They embody the single biggest indicator of delusion, which is this: In order to see things working out their way, they have to imagine the world different than it is. Bazelon describes one Planned Parenthood director who "looked out the window, at all the people who she wished could feel the urgency she does, and pointed out that change in medicine comes slowly."
And abortion supporters need this to keep going—they need to keep looking forward to the vision they have in mind. But what they lose along the way is a deeper understanding of why abortion isn't accepted in public and medical life. Rather than trying to understand why support for abortion dwindles, they turn away, they cover up, they try to hide the discomforting part of abortion from patients, from nurses, from themselves.....
Somewhere in these women's stories lies the reason why abortion still causes hesitation for much of the American public; the reason why many women who support the availability of abortion in the abstract say they wouldn't do it themselves; the reason why many doctors who support abortion in polls don't perform them in their offices. But abortion supporters, like those quoted in Bazelon's article, find it hard to look closer to understand these reasons and grapple with them.
The Associated Press has an article on the now-apparently-removed abortion coverage from states' high risk plans.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, acknowledged that his side had won a round.
"If they now do what they say they are going to do, that would be good," Johnson said of the Obama administration. "But in our view they are doing it because the spotlight has been put on them and we blew the whistle."
Unions in Michigan plan on spending millions of dollars on advertisements to inform the public that one Democratic candidate for governor is opposed to abortion.
Here's the latest on induced pluripotent stem cells.
A study by Hochedlinger published in the journal Nature in April found that in most mouse iPS cells, a cluster of genes known to be important in development was not activated. In the most stringent test, those iPS cells did not perform as well as embryonic stem cells. But he also found a small portion of iPS cells in which those genes were active, and the cells had the full development potential of embryonic stem cells.
He is now repeating the experiment using human cells, and says his work suggests that it may be possible to optimize the reprogramming process or to use the genetic differences to sort good iPS cells from bad.
A bus driver in Texas is suing his employer after he was fired for refusing to pick up a woman and take her to Planned Parenthood.
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I think one powerful motive for trying to "mainstream" abortion is that the curriculum itself is designed to brainwash doctors into believing, against their own instincts, that abortion really is good for women. This means that the woman will be more isolated from those who could provide her with real help.
ReplyDeleteWhy are prolife doctors not doing more to develop a curriculum that educates doctors about normal, self-limiting ambivalence in early pregnancy? About how to identify and help abortion-vulnerable women? Why is it those who only seek to harm that have all the motivation to go out and push an agenda, and those who are there to protect women sit back and figure that simply not doing abortions themselves is all they need to do?