The Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision turned 38 last week, and regardless of one’s ultimate view of the issue, the legal right to abortion on demand is clearly in the throes an awkward middle age.

This year’s Roe anniversary coincides with the indictment of Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell on eight counts of murder. Gosnell appears to have been the sort of unscrupulous abortion mill operator you’d find in a Jack Chick comic — an answer to the many fervid prayers of pro-life activists keen to make the public abortion understand as murder in the most brutal and forceful terms. When state inspectors suspended his license and closed his clinic down in February, they noted that he performed abortion in any term of a pregnancy, heedless of basic health, safety or sanitation measures.

They reported finding “blood on the floor and parts of fetuses in jars” — though as the Philadelphia district attorney’s office notes, these conditions prevailed only in the high-turnover main facility of Gosnell’s clinic, which catered chiefly to low-income and immigrant pregnant women in the middle Atlantic. A separate part of the clinic, designed to serve better-heeled suburban white patients, was safer and cleaner, the DA reports. Gosnell himself got rich in the process, even though he was never actually licensed as an OB-GYN, charging about $3,000 per procedure, and making $1.8 million; the DA’s office had found $240,000 in cash in his home.

The grand jury report on the indictments spells out the routine butchery of the Gosnell operation in a wealth of horrifying, heartbreaking detail. Seven of the eight murder counts involve him (or one of his all-too-often untrained assistants) ending the lives of viable fetuses — another routine malpractice alleged in the indictments involved Gosnell blithely disregarding or misrepresenting the gestation of a fetus, so as to sidestep Pennslyvania’s Abortion Control Act, which forbids abortions after the 24th week. Gosnell or his fellow clinicians would terminate these more mature fetuses by crushing their spines or slitting their throats. The one non-fetus count in the indictment is a wrenching character study unto itself: In November 2009, a 41-year-old patient named Karnamaya Mongar died after an unlicensed employee of the clinic administered too much anesthesia to her. Mongar had arrived in the United States just four months earlier together with her husband, after spending almost twenty years in a Nepalese refugee camp; the couple had been expelled from Bhutan along with thousands of other dissidents for taking part in pro-democracy protests, and Mongar’s husband, Ash, had just found work at a Virginia chiecken factory. After a Virginia clinic refused her an abortion because Mongar was in her second trimester, she was referred to Gosnell’s operation; there, a clinic’s aide performed an ultrasound, and while Gosnell signed a form stipulating he’d met with Mongar beforehand, he hadn’t bothered to, instead leaving an aide who was by all accounts his least competent anesthesia hand to administer what the indictment. The initials of both Mongar and her daughter, who drove her to the clinic, were affixed to consent and waiver forms, even though Mongar spoke no English and her daughter scarcely spoke any. Mongar was a diminutive 4’11” and weighed 110 lbs, even well into her second trimester; a competent physician would have taken that into account with her anesthesia; but then again, a competent physician would have actually met with his patient and not signed a form falsely representing that he had done so. Over a grueling six-hour ordeal that sought to chemically induce cramping and labor, Mongar was administered heavy doses of sedative to be kept asleep. As the grand jury report tersely notes, “repeated injections of strong narcotics, administered in accordance with Gosnell’s standard procedure, killed Mrs. Mongar.”

Clearly, there is nothing for pro-choice activists to cheer in this grisly saga. And critics of the absolutist, no-slippery-slope defense of reproductive rights — “abortion on demand, without apology,” as the slogan has it — are seizing on Gosnell’s story as a limit-case of where this reasoning leads. The terms of engagement, as always, are the entirely arbitrary trimester-scheme of fetus viability that the Roe decision bequeathed to the partisans as its own sort of scripture. In the worldview of choice absolutism, as Slate’s Will Saletan writes…

…there’s no moral difference between eight, 18, and 28 weeks. No one has the right to judge another person’s abortion decision, regardless of her stage of pregnancy. Each woman is entitled to decide not only whether to have an abortion, but how long she can wait to make that choice…. You can argue that what Gosnell did wasn’t conventional abortion — he routinely delivered the babies before slitting their necks — but the 33 proposed charges involving the Abortion Control Act have nothing to do with that. Those charges pertain strictly to a time limit: performing abortions beyond 24 weeks. Should Gosnell be prosecuted for violating that limit? Is it OK to outlaw abortions at 28, 30, or 32 weeks? Or is drawing such a line an unacceptable breach of women’s autonomy?

Yes, the Gosnell case does raise these well worn issues anew — though one obvious rejoinder to Saletan’s rhetorical questions is that it’s not too much to ask that the state competently administer both later-term abortion limits and standard medical regulation and licensing protocols.

Still, Gosnell’s grotesque brand of malpractice, in the Mongar case especially, also touches on the emerging new legal and moral battleground of the abortion debate. As Mother Jones writer Sarah Blaustein notes, abortion foes are increasingly citing the well-being of the mother as the basis for restricting and — so they hope — eventually outlawing the procedure all together. South Dakota’s controversial 2005 bill virtually banning abortion was redrafted to stress the alleged long-term mental-health harm that abortions wreak on women who endure the procedure. And the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart ruling upholding the congressional ban on later-term abortions, employed a version of the same rationale. The majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, conceded that the proposition holding that abortions harmed the mental health of patients was “unexceptionable,” even though “no reliable data” actually upholds that view. In lieu of such data Kennedy cited the anecdotal testimony presented before the South Dakota legislature — even though, as Blaustein observes, that legislation itself contained no exception for the mother’s physical health.

Such acrobatics point up the rhetorically overloaded character of the seemingly never-to-be-resolved moral debate over abortion. For pro-life absolutists, the fetus in gestation possesses a sort of emotional supra-life, despite so much of the legal debate’s preoccupation of just when a fetus can be said to be defined as an independent human life. In this righteous scheme, the crocodile tears shed over the alleged mental health perils the procedure wreaks on would-be mothers almost entirely crowds out the actual plight of people like Karnamaya Mangar, who was no “culture of death” libertine. She had two daughters in addition to the one who drove her to Gosnell’s clinic, and a grandchild as well; in all likelihood, she and her husband reckoned an unplanned pregnancy was an economic burden they couldn’t fathom facing in a strange land on a chicken worker’s salary. And there’s no rhetorical percentage for the anti-abortion crowd to make the debate about victims such as her, since an outright abortion ban would vastly increase the volume of unscrupulous and unlicensed providers like Gosnell in the marketplace, and thereby multiply the body count among women seeking outlawed abortions.

Meanwhile, for pro-choice absolutists, the hard-fought legal goal of women’s bodily autonomy is the higher good that tends to suborn other moral or legal claims. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a stinging dissent to Kennedy, the Carhart opinion rested on “an antiabortion shibboleth for which [the Court] concededly has no reliable evidence…. This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.”

Still, one can’t help but thinking how little meaning such notions of choice and autonomy wound up having for Mongar, especially after she’d paid so heavily for agitating for democracy in her own homeland. The pat, passionately held certitudes on both sides of the abortion debate fall oddly silent before a system of health care that deliberately ensures a higher quality of basic care for the more affluent — and as the Philadelphia DA observed, even a shitheel like Gosnell knew enough about the real workings of the class-segmented health care market to reproduce its logic in his own facility.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the debate over universal health care is prey to the same theatrically gnat-straining brand of moral absolutism — or what amounts to the same thing, the wan subject of difference-trimming resolutions from clerics that are most notable for their eagerness to sidestep the culture-war landmine of abortion rights. The Gossnell indictment doesn’t note what religious beliefs Mongar may have held, but one thing seems clear: She was a collateral casualty of a sclerotic public discourse that, in its patent disregard for making choice a nonlethal good in a fiercely privatized medical marketplace, can fairly be described as faithless.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist now

How The Sunda Clouded Leopard Got Its Spots (And Morphologically Distinct Features In Its Skull And Teeth)

“Researchers think that a volcanic eruption on Sumatra 75,000 years ago may have wiped out most clouded leopards. One group survived in China and colonised the rest of mainland Asia.
Another hung on in Borneo, becoming the Sunda clouded leopard. This evolved into two types after a group colonised Sumatra via glacial land bridges, and then became cut off as sea levels rose.”
 — There are more different types of clouded leopards than you previously thought. They are all stunningly beautiful. The one above is in Borneo.

This one is in Sumatra.

This one is from mainland southeast Asia, but relocated to England to make its mark, like Jimi Hendrix.

There’ll be lots of swearing in Chicago today (or, you know, more so than usual, even given the Bears loss): “Rahm Emanuel was thrown off the ballot for mayor of Chicago today by an appellate court panel, a stunning blow to the fund-raising leader in the race. An appellate panel ruled 2–1 that Emanuel did not meet the residency standard to run for mayor.” Emmanuel is expected to appeal to Illinois’ Supreme Court.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on his recent conviction and sentencing to three years in prison on conspiracy charges: “’We prayed like crazy that we wouldn’t get more than 10 years,’ DeLay said, noting that Texas law requires defendants sentenced to 10 years or more to pursue their appeals from prison. ‘We got less than 10, so that was an answer to prayer.’” Also: “[M]aybe I didn’t need to be so arrogant.” Uh huh.

10) Flip-flops

9) Cowboy boots

8) Topsiders

7) Moccasins

6) Mukluks

5) Those special bicycle shoes that are missing the sole on the heel

4) Birkenstocks

3) Uggs

2) Soccer cleats

1) Duck boots

My dream of a local franchise called the New York Jews very nearly came true last evening. I mean, it’s not exact, but still, close enough.

Taking the knee to ice out the clock at the end of American Football games is a tradition. One team has the ball. The other team has no timeouts. The Center gives the ball to the Quarterback who takes a step and kneels. The Quarterback has a man to his right and to his left and one behind him should he fumble and have the ball wildly go behind him. Kneeling makes the clock count out 45 seconds or so. It’s almost ceremonial. One time the New York Giants messed up by not kneeling out the ball to end a game. There was a mishap with the ball, Herman Edwards of the Eagles picked it up and went on to score the winning touchdown against them. In many games, the kneeling out is so lackadaisical that opposing players are already shaking hands and wishing the winning team well as this process is still going on and the game is still technically in doubt.

The New York Jets, shruggers-off of convention, tradition and decorum decided last night to use this time jumping desperately over the line petulantly, trying to knock the well-protected ball free, coming down dangerously on the heads of Pittsburgh players headed inevitably to the Super Bowl. If a Steeler had been injured during one of these routine snaps by a falling Jet, the blowback from the Sporting Set would be immense. It’s incredibly bad sportsmanship, it’s petty, it’s punchy, it’s stupid. That’s the image of the 2010 New York Jets for me.

The pervading rubric in The American Football has been to respect your opponents in the press, say all the right things before games and then close the locker room door and Completely Shit on the other team to your team. The Unsecret Secret Life of American Sports is that Shit Talk rules at all times when reporters are not around. Shit Talking in front of reporters is deemed unclassy, disrespectful and unprofessional. When it’s done in-game while the microphones are too far away to hear, it is considered a competitive edge or a sign of intensity.

This year’s version of the New York Jets reveled in being reviled (See how I did that?). They Talked Shit in front of more microphones to the point where you thought Talking Shit was their main occupation instead of scoring touchdowns and stopping other people from scoring touchdowns. Which New York loves, let me tell you. There’s almost as many reporters per square inch in the five boroughs as there are hungry, hungry bedbugs. And nothing sells papers more than Football Shit Talk. You have an entire week of No Action between Football Games. What are these hungry, hungry reporters to do but invent stories? Stories that feed the radio and TV shows, that boost ratings, that get everyone interested. Including the players. So if these Green Kings of Shit Talk had started talking in Training Camp on HBO of how they were going to win the Super Bowl, why did they inexplicably stop Talking Shit this very week? And then come up so flat in the First Half of their loss against the Steelers, who will lose the Super Bowl to the Packers in Dallas on Februrary 6th?

Never mind they almost came back to win in what would have been the greatest comeback in the history of the NFL Playoffs.

One was beginning to imagine that Jets’ Coach Rex Ryan may have been some kind of Evil Shit-Talking Genius who knew that belittling his enemies would soften and confuse them the week of big games. My New England Patriots fell into such a Green Bear Trap. The Jet Shit Talk on the Week-long run up to the Divisional Playoff Game in Foxboro, New England, started early and lasted until game time. And very arguably threw off Tom Brady’s game and caused the downfall of that 14–2 team and most likely the Longterm Reputations of QB Brady and alleged former genius Bill Belichick. They Came, They Saw, They Talked Shat and did the Spread Armed Jets Dance all over the field as a Billion New Englanders felt the 2nd Big Beatdown from a New York Team to their Invincibility in the last 5 years.

This week the Jets were nearly silent until the Friday before the game. No “This Game is Personal, Between Me and (Opposing Coach).” No “We Ain’t Going There to Lose.” It was like how “Twin Peaks” stopped being “Twin Peaks” before the end of “Twin Peaks.” Suddenly, inexplicably, someone had pulled the plug on the script. They teach pitchers not to be beat on their second-best pitch. Ride the horse you came in on, go to your strengths. Do what brought you here. So why was Rex Ryan so nice and respectful of the Steelers and Coach Mike Tomlin leading up to Sunday’s game? That was Old Way, the Respectful Route. Say nothing in the press. Be nice. Don’t give them any fodder to hang on their Bulletin Boards. Try to beat them on the field. The Rex Ryan Shit Talking Way had become, through multiple wins on the road, a viable game plan. Beat them in the Press. And then they, used to being given respect in the Press, will be Surprised/Shocked out of their game plan, play angry and fail. It was the Jets who failed to take off in the First and Second Quarters, no doubt lacking the requisite Hot Air to initially get off the ground.

Class and Classiness may be in the eye of the beholder. It’s easy to stay classy when you’re winning or you’re a dominant team. The 2010 Jets had been as Crass a group as the NFL has ever seen, since possibly the Chicago Bears of the famous “Super Bowl Shuffle” Era, the last time a member of the Ryan Coaching Clan was in the Super Bowl. That Buddy Ryan-coached defense goes down as the greatest of the last 40 years or so, arguably the greatest ever. The Jets had many off the field distractions. Santonio Holmes, their star Wide Receiver, celebrates first downs as wildly as he does touchdowns. The Jets have threatened to injure players in career-ending ways. The NFL fined the Jets for their pre-Patriots’ game antics. They were worth every penny. The Jets humiliated the Patriots on their home field and their talk was definitely worth the price of admission.

Shit Talk is good for NFL Ratings, we found out. That Patriots/Jets Tilt was one of the highest rated Playoff games ever. Even the casual sports enthusiast wants to see if the blusterer can back up the bluster. Muhammad Ali knew this. He goes down as the greatest because he called himself the greatest and then proceeded to back it up in the ring numerous times over the span of years. The Jets haven’t been in the Super Bowl since their last great Shit Talker, Quarterback Broadway Joe Namath brought them there and won the game against the heavily-favored Baltimore Colts in 1969. Joe had off-handedly “guaranteed” victory in the press. And then went out and was actually victorious. What do we do to Shit Talkers who cannot back up their
shit? Forget them? How do we remember Nikita Kruschev, former Soviet premiere, who banged with his little shoe and shouted “We will bury you” to the United States? As a lunatic or a comedian. As an afterthought.

Reporters on the one hand deeply enjoy Shit Talk because it makes for a great story. And a great story is the kind of story that spawns stories. It also inspires the “they talk too much” kind of stories. The wisdom of coaches suggests that Shit Talking in the Press only Fires Up the other team. Wouldn’t you rather play a bunch of guys who seem to have a lot of respect for your skills? When you Shit Talk there’s the reverse effect of reporters repeating your Shit Talk to Those About Whom The Shit Was Talked. Sports is run on Respect. Respect is Money. It’s also Championships and Money. And Not Having To Put Up With Your Bullshit is also Respect.

Sports figures are surprisingly sensitive to perceptions. On the SNY Jets’ Postgame Show, former back-up Quarterback Ray Lucas insinuated that he would punch people in the face on the street anyone who called these Jets “The Same Old Jets.” Meaning heartbreakers, underachievers. Imagine those being fighting words in your world. Rex Ryan bristles at the mention of “The Same Old Jets.” But, as the Legendary Shit Talker Bill Parcells once said, “You are what your record says you are.”

The ultimate failure of the New York Jets’ season will be that they ultimately were not what they said they were. What they insisted they were. It has nothing to do with football. It has to do with how the Jets came out and saw themselves in that First Half. After all the talk had faded away, they ended up with a failure of their own imaginations. They met the rare air of the AFC Championship game and failed to just be themselves.

There will be many who try to replicate the Shit Talking Ways of Rex Ryan and these Jets. The New York media will start early and often to hang on Ryan’s every word this off-season. A few New York Giants have already signaled they prefer the Rex Ryan Way to the Old School Ways of their coach, who won a Super Bowl against the Patriots just a few years ago. HBO will select a team to follow in the off-season for their “Hard Knocks” program and will expect television-worthy drama. Shit Will Have to Be Talked.

There’s no reason to expect that the Jets won’t be in the AFC Championship game again next year. There’s every reason in the world to expect the Shit Talk won’t stop until that team has reached the mountaintop.

But what of this perceived, elusive class? Many fans throughout the league refused to give the Jets credit for being a terrific team and are no doubt delighted to watch them fail. I will miss the Green Empire State Building. And when New York is involved in big events they always seem bigger. The Packers and the Steelers might actually go out and get the biggest ratings of any Super Bowl ever, with two incredible fan bases spread across the country. Last year’s Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts was the most watched program of all time, bigger than the last episode of “M.A.S.H.” They add an extra week so they can add extra Talk.

We equally immortalize those who Played the Game the Right Way and those who Were “Brash” But Backed It Up. The American Imagination is tickled by both those who quietly went about their business and those who Talked a lot of Shit. In America, we just want you to be you, as long as you’re a winner. If you lose, Americans want to have nothing to do with you.

Americans’ relationship with humility is more imagined than actual. We simultaneously think we’re awesome and will crush you. But say all the right boring things. Rex Ryan said whatever it was that popped into his head. And it was great for ratings. The Super Bowl will be very ordinary without him and his bluster. He will be missed. When the game is just a game, it’s just a game. It can be more when we elevate it to the position of theater, when the thing you’ll remember most is not who played, but What Was Said. I won’t bemoan the end of sportsmanship or salute the coming Shit Talkers of the Future (they should maybe add a wing to the Halls of Fame to fit those who boasted best). Like those funny beer commercials have shown us, sometimes the game isn’t won on the field, it’s won during the post-game news conference.

Hey, fellas: Want to do sex to that special — or simply just available — lady in your life? Text her! “Nearly 40 percent of women say that social-networking media, such as text-messaging and Facebook, are causing them to jump into the sack faster with partners than they would have in the past, according to a poll by Men’s Fitness and Shape magazines.” Some clinical psychologist suggests that the false sense of intimacy texting provides will get you over the hump (heh), as the lady in question will think that “you’ve actually been together for a longer amount of time, so it’s actually OK to have sex quicker. You may have gone out once or twice, but since there’s been so much exchange, either in texting or Facebook, it feels longer. It actually feels like its been longer than just two dates.” What a marvelous age in which we live!

“It wasn’t that long ago that opinions were something carefully considered and weighed, so that they’d stand the test of time and reflect well on the author.”
 — Oh, you don’t say, op-ed by Stephen Randall. Exactly how long ago was that?

Hey, what did you do this weekend? If you were Rafael Nadal, you dropped by a penguin nursery in Melbourne with your trainer, after destroying a competitor in the Australian Open and having nearly-naked underwear ads hit the Internet. You’re lazy. (via)