics polled found the bishops’ position on abortion irrelevant to the public policy debate. Basing public policy on one subset of Christianity just seems like a bad idea.

Cross posted on Pushback.

Republicans Divided on Choice

In the increasing age of the ideological polarization of social issues, the Republican Majority for Choice seemed like a fresh breath of air when I interviewed one of their co-chairs at the Republican National Convention. But the RMC is perhaps a little too optimistic about the outcome of a McCain/Palin ticket:

In the end, the battle becomes about justices on the Supreme Court. Though McCain has made his judicial philosophy clear -- and essentially guaranteed the nomination of a "strict constructionist" justice or justices in the mold of Robert and Alito -- Stockman sees the Democratic Congress as a buffer to the most egregious of his possible choices: "Believe it or not, I'm not as concerned because Democrats will control the Senate and McCain can't propose [a judicial nominee] who's on the record as being anti-choice," Stockman said.

Despite RMC's optimism that McCain will prioritize other issues over women's health and rights, his track record aligns overwhelmingly with a pro-life agenda. As Sarah Blustain reported in The New Republic earlier this summer, McCain has voted against women's health and rights issues -- ranging from birth control access to abortion -- 125 out of 130 times.

Read the rest of what I wrote over at RH Reality Check.