Happy Fetus

Feto Incognito

Adam Lambert Embryo

The purveyor of the site insists that “Feti is just for fun, no political statements being made here.” I’m tempted to believe that in her case, but the thing still strikes me as weird,  and indicative of a mindset that is worth noting.

The vendor suggests these are intended as gifts for expectant parents, as appropriate additions to the “Baby’s First _____” category of remembrances. (Exactly how, I’m not sure: “Baby’s First Disembodied Hanging on a Christmas Tree”?) In that vein, they play off the very common and understandable practice of many expectant parents in personifying their fetus as it develops – talking to it, playing music, naming it before it is born, and so on. They also seem to accept as a cultural commonplace the fetishizing – literally, in this case! – and personifying of the fetus that is a mainstay of anti-choice propaganda. (Anti-choicers often wear gold-plated fetal-footprint jewelry, and they are forever trying to force abortion patients to look at pictures or sonograms of the fetus.)

I don’t know if the anti-choice movement has so far succeeded in turning the fetus into a fetish object that you can now literally market them to the general public as holiday ornaments, or if the common desire to see fetuses as sort of reverse-extensions of babies simply makes this a natural marketing move, like Cabbage Patch dolls or those weird Anne Geddes photographs of babies in flower petals, and the right wing has merely piggybacked off that common emotional trope for their own purposes. The former would scare me a bit, the latter is merely infuriating. Either way, this sort of thing leaves me with a creepy feeling.

I’m happy for people to be happy about their pregnancies, and to embue their future offspring with emotional valence or even a somewhat overgrandiose sense of promise or accomplishment. In the same way that all parents think their kids are smart and talented, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that, expectant parents can and should go ga-ga over the cute little buns in their respective ovens. There is no point, in the case of people’s emotional experience of the events in their lives, to go around insisting to them “you know it has no functional higher nervous system, right?” . . . “that’s not a ‘person’ you’re carrying, in any meaningful sense of the term – just wanted to let you know” . . . “don’t get too close to it – there’s about a 1-in-12 chance you’ll lose the pregnancy”. But when it comes to law and policy-making, clear distinctions do have to be made – and at that point, the conflict between stark reality and parents’ expectations may be uncomfortable.

Regardless of parental beliefs, not all kids are smart or talented, and thus some won’t make it into selective academic or sports or art programs. And regardless of the fervent, desperately dishonest myth-making of the anti-choice right, the early fetus is not a person and does not make moral claims on a woman’s body and life sufficient to override her autonomy. It is unfortunate to have to disappoint people emotionally invested in believing otherwise, but it is far worse to make policy based on wishful thinking in defiance of the truth.

By all means, have yourself a merry little Christmas, and hang a smiling Adam Lambert Jewish punk fetus upon the highest bough. But let’s keep the “personified fetus” myth firmly in its place when we go to making important decisions about real issues in real people’s lives.

It is.

Thanks, Penn.

(See here for a similar observation from an equally-surprising source.)

I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” said Jonhson. . . .

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted [icky procedures], something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

“I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don’t have this guilt, I don’t have this burden on me anymore that’s how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion.”

Johnson reports that she is likewise convicted about gall bladder removals, most forms of cancer surgery, and liposuction, although she does not criticize the decisions several of her friends have made to have such procedures, because “that’s different”. She is semi-convicted about breast implants, believing they are the work of the Whore of Babylon but also something you could understand that a woman needs sometimes. She justifies these distinctions with random Bible quotes and references to her own idiosyncratic feelings, which she cannot coherently articulate but is happy to impose on others by law.

This otherwise trivial story about one small-town individual’s weird religious hangups was trumpeted by the religious right as a stunning victory over the right of other people to make healthcare choices they don’t like, claiming other people’s healthcare was now “in meltdown mode” and “total disarray”. Every healthcare clinic in the country, including the one that has now hired a new director, went about its business as usual.

I don’t have much to say about that, except to offer support and the wish that the homophobia that infects our society, among other lingering forms of discrimination and prejudice, will soon fade, and “coming out” can be the act of celebration and affirmation that it should be, rather than an act of courage and risk-taking in the face of dangers that should not be allowed  to exist.

I’ll note, by way of parochial hyper-focus, that the pressures and threats that impede coming out and living openly in one’s chosen orientation have health consequences as well as many other harmful impacts; they cause stress and depression, create barriers to healthcare access, often result in abusive or discriminatory treatment in emergency care, and not infrequently result in violence. And of course the pervasive legal discrimination LGBTQ people face, in particular regarding health insurance, visitation and decision-making rights for gay couples, and barriers to assisted fertility and adoption, are also health and family-rearing issues as well as being rank discrimination in the basic sense.

Ending homophobia for reasons of good health is an odd and circumlocutory approach to the problem, but it’s one reason among many. Simple moral necessity is a better one. It’s long past time.

For this reason, I felt less shock than merely tired recognition at this week’s reports from the right-wing “Value Voters” conference, in particular the much-remarked insanity of anti-choice provocateur Lila Rose’s demand that abortions be “done in the public square” (“maybe then we might hear angels singing as we ponder the glory of conception”*). Of course it’s idiotic, outrageous, and unhinged; of course it’s meaningless as a serious policy proposal. But it was never intended to be otherwise. It was intended to do exactly what it did – get more attention for a serial attention-seeker whose stock in trade is saying provocative things on video so she can enjoy the reaction, as well as create yet another controversy to make anti-choice theater seem important by generating press.

But it’s worth taking a moment, not to combat this nonsense as if it was to be taken seriously, nor even to condemn the continual offensiveness and provocation of the anti-choice movement (a singularly unlikely complaint, since without that the anti-choice movement wouldn’t even exist), but to note the ways in which anti-choicers choose to offend.

What does it mean to imagine – even if only to create offense – that women should be forced to have their abortions in public? As crazed as the suggestion is, it is not as extreme, from the right-wing perspective, as it would seem from any decent point of view. Mandatory public display of intimate gynecological procedures in order to diminish the legal availability of those procedures is nothing more than the literal instantiation of the basic presuppositions of the anti-choice movement in general:

• that women seeking abortion, uniquely, must be denied any presumption of privacy (in the sense either of autonomous choice or of confidentiality);
• that women’s sexuality is fodder for public observation, examination, and commentary;
• that women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, and women’s needs are so inherently disgusting that merely observing them will create the same visceral hostility among the general public that they already receive from the right wing (and that the general level of support for abortion that has always existed is due merely to the fact that supporters haven’t yet seen women’s bodies and healthcare up close yet);
• that women’s choices, preferences, and comfort in their own bodily autonomy and healthcare count for nothing against the demands by those who hate them that they expose themselves to hostile scrutiny for those others’ political goals;
• that policy regarding women’s autonomy and health is appropriately decided by deliberately-manipulated public emotions – in which tactic the women may be forced to participate to their own detriment – and not any considered defense of the women’s moral agency and interests, or the objective absence of moral agency in the fetus.

As with so much anti-choice agitation, women simply disappear from this invasive and offensive scheme as persons to be taken seriously in their own right. Healthcare is granted near-sacrosanct status as regards privacy, discretion, and the centrality of the needs and interests of the patient, but a woman seeking abortion must expose herself, legs splayed in stirrups, vagina dilated, instruments inserted, “in the public square” – her needs and interests, in fact her basic humanity as a person deserving of consideration and dignity, carry no weight against the creepy, invasive perversions of the sex-obsessive misogynists. The abortion debate is structured, logically, as a conflict between women’s autonomy and the religious imperatives of the anti-choice right wing, but here there is no recognition of autonomy interests at play in any way – women not only may not control their bodies or reproductive options, but may even be forced into invasive and degrading displays deliberately intended to undermine their own autonomy, as a condition of (temporarily) accessing such options. As always, women simply don’t count. Whatever protections and privileges the typical moral person might command in undertaking their own purposes in their own life simply vanish if that person is a woman seeking control over her reproduction.

But this familiar moral blindness is not accidental, and it is not merely the hyperbolic implication of a deliberately provocative suggestion. Stupid, crazy, and nasty as they may be, the right wing is not completely incapable of recognizing moral humanity, even in those they despise. The right wing gradually learned not to use racial slurs; today it would unthinkable for them to suggest that people of color should be paraded “in the public square” even as a tactic to undermine their rights, and wingers fall over themselves denying the racism in their racist policies. The gay-rights movement, embattled as it was, made remarkable progress in the space of about 35 years; today, the conservative position on gay rights extols accommodations (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; civil unions) that would have been grand liberal victories just a few years previously. Yet after thousands of years of patriarchy, women command no such deference. Even as a joke or a provocation, there are things that are not said about minorities and gays – things the public would reject in disgust. There seems to be nothing the right wing won’t say about women – there seem to be no abuses or humiliations that are beyond the pale, no degradations or invasions that are unthinkable, whether or not they seem likely as policy.

Vacating medical confidentiality to publicize abortions for the explicit purpose of humiliating women by generating disgust at their bodies, healthcare, and reproductive choices?  The only part of that scenario the right wing objects to is the abortion. All the rest is merely the rights, interests, and choices of women. Nothing at all, really.

* I am not making this up.

Mind-bogglingly, they claim they are not merely poking fun by making progressive symbols retrogressive, but are adopting the tools and techniques of left-wing activism for purposes that they regard as similar in motivation and intention. Adam Brandon, press secretary for the tea-bagger organization, claimed:

If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We’re trying to borrow some from the civil rights movement.

Right. Freedom Riders:

But that wasn’t my main point. I wanted to note just that one slogan: “Keep your laws off my body”.

It seems undeniable that the vast majority of tea-baggers would strongly oppose the liberty that slogan advocates. Surely their Congressional enablers do. But with the characteristic ignorance and lack of shame that makes it possible for right-wingers to say any of the things they say, they’ve co-opted words they don’t believe in into a context in which they don’t even make sense.

Unlike the issue of abortion rights – wherein the same noisy faction that opposes healthcare for others also aggressively campaigns to prohibit women from controlling their own bodies, and to force them to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will – the proposed plan for universal healthcare access doesn’t impose any unwanted procedure on anyone’s body. The access plan incorporates no specific treatments at all – it is a funding mechanism, not a treatment regimen, still less a mandatory one.

Naturally, of course, the wingers who oppose both abortion and healthcare in general, while demanding “keep your laws off my body”, also oppose abortion funding under any healthcare plan that is passed: that’s right, they insist that the healthcare plan they oppose because it would impose laws on their body must also be crafted so as to assist them in imposing laws on other people’s bodies. But more fundamentally, it is the characteristic right-wing solipsism and sheer imperviousness to fact that makes this absurdity possible: their aversion to healthcare means other people can’t have any, and their valorization of unplanned pregnancy means other women must have them; laws that have nothing to do with actually imposing upon people’s bodies are opposed with liberal slogans regarding bodily freedom, while the liberal demand for bodily freedom is opposed by people who spout that same slogan.

As always, the interpretive question here is whether these people are simply mind-bogglingly stupid, or deliberately dishonest. And as always, it’s hard to tell the difference in their cases.

The manifold horrors of the Bush years are finally behind us, and President Obama is already taking steps to end their ravages and wipe away the stains they have left upon the United States. In the area of reproductive autonomy, he has sent encouraging signals that he will repeal the odious “Gag Rule” and “Conscience Clauses” and oppose legislative attempts to further intrude upon women’s freedom. Hopefully the discriminatory Hyde Amendment will finally bite the dust as well. But that those are salient issues is only evidence of how much has been lost in a short time.

That we have to beat back absolute absurdities, such as that hospital personnel may refuse to treat patients in need out of personal prejudice alone, or that any yahoo with an ideological grudge, down to and including pharmacy clerks and cash register tellers, can withhold products and prescription medications on the same whim, means that the first promise of the unfolding Obama administration is simply to undo some of the trespasses of recent years, restoring what, under Clinton, nobody imagined could be lost. Actual progress will have to be a follow-on goal.

So it is not merely “choice” – reproductive autonomy in the area of birth control and abortion – that is under siege, but the entire range of choices women may make regarding their healthcare, sexual and reproductive lives, and liberty in general. Not only the right to abortion has been restricted, but, as part of their war on women’s sexual health, women’s rights to make factually informed choices about their own health and treatment options, to choose, purchase, and receive medicine and healthcare products prescribed or recommended for them, to choose how to balance their sexual and healthcare needs without interference, to choose their own goals and methods in family planning without prohibition on extremist religious grounds, to choose to use scientific medical advances without arbitrary religious restriction, and to make any number of other choices regarding their health and bodily autonomy, have systematically been assaulted, hamstrung, and denied by legions of religious-extremist obstructionists inside and outside the Bush administration. The first item on the “choice” agenda must now be restoring the basic set of choices that existed before the whackos got loose; only then can we begin to extend and refine the range and accessibility of those choices.

There is good reason to be hopeful, as, barely days into the Obama Presidency, a new sense of decency emanates from Washington and the most egregious crimes of the recent past are repudiated and undone. There is little reason to be ecstatic, however - and those who value women’s autonomy know too well that women are always the first to be thrown overboard for political expediency, and that women’s bodies and lives are of little weight in the traditional political balance. It would be foolhardy to expect President Obama to be too radical a departure from business as usual in that respect, though he has been generally good on choice, and on scientific, vs. religious, policymaking. Sadly, I expect that “Blog for Choice Day” will be an annual tradition that outlasts even this administration. But this is certainly the beginning of better things to come, and the victory has never been out of sight, however hatefully it has been contested. Good days ahead!

The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus – a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.

Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.

Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?

But the lack of comprehension, and the vast evasions and logical gaps, Egan’s supposed “discussion” shows are par for the course, from this source and the anti-choice brigade in general. It’s hardly worth bothering with. What catches my eye in this piece – literally – is that photo, and the way it is used. Egan seems sincerely convinced that photos have moral meanings. (” Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully. . . . The matter becomes even clearer and simpler if you obtain from the National Geographic Society two extraordinary DVDs . . . entitled “In the Womb” . . . [and] “In the Womb—Multiples”.) Now, all activist groups use photographs to illustrate their causes, and to manipulate the viewer emotionally. But they usually do the courtesy of providing some sort of argument for their position. Egan declares that none is necessary – the fetuses in the photos almost literally speak for themselves. And that fact illustrates the most important thing about the anti-choice position.

To be anti-choice is, in a fundmental and particularly vicious way, to be anti-woman. It is to declare that women may have no control over their own bodies with respect to their reproductive functions, or over their entire lives as affected by those functions – and that society, invariably men, may declare to women in what circumstances they may make their own choices and follow their own paths in life, and in what circumstances those paths will be dictated to them against their wills. And, more practically, it is to put the life of every woman on earth, before and during her fertile years at least, and afterwards as a result of that earlier constraint, entirely and completely on a contingent basis, subject to conditions determined by others (men), and forever out of the control of the women themselves. Everything any woman does, wants, or plans for can be derailed in a moment by a trivial accident of biology – a condition that can be dealt with easily, safely, and cheaply by means that men choose to criminalize to prevent women from making their own choices about. There is nothing in any woman’s life that can be depended on or confidently planned for, because everything any women chooses can be disrupted or swept away, not by being pregnant, but by being pregnant and forced to remain so against her will, physically prevented, and prohibited by law, from acting on her own choices on that matter. And every woman who lives in a misogynist society, which is to say every woman in the world (with the only partial exception of women in pro-choice countries), must live with that knowledge every minute of every day – must know that anything she thinks about or plans for more than a few months into the future of her own life can only be hypothetical if men who hate her choose to make her their prisoner, by way of her own body.

To be anti-choice is to take women out of their own lives in a fundamental way. It is longstanding principle and practice of the right wing that women exist as functionaries for men – they are important insofar as they are fulfilling the roles that have been appointed to them as wives, mothers, sexual servants, housekeepers, purity symbols, or what have you, but they may not choose their roles for themselves, and they may not choose roles outside their position of inferiority to those who dictate those roles. (Slight exceptions are made for women who use their public positions to keep other women down.) Women’s lives, under misogyny, are tools for men’s comfort, and women are what men decide they will be. The anti-choice position takes this perspective to a sickeningly literal extreme. Invariably, anti-choice literature and arguments are focused entirely on the fetus. Indeed the degree of fetus-worship on the religious right is unsettling, and often very creepy. (One Catholic group stole aborted fetuses from a hospital, baptized them, and buried them in a religious ceremony in explicit violation of the instructions of the women who had aborted them. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his wife took a miscarried fetus home in a box, named it, and made their other children hold it. Anti-stem-cell-research advocates paraded their own children before Congressional committees dressed in T-shirts reading “Former Embryo”.) Invariably, there is no mention of actual women in anti-choice discussions of abortion. Women are simply not part of the issue of abortion, for the right wing. Abortion, for them, is only and entirely a question of something happening to a fetus – which they invest with full moral standing for virtually incoherent reasons almost always grounded on sectarian religious beliefs – with no question at all of what it means for the woman who is pregnant against her wishes, a woman of actual moral standing, with a full life well underway, plans and projects hanging in the balance, moral interests to be taken into account, and moral agency of her own that should vest her with control of that life and those plans and projects. She literally does not exist, in almost any right-wing discussion of abortion.

And Egan, with his airily articulate photo, makes this ludicrously plain. The photograph of his morally magical fetus proves that the fetus is indeed magical in one way: it exists outside any woman’s uterus. The strangely pristine and carefully-arranged fetus in this picture floats against a plain backdrop with no hint that it should be connected to, let alone that it lives inside, the body of a thinking, feeling, reproductively mature woman actively engaged in her own life, with thoughts and desires about how that life should go and whether or not she chooses any particular path for it. (There is a hint of umbilical cord and the fetal side of the placenta, but of course they don’t attach to . . . anything.) The fetus that speaks so eloquently to Egan has no visible connection to the woman who could actually speak, and articulate her own decisions about her own body, if she existed at all, which she does not in the picture Egan says tells us everything we need to know about abortion. And when Egan contemptuously dismisses the concept of “person” with scare quotes, because it would “cast sand” into his eyes to consider the difference between this fetus and the actual person whose body it is living inside, that person whom Egan declares has no power to choose whether anyone or anything can live inside her own body, he again sets real persons at nought, in favor of the fetus whose interests (so to speak) stand unopposed by those of the non-existing woman it lives within.

It takes some trick to remove women from pregnancy, but the Catholic church has that one down pat. In his 1,300-word paen to forced pregnancy, unembarassed by any actual thinking, he manages never once, in any context, to use the word “woman”. He does, of course, work in “mother” – 10 times. Women, for Egan, do not exist – only mothers do. A pregnant woman is a mother – there is no distinction for Egan. She is certainly not a woman who faces a choice whether she wants to be a mother, or whether she will or can become a mother. And women who are not mothers, apparently, don’t exist at all – they simply live their lives knowing that nothing they choose or want can stand against their eventually becoming a “mother”, when Egan has decided that is what they are, whether or not they want to. Remarkably, fetuses do not exist for Egan, either: not a single use of that word. Every reference to the fetus employs the phrase “human being” (it appears alone 9 times; “innocent human being” 16 times). Egan has already embraced ignorance of the difference between “human being” and “moral person”, so perhaps he thinks he is saying something when he says that, but notice that “human being” is never used in reference to a woman (pregnant or otherwise). Only fetuses are human; only mothers are women, and women are only mothers; women are not human. That’s all you need to know about abortion.

Unless, of course, you take women seriously – seriously enough at least to notice that they exist, but more importantly seriously enough to acknowledge they are moral agents and have interests and values that demand respect in their own right. If you think women matter, and that women are part of the question of abortion, and if you are even passingly aware that women care about their own lives and the direction and contents of those lives, you might bother to put women into the equation, at the very least.

Or you could be a smarmy, anti-intellectual, contemptuously misogynist asshole. There’s plenty of company for you there.

[NB: Cross-posted at Lean Left, a political blog I contribute to.]

But there has been some other stuff entering into the discussion that I think is very ugly and ill-advised. Of course there have been some idiotic sexist remarks (and some equally idiotic attempted defenses of her “women’s work” as a qualification for President that are just as sexist in their condescension); that’s bad enough. And it’s hard to know just how to evaluate her “life story”, since much of her qualification for office – according to those who support her – is that she hunts moose and has a passle of kids. If they really think those are qualifications*, then it’s fair game to point out that they are not.

But there are other personal issues that are not fair game.

I hardly like to even bring the subject up, but it should be confronted. There are all kinds of weird rumors going around about Palin and her kids. Many people have suggested that her last child, born when Palin was 44 years old and not known to have been pregnant at the time, was actually the child of Palin’s oldest teenage daughter, who had dropped out of school claiming illness for over 6 months leading up to the birth. In addition, that child was born with Down Syndrome, and some other clown is now posting suggesting that that condition was the result of Sarah Palin’s behavior during the pregnancy. Alan Colmes has suggested Palin could have endangered the fetus by traveling more than 9 hours to a rural Alaskan hospital, rather than go to any of the many larger and closer hospitals, while supposedly in labor. (Note that the two rumors conflict with one another.)

Aside from this being a highly personal issue (and, if the rumor about the teenage mother is true, then apparently something the family does not want to acknowledge), it’s hard to see what legitimate relevance it has. Once, this would have been a career-killing scandal; thankfully, as the result of progressive social activism and the victories for women’s reproductive freedom that Palin herself opposes, there are now many options for forming families, and one’s personal choices in that regard are granted much more respect. Ironically, it is only Palin’s own base that would find anything scandalous in this. But it can certainly be used to create discomfort for the candidate and her family, and, again, among all the irrelevant lightweight issues Palin brings to the campaign, this seems to bear no relation to the question of her fitness for office.

To deliberately pick on an uncomfortable and private issue for the purpose of embarrassing or harassing a candidate is despicable. And to use women’s reproductive choices as weapons against them only involves us in the worst abuses of the right wing. This is absolutely the sort of thing we – decent progressives who support women’s freedom to choose their reproductive pathway – must not be doing. Yet highly-visible blogs like DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan (not a defender of choice, it’s true) are pushing the issue, and others are spreading it with their concern-trolling.**

There is perhaps one argument that makes the issue sound relevant, and that is the question of hypocrisy. The religious right and the GOP are on hair-trigger to judge other people’s lifestyles, family structures, and reproductive choices, so when one of them finds themselves enmeshed in a “non-traditional family” saga, perhaps we are entitled to some schadenfreude? And perhaps we are, but the only decent response is to welcome that family to the community of freedom of choice and freedom from condemnation. Palin, as far as I know, has not been one of the overt persecutors of others in that respect, and does not deserve to be persecuted in return.

Lee Stranahan, of the Huffington Post, offers this odd defense:

The whole story is based on an insulting view of fundamentalist Christians; that they’d be so freaked out by a teenage pregnancy that they’d have the Governor — the most highly visible and public women in the small fishbowl of Alaska — fake a pregnancy to cover up the sins her of daughter Bristol.

Actually, I find that perfectly possible to believe. But it’s just as much none of our business as it is none of theirs. We’ve got to stop making political fodder out of people’s health and reproduction, out of their attempts to just live their lives as best they can by their own lights, without interfering with anyone else. I have little hope that this story – whatever is behind it – will have any such effect on the GOP; in fact I have little hope that it will even encourage Sarah Palin to think that women who make different reproductive choices from hers might deserve the kind of privacy and respect that she wants for herself. But if we’re going to see a future in which people have the freedom and security to live their own lives and make their own choices, we have to let everyone do so, even those who oppose that freedom for others. We can’t let ourselves be the thing we oppose and expect anything good to come of it.

Update: Palin herself has just announced that the rumors her 17-year-old daughter had the baby (Trig) in May are false, because . . .  the daughter is pregnant now.

ST. PAUL (Reuters) –  The 17-year-old daughter of Republican  vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said  on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by  liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up  for her child.

That would seem to lay the other rumor to rest. It also explains why the daughter was seen wearing an engagement ring – she’s marrying the father of her expected baby (yes, 17 years old, with a baby and a husband, neither of which she planned for). Palin has requested privacy for her family over that issue, and again it seems to me they ought to have it. This does raise the tantalizing question of how her insane fundie supporters are going to react, but I think we know the answer to that already: they would be screaming and howling at any Democrat who made the same announcement, but nothing matters if you’re a Republican, so it’ll be just fine.

* I’m highly suspicious that any of her supporters actually believe she is qualified for this office, or that they really mean the things they say in claiming so.
** I hope that’s not what I’m doing here, also. That’s not my intent, at least.

[Crossposted from my group political blog, Lean Left.]

Update: Revised description of one of the rumors; my original explanation was wrong.

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.