Life Links 12/12/11

Newsweek's The Daily Beast has a long story on Jennie McCormick, the woman in Idaho who aborted a later-term pregnancy using RU-486 and then put her dead child in a box on the back porch.

McCormack, who thought she was about 12 weeks along, took the pills (the protocol involves two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol) the afternoon they arrived. The drugs are FDA-approved only for ending early-stage pregnancies; McCormack had no complications, but the pregnancy turned out to be more advanced than she thought—perhaps between 18 and 21 weeks, experts later speculated—and the size of the fetus scared her. She didn't know what to do—"I was paralyzed," she says—so she put it in a box on her porch, and, terrified, called a friend. That friend then called his sister, who reported McCormack to the police.

The author, Nancy Hess, includes this absurd claim about fetal pain with no source given.

(Virtually all research on the subject shows that fetuses cannot distinguish pain until as late as the 30th week of gestation.)

ABC News has a report from Elizabeth Vargas on sex-selection abortion and infanticide in India.


Hilarious Amanda Marcotte quote of the week (my emphasis):

But don't take my word for it. David Dayen at Firedoglake quoted respected and non-ideological pollster Celinda Lake on the issue:

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said she could "not even remotely" understand the political calculus of the decision, saying it "alienates the base, causes conflict with women in the base, [is] bad for key groups of women like younger women and unmarried women, and doesn't win the swing independent women."

It's one thing to ignorantly claim Celinda Lake is non-ideological. It's another to say she's non-ideological and then post a quote which the author identifies Lake as being a Democratic pollster.