Life Links 6/28/13

Salon's Dave Weigel really should do some basic research before making such broad generalizations.

Abortions after 24 weeks (excepting medical emergencies) are flat-out illegal.   

If Weigel had taken the time to do even the most basic research, like say typing "abortion 26 weeks" into Google, he'd find this abortion advertising listing where a variety of abortion providers offer elective abortions past 24 weeks.  But hey, they're flat-out illegal, right? 

Your average pro-choice journalist/commentator has never done 5 minutes of research on abortion besides going to Planned Parenthood's or NARAL's web page.


Jonah Goldberg on "women's health":

Of course, this argument will be wholly unpersuasive to the folks shouting the loudest about "women's health decisions." Which raises an even greater irony. The basic conservative or pro-life view is that abortion is different from other health-care decisions because there's a harmed party other than the mother. This fact, not sexism or traditionalism or theology, is what trumps the general conservative preference for individual freedom. You don't have an unfettered right to harm someone else.

But once you get beyond abortion, conservative public policies treat women like autonomous human beings capable of making their own choices — about health care or anything else. It's the abortion-rights extremists who boil down the vast range of issues and choices raised by the term "women's health" to a single issue, sexual reproduction, as if women were nothing more than breeders. And yet conservatives are the ones who are called sexists.

The U.S. Supreme Court may take up a case on an Oklahoma law which required abortionists to follow the FDA protocol when dispensing RU-486 chemical abortions. 

An Oklahoma court ruled that the law violated women's bodily integrity and right to abortion and struck it down, saying it "can serve no purpose other than to prevent women from obtaining abortions." The state's highest court affirmed that decision, and now the state attorney general has appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the law is a reasonable exercise of state power.