Michael Gerson, Bush administration tool and terminal sufferer from Conservative Comprehension Disorder, continues his pattern of getting everything exactly backwards in his Washington Post-sponsored campaign of attacks on Barack Obama. The day after April Fool’s Day (he must have missed a deadline), Gerson published another misinformed screed, this one claiming that Obama is an “extremist” on abortion for opposing laws that would have sentenced women to death. As usual with Gerson and the forced-pregnancy crowd generally, almost everything he says is factually false, and a repetition of standard right-wing myths. The column consists of nothing more than Gerson and the Post carrying water for the organized anti-woman crowd by repeating their well-worn talking points verbatim, with no pretense of originality or reportorial integrity.

He begins with a standard myth that, for reasons that entirely escape me, has become some sort of cri du combat among forced-pregnancy activists:

In the summer of 1992, as Bill Clinton solidified his control over the Democratic Party, Robert P. Casey Sr. . . . was banned from speaking to the Democratic convention for the heresy of being pro-life. The elder Casey (now deceased) was then the governor of Pennsylvania — one of the most prominent elected Democrats in the country. He was an economic progressive in the Roosevelt tradition. But his Irish Catholic conscience led him to oppose abortion. So the Clintons chose to humiliate him.

I simply don’t know why this story keeps coming up, or why anyone cares. It hardly makes sense even if you don’t know the facts - it’s not like a prime-time speaking slot at a political campaign is some sort of birthright that Casey was cheated out of - and it’s an unusually weird motivation for stripping women of their bodily integrity (”We must eliminate reproductive autonomy to avenge the memory of Robert P. ‘Who?’ Casey!”). But it’s also false.

At the time of the 1992 convention (unlike now), the Democratic nomination was already sewn up. Clinton was the official nominee, and he was running on an explicitly pro-choice platform; the official Democratic party platform was also explicitly pro-choice. Casey had refused to endorse Clinton for President even after he sealed the nomination, and had indicated he wanted to get a speaking slot at the convention to speak against reproductive freedom. So he wasn’t invited to. That’s the whole story: shockingly, the Democratic party did not grant prime-time speaking time at their official convention to a speaker who opposed their official platform, stated that he would use his speaking time to undermine the platform, disagreed with the nominee on a major political issue, and refused to endorse the nominee. It’s beyond bizarre, it’s simply stupid dishonesty to pretend there’s anything scandalous, underhanded, or unfair in that - still less that it was retaliation for his being anti-choice; no fewer than 8 prominent anti-choice Democrats spoke at the convention, they just didn’t use their opportunity to explicitly renounce their candidate’s and party’s platform. The party was engaged in an election campaign and they carefully coordinated their convention to promote their platform and support their nominee - that’s what parties are for. Casey openly intended to do exactly the opposite, and so he wasn’t given space on the official convention program to play his loose-cannon tricks. Anybody who isn’t now saying “No shit, Sherlock” is an idiot. And for Gerson to pretend that was some kind of “humiliation” of Casey (he uses the word twice - never once mentioning that Casey was the one not playing ball) is beyond idiotic; Casey explicitly intended to embarrass his party and its nominee at their own convention, and announced as much - and was then not invited to do so. He had only himself to blame.

But it goes on.

After re-raising the banner of Robert P. “Who?” Casey’s self-wounded honor, Gerson declares Obama to be “extreme” in his attitudes toward abortion because, apparently, of three positions he took that Gerson somehow cannot fathorm.

Obama’s record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion — a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called “too close to infanticide.” Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be “punished with a baby” because of a crisis pregnancy — hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

What is it that, to Gerson is beyond the pale? What is so “extreme” that it unfits Obama for the presidency?

Intact dilation and extraction (”IDX”) is a clinical procedure used in some cases of very late-term abortion - reportedly about 5,000 cases per year at most, which was well under 1/2 of 1% of all abortions performed at that time. It was termed “partial-birth” abortion as a propaganda tactic, and as a means of crafting bans supposedly aimed at a specific procedure (intact dilation and extraction, which does have a specific medical definition) that, by vagueness of terminology (”partial birth” has no medical definition) could be extended to cover a wide range of third-trimester abortions. IDX is the procedure of choice when aborting a large fetus because it allows for lesser dilation of the woman’s cervix than a regular delivery, but does not involve complete disarticulation of fetal limbs inside the uterus; it is thus safer for the woman than any alternative at that stage of pregnancy, particularly for very young and undeveloped women. Note that the “partial-birth” abortion ban contains no exceptions for threats to the woman’s health - the GOP explicitly demanded that they be removed from the bill; it also contains no limits on gestational age (meaning that it applies throughout the pregnancy, not just in cases of the last weeks of viability that its supporters invariably harped on). Note particularly that it does not, in fact, ban abortion at any time; it only bans one (vaguely-described) type of procedure used in abortion. In other words, the effect of the so-called partial-birth abortion ban is, exclusively, to force women to use a more-dangerous procedure for late-term abortion when a safer one is available, while explicitly denying the woman’s health as a mitigating factor in choosing the safer procedure.

For Gerson, it is “extreme” not to ban a woman’s choice of the safest option for surgical procedures that themselves are not banned, and to admit that women’s health and safety is a factor in decisionmaking about women’s healthcare. That is the Republican approach to women’s health, and that is what Obama opposed.

Regarding the post-viability abortion bill, the basic requirement was that doctors must provide medical care for fetuses that survive an abortion procedure. This cuts at the distinction between a right to control one’s own body by expelling an unwanted fetus and the right to demand the actual death of that fetus - a distinction that in fact was common in many of the “classic” ethics papers on abortion (Thomson, Warren, etc.). Most pro-choice activists were not opposed to that requirement in itself, but many were wary of the bills promoting it because - as noted above - virtually all legislation supported by anti-choice forces is actually crafted as a stalking horse for a complete repeal of women’s rights. That appears to have been the case in this bill, too.

The oddest thing about the post-viability bills that appeared at both the federal and state levels is that, like much anti-choice legislation, they did not simply state their goals and specify the means to achieve them. Instead, they insisted on introducing wholly unnecessary ideological language that seemed intended to lay the groundwork for a challenge to abortion rights in toto. The most egregious example of this was in the case of the federal “Unborn Victims of Crime” bill, which stipulated that the death of the fetus in an assault on a pregnant woman was to be charged as a separate crime of murder, and included language about “life beginning at conception”, in an obvious attempt to establish legal personhood for the fetus as an attack on abortion rights. Senator Dianne Feinstein offered an amendment that restated the exact terms of the original bill in every particular, with the exception of not defining the fetus as a separate victim with rights under the law. The right wing was beside itself in reaction to the Feinstein amendment - which, again, was precisely identical in effect to the bill they were originally pushing. They did everything to block it (and eventually prevailed by one vote), thereby demonstrating that their only concern was fetal personhood - which was the only thing Feinstein objected to - and not the putative substance of their own bill - which Feinstein endorsed in its entirety. This by itself gave good reason to beware any right-wing bills having to do with the treatment of the fetus. And the post-viability abortion bills were particularly suspect, because they contained even more explicit personhood language than that in the disingenuous, anti-choice fetal-murder bills. It would have been straightforward to simply declare that any fetus born alive should be given medical treatment, as Illinois law had already required for 20 years; instead, they went out of their way to stipulate that any fetus born alive after an abortion was to be considered a person under the law, and then require treatment for them by way of that unnecessary reason. There is obviously a hidden motivation for a law that both duplicates existing requirements and circumambulates its own objectives so deviously - and obviously, also, good reason to be suspicious of that law and its backers.

Obama’s specifically-stated objection to the version of the bill that was offered in Illinois was on those grounds - that he thought it was an attack on abortion rights, and that it appeared to contradict the protection of pregnant women’s rights in the pre-viability period as well. As with the fetal homicide bills, the post-viability bill only had the effect of introducing inflammatory language into an issue that could be, and in this case already had been, easily settled under the law. Obama thus opposed the bill the first two (of three) years it appeared before the IL State Senate (as did the Illinois State Medical Society). In the third year, there was an attempt to modify the bill to meet that objection (in which Obama was not alone), by revising the suspect section to match the similar federal bill, which had wide bipartisan support. And here, there seems to be some confusion about what happened, in part because the state legislature’s own Web site appears to be mistaken on the issue. Terence Jeffrey has a helpful, and refreshingly honest, post at Townhall in which he explains the confusion. Many people have claimed, using the Web site as their source, that Obama used his position as committee chair to pigeonhole the amended bill. But Jeffrey quotes Republican Senators saying their records show the bill did in fact come out of committee, where Obama then voted against it and it failed to pass. I have not found a statement from Obama explicitly addressing his reasons for the vote against the bill in its third, revised, form. The votes against the first two, with their explicit personhood language and ambiguous timeline, are easy to understand. Why Obama voted against it the third time I don’t know, but there were clearly reasons to be suspicious of the bill, and he was with the majority in opposing it.

Those who object to Obama’s actions toward that bill ought to explain why the existing law requiring treatment for viable fetuses had to be superseded by language about personhood. They should also explain what difference in medical practice this bill would have caused, given that the treatment it stipulates is already required under the law. And they should explain if they believe that the state medical societies, civil rights groups, and the majority of the state legislature who also opposed the bill are all as “extreme” as Obama is claimed to be. From here, it looks as if his actions (a) defeated a covert attack on abortion rights, (b) protected the factual and moral definition of personhood from irrational abuse, and (c) left intact an existing provision of law requiring treatment for living infants, identical in effect to that nominally sought by this law’s supporters. Hardly sounds “extreme” to me.

Regarding Obama’s “extreme” support for his daughter, in the interests of brevity I merely refer to to my man Brooklynite’s post on that very topic; he said much what I would say, though I want to emphasize that the fact that not ruining women’s lives - let alone your own daughter’s - with forced pregnancy should be regarded as “extreme” speaks volumes about Gerson’s, and the right’s, heartless indifference to anything in any way relating to women’s lives and autonomy.

And this is just the weird stuff. Again and again, Obama’s “extreme” positions amount to nothing more than regarding women’s autonomy - not to say health and safety - as important. If feminism is the proposition that women are neither prostitutes nor doormats, Gerson tells us what “extreme” feminism is: the proposition that women should neither die nor suffer for being sexually autonomous. That as much as anything tells us what Gerson and his contsituency are about, and what is at stake (yet again) in this election.

The rest is just a farrago of lies and distortions, many of them so old that ignorance of the truth cannot be an excuse.

Perhaps [Gerson’s inaccurate diagnosis of changes in attitudes toward abortion] reflects the continuing revolution of ultrasound technology — what might be called the “Juno” effect. In the delightful movie by that name, the protagonist, a pregnant teen seeking an abortion, is confronted by a classmate who informs her that the unborn child already has fingernails — which causes second thoughts. A worthless part of its mother’s body — a clump of protoplasmic rubbish — doesn’t have fingernails.

The anti-choice platform in a nutshell: emotional manipulation through irrelevant images and pseudo-scientific factoids, and the imputation of wholly imaginary arguments to pro-choice positions they clearly don’t understand (I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “worthless clump of cells” or the like from anti-choicers who think they’re offering an unanswerable sneer at the heart of the pro-choice stance, but I can count how many times I’ve heard it from serious, informed pro-choice proponents: zero).

Democrats of a past generation — the generation of Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King Jr. — spoke about building a beloved community that cared especially for the elderly, the weak, the disadvantaged and the young.

Sounds like a good idea - why don’t you ask Obama about it:

• Provide Americans with disabilities with . . . educational opportunities
• End discrimination and promote equal opportunity
• Increase the employment rate of workers with disabilities
• Support independent, community-based living for Americans with disabilities
• Provide a Living Wage
• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
• Expand Paid Sick Days
• Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act
• Encourage States to Adopt Paid Leave
• Expand High-Quality Afterschool Opportunities
• Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
• Protect Against Caregiver Discrimination
• Expand Flexible Work Arrangements
• Expand Early Childhood Education
• Reform and Fund No Child Left Behind
• Make College More Affordable
• Provide Universal Health Care and Lower Health Costs
• Create a Universal Mortgage Credit
• Support Parents with Young Children
• Create Automatic Workplace Pensions
• Expand Retirement Savings Incentives for Working Families
• Prevent Age Discrimination
• Provide Cheaper Prescription Drugs
• Protect and Strengthen Medicare
• Provide Transparency to Medicare Prescription Drug Plans
• Strengthen Long-Term Care Options
• Ensure Heating Assistance
• Support Senior Volunteer Efforts
• and on, and on, and on . . .

For Gerson, and the rest of the anti-choice horde, “community” has nothing to do with the disabled, the elderly, the young, or the disadvantaged. It specifically doesn’t include women at all. “Family” means nothing more than patriarchy and forced pregnancy - it also doesn’t include women, and the process of bearing children does not include women in any capacity other than as vessels and incubators, surely not as decisionmakers or interested moral persons in their own right. And naturally, whether a candidate is committed to “community” or the public welfare consists only and entirely of whether that candidate is committed to stripping women of their control of their own bodies, and forcing them - including the candidate’s own 9-year-old daughter - the undergo unwanted pregnancies against their will. (Remember when Dan Quayle showed a weak moment of almost-human affection, and stated that if his teenage daughter became pregnant he would “support her on whatever decision she made” - and then was forced to recant by his own wife, and insist they would force the 13-year-old girl to carry the pregnancy to term, less than 24 hours later?)

But who is a part of Gerson’s “community”?

The advance of pro-choice policies imported a different ideology into the Democratic Party — the absolute triumph of individualism. The rights and choices of adults have become paramount, even at the expense of other, voiceless members of the community.

Fetuses.

And here again, anti-choice misogyny in a nutshell. Only an anti-choicer can sneer that contemptuously at “the rights and choices of adults”, like that was some sort of suspect moral category. But undeveloped fetuses are now “members of the community”. And his confusion about his own creepy anti-person stance is similarly evident: whatever you may think about abortion rights, it has nothing to do with “individualism” vs. “the community”. This is merely another wrongheaded meme, very much akin to the shibboleth “relativism”, which right-wingers inject to make themselves sound sophisticated when talking rot about other people’s moral interests.

Rights and personhood begin with, and inhere in, the individual. There is nowhere else for them to do so. Even the strongest traditional defense of self-denial in favor of group survival - contract theory - is grounded entirely in the notion of rights adhering in the individual. (There was a reason - which I’m sure Gerson, the Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase “axis of evil”, could never explain no matter how much babbling you were willing to endure - that Hobbes’s masterly elucidation of contract theory was named Leviathan. That word was Hobbes’s name for the aggregative power of the king, deriving from the personal sovereignty of each and every individual citizen independently - because there was no other source of such power. His commissioned frontispiece for the work - a drawing of a king, regnant over all the land, urban, rural, and ecclesiastical, whose body was composed of thousands of tiny figures of individuals from all walks of life, but with a single head - illustrates it beautifully.) There is a recent body of work re-asserting “communitarianism” as a locus of rights, but it isn’t well worked out and it has very little to do with the abortion debate. Whether abortion is or isn’t justifiable has nothing to do with communitarianism, another concept I’m sure Gerson couldn’t explain (since it’s proponents largely can’t, either). Abortion is not an attack on the community, and asserting community interests has nothing to do with denying women’s interests in their own bodies. (Thomson’s famous defense of abortion rights even assuming the fetus is a person works just as well if you assume communitarianism, too; simply acknowledging competing interests - of the fetus, or of the community - does not lead to the conclusion that women’s interests in themselves are impotent.) And Gerson himself offers no community-based attack on women’s autonomy; he merely asserts the personhood of the fetus, once again setting women’s interests at nought in favor of his particular moral fetish-object.

Gerson clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, and seems incapable of making an argument on the issues at hand. He merely identifies aspects of Obama’s outlook that don’t sit well with him, and labels them “extremist”. Aside from personal values or moral positions, he’s willing to do so with statistical facts as well.

Obama could take the wise counsel of evangelical Democrats such as Amy Sullivan and come out strongly for policies that would reduce the number of abortions — support for pregnant women, abstinence education, the responsible promotion of birth control. An organization called Democrats for Life has proposed the creation of a “95-10 Initiative” in which states and the federal government would work toward the reduction of abortion rates by 95 percent within 10 years.

Please. After enduring years of heckling by moral buffoons like Gerson and Alan Keyes, the last thing Obama - or anyone - needs is a dose of Amy Sullivan. But, besides that, Gerson here again seems to have no idea about, and no interest in, what he’s actually saying. He’s merely mouthing disingenuous anti-choice tropes with an implication that anyone who doesn’t acquiesce in his false or misleading claims is “extremist”. But the policies he claims to support are either ones that reasonable people have been clamoring for against Republican opposition - prenatal care and birth control - and that Obama explicitly endorses and has detailed plans for, or nonsensical frauds that are worse than doing nothing at all (like abstinence education, which actually increases the rate of STIs and unwanted pregnancies among teenagers, and has been used as an excuse to block AIDS prevention campaigns in Africa). The idiotic “95-10″ plan seriously intends to reduce 95% of abortions? How? By reducing 95% of unwanted pregnancies? Since almost no birth-control methods have >95% effectiveness in use, and the people who are promoting this “Initiative” are the same clowns who oppose birth control, it’s obvious that’s not what they have in mind. (The organization Gerson touts admits they are not in agreement on any pro-contraception program - “because of ethical, religious or personal reasons” - and have not endorsed any bill in Congress to promote it.) That leaves blocking abortion outright as the only path available. They do talk about providing support for women who want to carry a pregnancy to term and “feel that abortion is their only option” for financial reasons, but there’s no evidence how large a part of the abortion rate that is (just getting an abortion is hard enough in most of the country that hundreds of thousands of women seeking them are forced into childbirth they cannot afford; being “forced” into abortion to avoid that fate is hardly the problem). And of course the group offers no support for women who are determined not to become unwilling parents, and who face financial or other barriers to the abortions they want: like all “pro-life” organizations, Democrats for Life is supportive of women’s choices only when they are the choices the organization has already decided they should make.

This bullshit makes me tired. Gerson is a typical anti-choice hack: self-contradictory, ignorant, and deeply anti-woman. The positions he declares are “extreme” are no more than acknowledging that women have some interest in controlling their own fates. The positions he favors are either, paradoxically, ones Obama has not only endorsed but planned for in detail, which Gerson has no knowledge of, or counterproductive and cynically manipulative. He repeats long-since falsified myths and anti-choice campfire stories, slings around philosophical terms he has no comprehension of, and attempts to package it all as some sort of common-sensical stance against an “extremism” that he invented and inflated with his own hot air.