The real catastrophic defect.

Good news about a decline in the abortion rate.

The comedienne Margaret Cho has a blog and what's more, she posts there often--long, interesting posts with a political perspective that is very different from mine.

One of my readers brought Cho's blog to my attention, because Cho has written about her own abortion while reflecting on the execution of Paul Hill.

Cho writes:

"The protesters harass women outside of clinics, acting like there is some house party happening up in there. It's not Burke Williams you idiots. We are not going in the building for a 'Day of Beauty'. No oxygen facials, seaweed detox body wrap, hand and foot fantasy. No kicking back with your homies, bobbing your head to 'Nellyville' with a strawberry daquiri in your hand and an iv in your arm, talking 'bout,'"I just killed my fetus. How you like me now! Hooo . Hey Shorty - it's NOT your birthday, it's NOT your birthday…. Hooo…'

I had an abortion, and you know what? It fucking hurts like hell. The fact that the medical community has not made early termination easier and less painful is just another example of how sexist our country is. You lie in a big room, filled with crying teenage girls, pissed off women in their '20s, someone older like me, reading a Redbook from 1994 and beating myself up at the same time because the rubber broke and I didn't even fucking like that guy in the first place and then occasionally other random thoughts like 'wow, I am going to try to bake that at home', and countless others. We are collectively suffering, because pregnancy feels like there is somebody in there. And for whatever reason, and every reason is the right reason, you can't have a tenant. So you gotta evict. Nothing personal. The doctor sticks a Cuisinart into the upper reaches of your vagina and turns it on Puree. And then you see that the tenant has checked out, leaving you hollowed out and alone, and all you have to show for it is a bloody hole and a recipe for lemon poppy upside down cake. The secret is to shave lemon rind into the batter, but not too much. It will be bitter if you aren't careful. You come out, never wanting to have sex again, feeling sick, bleeding like Theresa Saldana after she got stabbed 52 times, and the protesters have the gall to call you a murderer. Fuck you. Seriously. Fucking fuck you."

This is about the most accurate description I've ever read of life in the abortion war zone.

Apart from the description, it sounds like Cho is saying, "It's already a nightmare and the pro-life community is just making it worse."

Do you think so? An alternative explanation is that it's a nightmare, and some people try to distract themselves from that pain and trauma by turning their anger outward and finding a target in the pro-life community.

It's not surprising that Cho would have a lot of anger because she recognizes that in an abortion, a fetus is killed.

Lots of women who aborted in the 70s and 80s are angry because they feel like they were lied to by those who told them, "It's just a blob of tissue."

This is partly what has fueled the drive to mandate that abortion clinics must show pictures of embryological development or sonograms from ultrasounds to women seeking abortion. In states that do mandate this, the abortion rates fall, typically by 20-30%.

I imagine that some members of the pro-life community thought that the abortion rate would fall much, much more than that. "If women fully realized what a 7-week old fetus looks like, they would see that it is a human being, not a blob of tissue, and they wouldn't abort it."

Margaret Cho speaks to the truth of the remaining 70-80%--the women who are aware that the fetus is not a blob of tissue but who feel that it is morally acceptable to kill it, anyway.

When Cho says, "You can't have a tenant. So you gotta evict" she is capturing a key part of the thought process in abortion.

What Cho is getting at is a rationale for abortion that was made famous (to the extent that philosophy arguments can be called famous) by Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense of Abortion, published in 1971.

Thomson argues that even if the fetus is an innocent human being with the identical right to life of a healthy adult, it is still morally permissible to kill it. The reason it is morally permissible to kill it is because we would all agree that it is sometimes morally permissible to kill innocent adult human beings who have encroached on our territory.

Thomson's violinist argument asks you to consider a hypothetical situation. Your blood, and your blood alone, is an exact match for the blood of the world's best violinist. He has been stricken by a rare and fatal kidney disease. The only way for him to recover is to be hooked up to your body for nine months while you lay on a bed next to him in a hospital room for that period. The Society of Music Lovers captures you one night and proceeds to hook you up to the violinist so that your blood can course through his veins, restoring him to health.

Thomson argues that given this situation, most people feel that they would be morally entitled to disconnect from the violinist and walk out of the room. They feel this way even though they agree that the violinist--who is in a coma and has no idea what is going on--is both innocent and possesses the same right to life that anyone else does.

I'm not going to go over what I think the flaws are in Thomson's argument. David Oderberg does that in this book.

Thomson's violinist analogy captures approximately what it feels like to be pregnant when you didn't intend to be pregnant. So does Cho.

The pro-life community needs to grasp that abortions often occur even when the woman has some sense of the humanity of the fetus. Showing pictures of 7-week-old fetuses isn't going to change that woman's mind.

One final observation. I know pro-lifers who would be angrily resentful if they woke up in a hospital bed to discover that their body, against their will and without their permission, was being used to support another human being. They would feel entirely within their rights to rip out the wires connecting them and leave the room.

Living the Redeemed Life.

This is the webpage of Molly White, a woman who speaks out in Texas and across the country about post-abortion trauma.

It's encouraging to find more and more people and groups coming together to give a voice to the reality that abortion hurts women.

Rachel's Hope.

Today has been a banner day for finding new post-abortion ministries on the web! Rachel's Hope is based in San Diego and it will be added to my "regional" links list.

After the Choice, another post-abortion ministry. I'm adding it to my list of regional links.

News from The Elliot Institute:

"A recent study published in the prestigious American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) attracted the ire of the Allan Guttmacher Institute (AGI).

The study by Coleman PK, Reardon DC, Rue VM, and Cougle JR, "History of induced abortion in relation to substance use during pregnancies carried to term," appeared in Am J Obstet Gynecol 2002; 187(5):1673-8.

Read more about the study here.

In a letter published in an August 2003 issue of AJOG, Alan Guttmacher researchers tried to dismiss the findings from this nationally representative study showing that abortion is associated with a higher risk of substance abuse in subsequent pregnancies.

Their arguments were weak but we were delighted to see them published since it gave the authors of the original study, including the Elliot Institute's director, Dr. Reardon, an opportunity to respond and further educate America's ob/gyn's."

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To read the exchange, click here.

Judge tosses out some charges against abortion doctor.

Complicit guilt, explicit healing, from the November 2003 edition of Christianity Today.

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As a Baptist church youth leader, Jerry Little had long preached about the evils of abortion. He and his wife, Debbie, repeatedly opened their home to young, unwed mothers-to-be.

But in 1993, his daughter, Candy, 18, revealed her own pregnancy. Shocked, Little convinced himself that his daughter's case was different and that only an abortion could resolve the issue.

Candy, however, didn't want an abortion.

Little drove his daughter 120 miles from their Amarillo, Texas, home to Lubbock for a clandestine abortion. Once inside the facility, Candy became so distraught that the abortionist refused to do the procedure.

But Little persisted, talking her into the procedure. Two days later, Little and his daughter returned. Although Candy continued to cry uncontrollably, this time the abortionist took Little's money.

When Candy returned to the waiting room, she gazed vacantly in her father's direction and said, "Let's go." He immediately knew their relationship would never be the same.

More...

Speaker draws other with stories. From the Iowa News-Register:

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GALESBURG - Every day Luana Stotenberg thinks about the three children she aborted when she was younger, wondering what they would look like and what kind of people they would have become.

Stotenberg, of Davenport, Iowa, had an abortion when she was 17, 18 and 19. Because of her abortions, she is infertile.

"I'll never know what a child of my own would look like," Stotenberg said.

She said she turned to drug and alcohol abuse after the first abortion and became promiscuous, which led to two subsequent pregnancies she aborted.

More...

Don't let anyone pressure you.

A high school senior's advice column.

From the Philadelphia Daily News, Joey's wife aborted lover's kid.

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WANNABE mobster Billy Rinick dropped a bombshell at his murder trial yesterday, testifying that he drove the wife of jailed mob boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino to Maryland so she could abort the lovechild of her affair with a New York football player.

The "did-he-really-say-that?" silence in Common Pleas Judge Jane Cutler Greenspan's courtroom was deafening.

Accounting for his whereabouts hours before the slaying of Adam Finelli, Rinick revealed that what he had previously described as driving Deborah Merlino to and from Maryland for "some surgery" had been, in fact, for an abortion she needed after "cheating on her husband."

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Remember the girl that Sonny Corleone is doing the deed with in the opening scenes of The Godfather?

In the novel, she ends up in Las Vegas where she becomes the girlfriend of an abortionist. This is a man who lost his medical license (presumably for supplying abortions--this is prior to 1973) who then heads west to become the man who keeps Mob show girls in business. He is generally portrayed as a sympathetic character.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is portrayed as part of the Las Vegas wallpaper. It's a nice piece of verisimilitude.

This reminds me of the marvelous scene at the end of "Godfather II" where Kaye (Diane Keaton) realizes that there is in fact something she can say to Michael so that he will accept the dissolution of their marriage.

"It was an abortion, Michael! IT. WAS. AN. ABORTION."

Update: See the comments box for the Correct Quote, courtesy of The Raving Atheist.

"The self-pro-claimed right-to-life movement and its conservative allies are on a winning streak that is deeply troubling to some."

I think of men and women all over the country, going about their days with furrowed brow, sleeping fitfully, tossing and turning in their cozy beds, perhaps awakening from a nightmare to the sickening realization that it WASN'T a dream: It's true. It's really true that the federal government is about to make it illegal to stick a scissors into the skull of a 5-month old fetus so as to crush and liquify his or her brain.

Oh, the horror.

Eleanor Smeal gives a small college audience in Massachusetts oddly diffuse reasons for why they should participate in the March for Choice planned for next year.

A good overview of the partial-birth abortion ban in World Magazine.

Girls Will Be Girls.

This movie features male actors playing women. One of the three main characters is in love with the doctor who performed her abortion. She wants to have a child with him.

Does that sound farfetched?

I know a woman who became infatuated with her abortionist as the abortion occurred. She felt a deep romantic attachment to him for years, which may have been motivated by locking onto the doctor as a replacement for the baby.

An update on the Tuck-Blackmon race in Mississippi. Blackmon challenged Tuck three weeks ago to sign an affidavit that Tuck had never had an abortion.