WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.
Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.
Yes, it does matter who's in charge of the White House and Congress.
Katha Pollitt weighs in on Gonzales v. Carhart, the US Supreme Court's recent anti-abortion decision:
For the first time, the Supreme Court has ruled that the health of an actually existing human woman doesn't matter, never mind Roe. Nor does a doctor's judgment. What counts, according to Justice Kennedy's majority decision, is that this particular method of abortion "devalues human life." Besides, the woman, confused little flower nodding her head in the breeze, needs to be protected from regret, the "grief more anguished and sorrow more profound" that might come when she realizes the exact nature of the procedure. Regret! If that's a criterion, no one could ever decide about anything. Maybe we women should call up Justice Kennedy whenever we have a big decision to make. "Um, excuse me, Justice Kennedy, Bob just proposed, but what if he's not The One? And while I have you on the phone, the job in California sounds so great, but what if I never finish my novel? And what if I vote Republican because I'm scared of Osama, but then Congress tries to make me have a baby?" Numerous commentators have downplayed the significance of Gonzales v. Carhart--you can still get an abortion, just not with this method, which was only used in about 2,000 cases a year anyway. But that ho-hum approach overlooks what is new here and where it's going. I've mentioned the paternalism and the Roe-disregarding lack of a health exception. But let's not forget the sheer useless moral posturing: A woman can wind up injured, and her fetus will be aborted anyway, but the tender sensibilities of Kennedy and his four brethren will be protected! What other procedures will they find "shocking" down the line? It's not as if the alternatives--dismembering the fetus in the womb and extracting it piece by piece; poisoning it and delivering it dead--are delightful to contemplate. Why shouldn't they find more and more abortions unacceptable--maybe even all of them?
Perhaps they will. Because another thing this decision demonstrates is how deeply antichoice disinformation has penetrated the worlds of power and influence. Kennedy's regretful woman comes straight from the antichoice playbook, in which women who choose abortion are invariably bewildered, heedless, misled, manipulated and in need of guidance from wiser heads. When Kennedy refers to the gynecologists and obstetricians who perform abortions as "abortion doctors," he's repeating antichoice language intended to impugn the professionalism of these physicians and make it easier to disregard their judgment about how best to care for their patients. Abortion doctors! What do they know? The ban itself--calling the procedure "partial birth abortion," as if the fetus were days from being born (it's actually performed in the second trimester); singling out a method and using the emotions it arouses to violate the trimester distinctions of Roe and the pre-viability and post-viability distinction of Casey is part of the antichoice strategy to shut down legal abortion one restriction, one legal precedent at a time. And what about prochoicers' weak responses? NARAL caved in on the ridiculous Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. South Dakota's Healthy Families confined its opposition to the lack of rape, incest and health exceptions in the state's abortion ban, thus setting the stage for acceptance of future bans that added those provisos. [Emphasis added]
I wish I were even sometimes as eloquent as Pollitt is routinely. You should definitely go read the rest of what she has to say about Carhart.
If you're a working woman in the US, you've finally worked enough additional days this year to catch up with what your average male co-worker made during 2006. And, just think, you only have to work until sometime in August 2008 to earn what that co-worker will be paid this year.
You can find more info about pay equity (and the lack of it in the US) if you go here.
Constitutional lawyer Jack Balkin has some very interesting comments on yesterday's abortion ruling by the US Supreme Court.
The second point worth noting is that Justice Kennedy invokes what has become the new rhetoricof abortion opponents — the notion that women often regret abortions and that they are deceived by doctors into having them. This new (post Casey) line of argument arose in the mid 90s when abortion opponents realized that arguing primarily about the status of the fetus would not convince a majority of the public. Instead pro-life advocates sought to argue that abortion hurts women as well as fetuses. The new anti-abortion rhetoric attempts to demonstrate that few women in their right minds, who really understand what abortion involved, would defy their natural love for their children and consent to an abortion, much less seek to procure one. It tries to perform a rhetorical jujitsu move on the idea of choice, by suggesting — without any empirical evidence, that women don't really choose abortions, and that to have an abortion is actually a violation of their "true" choices.
Elements of this new anti-abortion rhetoric appear in Justice Kennedy's argument that because of a mother's natural bond of love for her child, some women would not have abortions if they knew about the intact D&E process. Therefore Congress may ban the procedure entirely. But there are a couple of non-sequiturs here. First, the appropriate remedy for the problem Justice Kennedy identifies would be informing the women about the nature of intact D&E, not preventing the women from choosing whether to undergo the procedure. Second, if a woman did not want to undergo intact D&E, she might still choose to abort the fetus because, as the Court itself point out, the doctor could still perform regular D&E or terminate the fetus by injection before withdrawing it intact. In that case, "the bond of love the mother has for her child," would not prevent the mother from ending the fetus's life. In fact, the argument about mother love seems to be a makeweight; it seems to involve the claim that Congress knows better than women do about what they would choose in certain situations. The law forecloses choice rather than informing it. As Justice Ginsburg points out in her dissent, this is the very sort of paternalism about women ability to make decisions about their reproductive lives that the right to abortion seeks to counter. Justice Kennedy's use of this new form of anti-abortion rhetoric reveals that this particular line of opposition to abortion, at least, is premised on the notion that women don't really know or really understand what they want when they seek abortions. [Emphasis added]
I highly recommend reading Balkin's whole post, which you can do if you go here.
