NBC/WSJ poll: Most Americans favor gay marriage. Most oppose abortion. nbcnews.to/12QbxWB
— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) April 12, 2013
One problem with Twitter as a news-and-churn source is that it's hard to summarize things! So here is a telephone poll, of a whopping 1000 people, that finds that… well what does it find?
"According to the survey, a combined 52 percent say that abortion should be illegal either with exceptions or without them, versus a combined 45 percent who say it should be legal either 'always' or 'most of the time.'" What does that actually mean? We already know from far more thorough studies that 63% [...]
"I’m not making anybody watch, OK. Because you just have to close your eyes." —Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett discusses a proposed law that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound procedure.
You know what would help solve the fake "deadlock" that may shut down the government at midnight? If Planned Parenthood could save money by not having to go state by state to defend legal abortion in courts from Arizona to Ohio to Missouri to Connecticut to Iowa. Since their public policy expenditures are something like $55 million, and Planned Parenthood's government contracts and grants are only something like $363 million, none of which is used to pay for abortion services, they could get closer to not needing your government money if half the states in the country would stop pushing stupid laws. (Though the best part is, Planned [...]
South Dakota is going to vote on a bill that amends its justifiable homicide law! They want to make sure that you can kill people with justification if someone is going to harm your unborn child "or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child." The amendment passed out of committee with a handy 9-3 vote. So you can see where this is going. (Fun fact: the law as written already allows you to kill to prevent a felony being performed upon your master or your servant.) The personhood movement is achieving success state by state (just like the gay marriage movement, sort of!) [...]
"Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s—which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless—have been cut short in utero instead. And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just 'pregnancy tissue.' After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: 'If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.' Instead, 'think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.' It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she [...]
Attention Dallas-area residents: Tickets to Friday's gala fundraiser for the Uptown Women's Center are now much more affordable! For just $250-marked down from $1000-you can attend the event, which features former Alaska governor Sarah Palin! And there won't be any pesky press around to get in the way, because they're barred. The gala's main sponsor is the Downtown Pregnancy Center, an organization dedicated to giving pregnant women choices.
In Why I Did It, artists and authors explain just why they made something. This week, Matthew Lickona talks about the making of Alphonse: A Monster For Our Time, a comic book about, yes, an aborted fetus.
I mean, yes, what was I thinking? Here's the rationale I wish I could give.
A lot of good horror stories are moral anxiety writ large (see also: Frankenstein and humanity's attempt to put nature on the rack, The Bacchae as the first in a long line of what my friend Michael calls "you screw, you die" stories.) And I think it's fair to say that there is moral anxiety about abortion. [...]
