The Washington Post surveys the continuing onslaught against reproductive health rights across the board, concluding that

This year’s state legislative season draws to a close having produced a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman’s access to abortion or contraception. . . .

“Every year, we see a lot of legislation introduced,” said Elizabeth Nash, a public policy associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research group that specializes in family and reproductive health. “This year, we have seen a lot more action than in recent years. The level of bills enacted has been much higher.”

Read the article for the whole dismaying list.

The Post does a good job highlighting the general strategies the right wing is now - quite openly -pursuing: “death by 1000 cuts” and a continuing move to sneak “fetal personhood” into the law.

David Bereit, director of program development for the American Life League, which opposes abortion in all circumstances, supports both the short-term efforts and the long-term strategy aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade .

“People are becoming frustrated more progress hasn’t been made at the federal level and feel they don’t have as much control to change things there,” he said. “If we can’t outright ban abortion, what can we do to make it less prevalent? We see it’s much easier to take up funding and parental notification measures at the state level.” . . .

“This year, the pro-life forces united in order to pass some legislation,” Greenfield said. The other measures include stricter parental notification requirements and a provision adding an “unborn child” as a distinct victim to the state’s criminal code for charges of murder in the first and second degree. In its new informed-consent law, South Dakota requires physicians to tell women seeking an abortion about the “existing relationship between a pregnant woman and her unborn child,” and that all abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.”

The language in that law was written with the expectation it could be used to “help tear down the wall put up by the Roe versus Wade decision,” Greenfield said. . . .

In its end-of-the-session newsletter, Texas Right to Life hinted at the variety of approaches its side pursued.

Supporters “did not muster the strength to pass any of the multiple freestanding pro-life bills,” it noted. However, “several major pro-life victories came in the form of ‘under the radar’ amendments.” Those included measures to shift state money to abortion alternatives and health care for unborn children, stricter parental consent requirements and a ban on third-trimester abortions “when the abortion is not necessary to prevent the death of the woman.”

The handwriting has never been more clearly on the wall, and the right wingers have become unusually confident during this current - temporary - reactionary swing. Not only are their tactics unmistakeable, but they’re telling us about them. It’s vital to organize to hold the tenuous freedoms that have so far been won.

As Jessica at Feministing says: ‘[S]eeing all of the horribleness i[n] one article is quite something.”

Effect Measure reports on a petition circulated by the American Council on Science and Health, demanding that the EPA reject “junk science” in its determinations of carinogenicity. The “junk science” in question: all tests on animal models.

That’s right - this right-wing lobbying group wants cancer-causing chemicals to be tested on humans - meaning released into the environment without any testing at all, until we just kind of see what happens.

Their argument contains two flavors of bullshit: (a) that animal testing is invalid because it involves “the administration of superhigh doses irrelevant to ordinary human exposure levels”, and (b) this testing is illegal under the “Information Quality Act”, which mandates the “equality, objectivity, utility, and integrity” of information released by government agencies.

The latter point is just nonsense, of course, and Effect Measure deals decisively with the former:

[A]nimals (rodents) are a standard model for biological processes of relevance to humans (which is why drug companies and medical researchers have been using them for a century). They are well understood and are the only sentinels for detecting carcinogenicity of any use to public health. Since chemically induced cancer has a latency period of decades (typically 20 years or more), waiting for it to appear in human populations would meant that once detected, even if exposure would cease instantly (which can never happen), it would take another 20 or more years to eliminate the cancers from exposure (all the cancers induced in the 20 years exposure prior to detection). But even then, the chances of detecting any but the most powerful carcinogens in human populations (via epidemiology) is small. Epidemiology is a very insensitive tool. I say this with some authority, as I am a cancer epidemiologist specializing in chemical exposures and have authored numerous peer reviewed studies in that area over many years.

The main rhetorical lever ACSH employs is the use of high doses in the animal studies, doses that are much higher than usually faced by humans. But as ACSH knows well (but didn’t divulge) there is a technical requirement for using these doses. If one were to use doses in animals predicted to cause cancer at a rate we would consider a public health hazard, we would need tens of thousands of animals to test a single dose, mode of exposure and rodent species or strain. This makes using those doses infeasible. Thus a Maximum Tolerated Dose is used, one that causes no other pathology except possibly cancer and doesn’t result in more than a 10% weight loss. The assumption here is that something that causes cancer at high doses in these animals will also do so at low doses. This is biologically reasonable. . . .

We know of no false negatives with this process. Every chemical we know that causes cancer in humans also does so in rodents (with the possible exception of inorganic trivalent arsenic, which is equivocal). The reverse question, whether everything that causes cancer in animals also is a human carcinogen, is not testable without doing the actual natural experimen: waiting to see if people get cancer on exposure, an experiment ACSH is only too happy to conduct on the American people to make their corporate sponsors happy.

The concept of “dose-responsiveness” is fundamental to environmental health: that the more of a chemical you are exposed to, the greater its effects (or the greater their likelihood) will be. This is not only intuitively reasonable, it is scientifically proven by a vast experimental foundation. And this fact allows for backwards extrapolation from high doses: if certain high dose levels create a certain response in a test population, lower doses can be expected to create a certain (correspondingly lower) response at predictable levels. This allows for testing under pragmatically-possible conditions using small populations exposed to high doses (hundreds, not tens of thousands, of subjects), with results that can be extrapolated to larger populations at smaller doses. The ACSH’s disingenuous suggestion would make it impossible to do safety testing at all - which is precisely their goal, as revealed by their complaints about

health panics, public outcry, activist crusades against chemicals, and waste of resources from unnecessary abatement, cleanup, and product recall/reformulation/replacement.

Yet more right-wing fake science - and fake logic, fake law, and fake mathematics.

Hat tip: Lindsay Beyerstein.