Amanda at Pandagon hits the nail on the head with her post on the Roberts nomination: even if he is eventually confirmed, Americans must be made aware of how much is at stake due to the right wing’s Sex Panic.

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Nick at Alas, a Blog, has an excellent post about the burdens and disruptions of pregnancy even for those who want a child.

These [three paragraphs of pains and inconveniences from a “normal, complication-free pregnancy”] are all minor niggles compared to the joy of knowing that I’m having the baby I always longed for. . . . But it has had one effect on me: what patience I ever had with the argument that “if you don’t want the baby you can just put it up for adoption” has vanished forever.

Women who want an abortion don’t object to the fetus, they object to the pregnancy. If the technology existed to remove a fetus unharmed from its mother and transfer it into an artificial womb, with no more complications than an abortion presents, abortion would disappear. Putting the baby up for adoption doesn’t solve the problem: the woman is still forced to act as a life-support system for nine months.

I want this baby passionately, and I still wish it was possible for me to take a break from being pregnant every now and again. Just pop the baby into an artificial womb for a couple of hours and do my own thing without having to worry about how it might affect the baby. And if I feel like this with a wanted pregnancy, how much worse would a woman feel who became pregnant as a result of contraceptive failure and remains pregnant because she’s been denied access to abortion?

Pro-lifers often brush this question under the carpet. There’s no admission that pregnancy is a process, and one that uses up a woman’s physical and emotional resources, sometimes alarmingly. They treat pregnancy as a passive state, purely a question of not having an abortion.

That’s not how it is.

[emphasis original]

Well said. The comments also offer an interesting discussion of the motivations for abortion, and whether “artificial womb” technology would really answer the case in every unwanted pregnancy.

Check it out.

The anti-choice right wing has done itself proud today, jumping on an FDA adverse incident report involving RU-486 with all the illogic, bad thinking, and stupid viciousness they can muster, before the report was even released to the press.

This New York Times article notes that 2 woman have died from intrauterine infection after aborting with misoprostol, or “RU-486″, bringing the total of deaths associated with this drug to 5 all together. Infection is known to be the cause of death in at least 4 of these cases. The Times article explicitly notes that:

[T]he risks of death from infection for users of the pill is roughly one in 100,000 uses - similar to the risks of death from infection after surgical abortions or childbirth, Dr. Galson said.

“There are no alarm bells going off because of this rate, but we are watching it closely,” [Dr. Steven Galson, Director of the FDA Center for drug evaluations] said.

Infection of the uterus after expulsion of the uterine contents is a known complication of childbirth and spontaneous or therapeutic abortion; it usually results from retained products of conception in the uterus. As the article notes:

Dr. Cynthia Summers, a spokeswoman for Danco Laboratories, Mifeprex’s maker, said she did not think the medicine caused bacterial infections. “This same infection has been reported after childbirth and other gynecological situations,” Dr. Summers said.

In other words, “incomplete abortion” sometimes occurs no matter what the trigger for expulsion of the uterine contents. It is the aftermath of that expulsion - not the cause of the expulsion, whether pharmaceutical, surgical, or natural - that is the problem. In this case, it is not that RU-486 caused these women’s abortions, but that the abortions appear not to have gone perfectly smoothly, that indirectly resulted in their deaths - just as it does in other cases not involving RU-486. This seems a perfectly reasonable interpretation of these events, especially, as Summers notes, given that the same consequences are seen in a variety of other situations, and even more so that the overall rate of infection post-expulsion is roughly the same for all such causes. Responsible people knowledgeable about these issues recognize this. (Note that the Steven Galson quoted above, debunking any causal role of RU-486 in these deaths, is the man who, in violation of standard FDA practice, signed the unprecedented letter of denial of over-the-counter sale certification for “Plan B” emergency contraception - so he’s hardly a pro-choice activist.) What did the anti-choicers have to say about the matter, then?

Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a conservative women’s group, said news of the latest death proved that label changes [proposed in response to the 5 deaths] would not make the drug safe.

“Changing the label the last time clearly didn’t help the latest woman who died,” Ms. Wright said. “Sadly, people who support RU-486 apparently believe the risk of death is preferable to having a child.”

This is stupid on a variety of levels.

First, having a child carries the same risk of death from infection as having a chemical abortion - so there is nothing to be gained by not using RU-486. In fact, the overall risk of death from all causes in childbirth is greater than the risk from any form of abortion until very late in the pregnancy - so if avoiding death is the motivating factor, abortion is the preferable choice! At the very least, since you cannot reduce your risk of death by infection by choosing childbirth over abortion, it is not clear what Wright is yammering about.The idiocy of suggesting that choosing abortion means choosing “the risk of death” over childbirth is simply staggering - the facts are completely the opposite of what she implies, yet that has no influence on her.

Second, RU-486 doesn’t cause these deaths from infection. They occur by a mechanism that accompanies any emptying of the uterus, including spontaneous abortion and childbirth. And since they occur at roughly the same rate by all such mechanisms, foregoing abortion and giving birth does nothing to reduce your risk of death from infection. Again, the facts completely belie what she is saying, yet she has no compunction about it.

Also missing from these remarks is any reasonable sense of proportion. Not only is this woman completely indifferent to the relative risks of abortion and childbirth (i.e., that the risk of abortion overall is lower than that associated with childbirth, and the risks of death from infection are roughly the same in each case), there is no sense of what this absolute level of risk means in general. A risk of death of 1 in 100,000 compares favorably with the risk of death in a given one-year period associated with home falls (over 3 per 100,000), being a car driver (24 per 100,000), being a pedestrian (2.3 per 100,000), owning a registered motorcycle (61 per 100,000), and so on. Unless the Concerned Women of America are “concerned” enough to excoriate pedestrians who “apparently believe the risk of death” while walking is acceptable, they are hardly in a position to criticize those who choose to run a much lower risk of death by chemical abortion out of, undoubtedly, much stronger motivations.

Finally, there is the simple viciousness of pouncing on these women’s deaths the momen they are announced to score these stupid and fraudulent political points. Since the anti-choice movement does not balk at terrorism and murder, they can hardly be expected to eschew callousness and bad taste, but it is still ugly to witness.

Bad math, bad thinking, just plain bad sense and bad character: add in the terrorism, murder, and misogyny and that pretty much sums up what’s wrong with the anti-choice right wing.

PS: Anti-kudos to the Times for their inflammatory headline, “2 More Women Die After Abortion Pills”. A more realistic headline might have been “499,995 Women Obtain Safe and Effective Non-Surgical Abortions” or “Infection Rate From Abortion Equal to Natural Childbirth”, or “Abortion Still Safer Than Term Pregnancy”.