The Quote Of The Year So Far?

"Everyone should be abstinent, or whatever, but it's not realistic at all."



No truer words, dear Bristol. No truer words.

BTW, later in the interview, Holy Mother Sarah basically agreed that abstinence-only education "sounds naive".

Tell Me Again Who's Serious About "Life"

The next time you anyone from the Criminalization Caucus claims that anyone who refuses to throw women in jail isn't "serious" about eliminating abortions, remind them of this.

That's right. According to the American Life (sic) League, somehow the fact that Krispy Kreme is giving away free donuts on Inauguration Day to celebrate the fact that Americans are "free" to "choose" their President makes the company the purveyor of "pro-abortion donuts".

And remember that this isn't some looney-fringe group within the "pro-life" movement. This group claims to be "the largest grassroots Catholic pro-life education organization in the United States."

Scary.

Why Criminalization of Abortion Will Never Work

Those who believe any and all efforts to eliminate abortions must include criminalization, and who accuse anyone who refuses to push for criminalization of being "pro-abortion" or "pro-death" or whatever the inflammatory rhetoric of the day happens to be, have to deal with these facts:

The pills were misoprostol, a prescription drug that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for reducing gastric ulcers and that researchers say is commonly, though illegally, used within the Dominican community to induce abortion. Two new studies by reproductive-health providers suggest that improper use of such drugs is one of myriad methods, including questionable homemade potions, frequently employed in attempts to end pregnancies by women from fervently anti-abortion cultures despite the widespread availability of safe, legal and inexpensive abortions in clinics and hospitals.

The articles describes the ease with which women seeking to terminate pregnancies are able to do so in a way far removed from the doctors' office:

Physicians say that women can obtain the pills either through pharmacies that are willing to bend the rules and provide the medicine without a prescription or by having the drugs shipped from overseas.

The article focuses on the pressure that women from certain cultures experience which leads them to these "private" abortions. However, the phenomenon demonstrates that the criminalization of abortion will be almost entirely ineffective, and ultimately unenforceable, in actually reducing the number of abortions.
Remember these facts when the Bishops start their rhetoric against the FOCA strawman.

If You Choose Not To Decide . . .

You still have made a choice.

An often unspoken premise of the argument that a "pro-life" position on abortion requires that abortion be criminalized is that the State (at either the state or federal level) has the authority gets to decide that the life within the womb takes precedence over the autonomy of the life of the woman within whose body that womb exists.

Left unanswered by the advocates of criminalization is this: If the State is explicitly granted that authority (even before the point of viability), then what is to stop the State from deciding that the needs of the State (and all the lives encompassed therein) take precedence over both the autonomy of an individual mother and the life within her womb?

In other words, if the State could legally prohibit abortion, why couldn't the State legally compel it?

This is not an abstract hypothetical exercise. The Chinese government is in the process of forcing a Muslim Uighur woman to terminate her 26-week pregnancy because she already has two children.

Because of its population of 1.3 billion, China maintains a one-child-per-family rule on majority Han Chinese.
Minority urban couples may have two children, while rural farmers may have three.
Arzigul holds a rural household registration but her husband is registered in an urban area.
Local officials eventually demanded that she terminate her pregnancy.

China argues that its forced-abortion policy is for the good of the State:

China says its population would have risen far more if 400 million abortions had not been performed in the past three decades.

If there's a legal distinction between the State's authority to prohibit abortion and the authority to compel abortion, I can't see it.

Presumably, criminalization advocates do not consider forced-abortion to be a realistic possibility in the U.S. But, is that assumption warranted?

Consider that a key element of the "welfare reform" movement of the '90s pushed by so-called "pro-life" conservatives was a policy of discouraging women on welfare from becoming pregnant and punishing them when they bore children. Do you remember the infamous "welfare queens"?

And don't forget that it was just this year when a Louisana State Republican Representative suggested sterilizing people on welfare:

LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.

P.S., one of the groups trying to fight China's "one child policy" is the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes voluntary family planning services as well as pre-natal and post-natal healthcare for women and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. The Bush Administration, in response to lobbying from right-wing groups, decided to cut off U.S. funding for UNFPA, a decision that the incoming Obama Administration is expected to overturn in January.