Anti-abortion idiots are getting COLD FEET about taking case to SCOTUS.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-abortion7mar07,1,4370625.story?coll=la-news-politics-national

Have you read about their new "strategy?" Now they plan on making a girl/woman look at an ultrasound pic of the fetus or require doctors to tell the woman/girl that the fetus will feel pain.:grr:

<snip>Such incremental steps would save many more fetuses than South Dakota's ban, said Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life. "As a pro-lifer, I feel guilty saying this, because people are out there all excited, but a ban is actually counterproductive," she said.

She and others argue that their movement needs more time to turn society firmly against abortion. They want to hold public hearings to investigate the alleged (and hotly disputed) risks of abortion. They plan to promote ultrasounds to fix an image in the public's mind of the embryo as a beautiful, human life. They aim to use more women who have had abortions — and now regret it — as spokeswomen for their cause.

Until then, they're reluctantly advising legislators in Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee not to pass the bans under consideration in those states.

Instead, they urge legislators to pass provisions such as requiring a woman to attend counseling and to wait a day or more before getting an abortion. The latest trend is to require doctors to show a woman her ultrasound or to inform her that the fetus might feel pain during an abortion.

:)

If we lose one more Justice....Roe will die a swift death.

Then what the hell will they do to rally their base for elections? What they will probably do is wait until another Justice retires or dies or is suicided.

That's what the Repubs will use to activate their base once Roe is gone.

I've had a number of prospective parents show me the sonograms of their darling little fetuses. On some you can make out a head-like shape and maybe some blurry limbs, but I think those were several months on and even then they weren't all that clear.

A 90 day or younger one - well, I suspect it would take some imagination to make out anything.

That's what mine looked like at 6 weeks when I had my abortion. I asked to see it, and it didn't bother me. I knew I had done the right thing, and seeing it so small had not bothered me.

At 8 weeks, it's a blob. You have to look closely to see anything resembling a beating heart. At 20 weeks, it starts to look more like a baby getting under way.

Dulcinea
mother of 2

by a very recent study that has shown that there is no capacity for a fetus to interpret any sensation as pain until the last month or so of gestation. The structures within the brain comprising pain centers are simply not developed until that time.

It's a pity the proslavery people have to lie so much.

If they didn't lie, they wouldn't have a "base."

As I have said, if the SCt strikes down Roe, the ability to mobilize the right wing fundies is gone. If the SCt affirms Roe, the ability is STILL gone because after thirty years of efforts and eight years of Bush, the right wing fundies aren't going to invest any more in the republicans.

So the political operatives want to simply put off the day of reckoning by telling the fundies that now is not the time for a ban, only itty bitty stetps to milk a few more election cycles from the anti choice voters. Well, it's now or never, and they won't wait.

milking this issue, not the pro-coathanger fundies.

They know if this goes to the SCOTUS, they will lose...5-4. They can't take that loss during an election year.

I guess Roe would be upheld, but it doesn't matter. If it isn't, what possible reason do the fundies have to turn out then? The anti gay, pro prayer stuff doesn't come with life or death rhetoric.

The only way for repuglicans to win is for the issue to never get to the courts, and therefore, teh operatives call for baby steps with the republicans in charge of the entire country, practically.

The Republicans may be in a position to no longer care what anyone thinks. We'll only know for sure in retrospect and I'm not willing to wait and see.

then it remains an issue to rally their base: they can still scream about "activist judges"; there is still work to be done and they need another term to protect the unborn. blah blah

It is also a sin isn't it? It destroys families and breaks kids hearts :cry: :cry: :nopity: :sarcasm:

That was the hot button issue in Pennsylvania each time the Dems brought up "No Fault Divorce." (1950's ?)

NOT WITH THEM. They are IN THE MINORITY.

:rofl: To convince the rest of the country they are right...which will NEVER HAPPEN.

It will be the death of the right-wing fundie movement...and that can't happen soon enough for me.

they so richly deserve.

What about them? Where do they go?

Some people 'round these parts--usually the ones without uteri, or who are too high/mighty/perfect to consider that they or women they love will ever need medical choice--simply don't give a shit about the human consequences to obstructions to human rights. It's just too hard for them to think outside the comfortable abstractions the rightists use.

to destroy the very dangerous fundie movement.

I will donate money to help disadvantaged women cross state lines if need be.

BTW...I have a uterus.

for it's own sake and for the sake of all the other rights of privacy that would have to be thrown out.

It would be the end of the fundies in politics. But I think that its the end if the SCt affirms Roe, too. Nobody on that side wants to hear that another thirty years is going to be necessary to bring all the stars into alignment for the perfect anti Roe court. IF the payback doesn't come this year, they are walking.

I understand this is NOT aobut humans, but puppies.

I have raised poodles and bichons for many years. Poodles must have their tails cropped and dew claws removed in the first 3 days after birth. BECAUSE they have NO response to pain then!!!!! Believe me, I've had dozens done, and there's not even a whimper or a squeek.

If you wait for even a few more days, the vet must anesthetize the areas for surgery.

Bichons only need their dew claws removed. Same response.

Sooner of later, humans will realize there is a closer relationship with animals than they want to believe.

I don't believe in having an abortion either, but trying to use the "feels pain" excuse is plain BS!

"How will we raise money, if abortion no longer exists?". I wish someone would just call them out, on that point.

Unless they are figuring the thing will get crushed before it gets to the Supreme Selection Court...

They are not medically necessary.

then show the prospective "child murderer" the pre-recorded video of a nicely developed 30 week fetus -- any one will do, but a thumb sucker scores extra points. Since it's not an option, they can say that the state pays the cost.
:sarcasm:

on edit -- too p.o'd to spell

who have been buying up ultrasound equipment like crazy. :(

buying up ultrasound equipment like crazy.

I didn't know that.:grr:

faulty logic and bad information:

(1)-The overthrow of Roe v. Wade is a certainty now that Alito is on the court: its overthrow is, in fact, one of the three primary purposes of Alito's appointment, with the timing of the Dakota case providing final and absolute proof. (The other purposes are judicial affirmation of the unitary executive principle, thereby transforming the president into a dictator; and the total nullification of Constitutional guarantees of individual liberty -- especially the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth amendments -- thereby clearing the way to the imposition of theocracy.) Beneath the obfuscation of deliberately misleading media coverage, this was the position taken by ALL of the feminist and civil-libertarian groups that opposed Alito before Senate Republicans and Democrats collaborated in rubber-stamping Alito into office.

(2)-The vital point invariably missed by the Roe-will-prevail optimists is that, as never before or since, Roe made the right to privacy a basic principle of U.S. law, and destruction of that right is as vital to the corporatists as it is to the theocrats: without privacy all other liberties are reduced to meaninglessness.

(3)-The notion repeal of Wade will sate the Christian Fundamentalist lust for power is not only a total denial of the evidence, but sheer foolhardiness -- like believing shards of meat will satisfy a school of hungry sharks. What the Fundamentalists want is a Talibanic state with high-tech police power: read the terrifying proof so many times linked on this very site, and deny it at your own peril. Here for the uninformed is but one example:

http://www.motherjones.com/toc/2005/12/index.html

Roe v. Wade is now and henceforth nothing more than a diversion: its overthrow is guaranteed, a foregone conclusion, and by the Dakota case, the process of its revocation has been lifted beyond public opinion and handed to the courts. What is important now is not to be distracted from the OTHER efforts underfoot, not only to abolish our liberty forever, but to plunge all humanity into a new Dark Age in which theocratic tyranny will be enforced by high tech and will thus last literally until the extinction of humanity: picture a two-class society of pampered aristocrats and abject serfs -- a society in which a new Inquisition is enabled by electronic surveillance, and furnaces for public witch-burnings are carefully controlled by computers programmed to ensure the victims suffer maximum agony. This is not science fiction; it is literally the reality we are facing.

It's "The Handmaid's Tale" come to life.

Pro-choice optimists are in denial and thus desperately clinging to faulty logic and bad information:

I suspect you're irony-impaired.

(1)-The overthrow of Roe v. Wade is a certainty now that Alito is on the court: its overthrow is, in fact, one of the three primary purposes of Alito's appointment, with the timing of the Dakota case providing final and absolute proof.

The arithmetic is 5 to 4 against an overturn. You don't know the future, so your claim of certainty is magical. Nice post hoc fallacy on South Dakota.

(The other purposes are judicial affirmation of the unitary executive principle, thereby transforming the president into a dictator; and the total nullification of Constitutional guarantees of individual liberty -- especially the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth amendments -- thereby clearing the way to the imposition of theocracy.) Beneath the obfuscation of deliberately misleading media coverage, this was the position taken by ALL of the feminist and civil-libertarian groups that opposed Alito before Senate Republicans and Democrats collaborated in rubber-stamping Alito into office.

Sound like mere paranoia to me and doesn't fit the facts either.

(2)-The vital point invariably missed by the Roe-will-prevail optimists is that, as never before or since, Roe made the right to privacy a basic principle of U.S. law, and destruction of that right is as vital to the corporatists as it is to the theocrats: without privacy all other liberties are reduced to meaninglessness.

The right to have and freely choose your religion is constitutionally protected by...the right to privacy. Likewise with the pursuit of profits/wealth. And the right to privacy was not discovered or defined by Roe v Wade, it is taken from the Ninth Amendment and interpreted to extend to the realm of sexual choices and activities by Griswold v Connecticut.

(3)-The notion repeal of Wade will sate the Christian Fundamentalist lust for power is not only a total denial of the evidence, but sheer foolhardiness -- like believing shards of meat will satisfy a school of hungry sharks. What the Fundamentalists want is a Talibanic state with high-tech police power: read the terrifying proof so many times linked on this very site, and deny it at your own peril. Here for the uninformed is but one example:

http://www.motherjones.com/toc/2005/12/index.html

Well, of course a wrong solution will never solve a problem, and so there must be an endless effort to solve it in all the wrong ways possible.

Roe v. Wade is now and henceforth nothing more than a diversion: its overthrow is guaranteed, a foregone conclusion, and by the Dakota case, the process of its revocation has been lifted beyond public opinion and handed to the courts.

Not true in the least.

What is important now is not to be distracted from the OTHER efforts underfoot, not only to abolish our liberty forever, but to plunge all humanity into a new Dark Age in which theocratic tyranny will be enforced by high tech and will thus last literally until the extinction of humanity: picture a two-class society of pampered aristocrats and abject serfs -- a society in which a new Inquisition is enabled by electronic surveillance, and furnaces for public witch-burnings are carefully controlled by computers programmed to ensure the victims suffer maximum agony. This is not science fiction; it is literally the reality we are facing.

Thanks for the paranoid vision, but you really have been reading too many out-of-date science fiction books. I think you've never actually had to manage a large group of people in a serious way. It isn't actually possible to govern large groups of people in a way that denies their real interests. Oh, people will submit to totalitarianisms for a time...but only in the name of pursuing such collective interests more vigorously than otherwise.

of which I was speaking.

Indeed I am reminded of the "optimists" -- and believe me I am bending over backward to be polite -- who denied that Hitler was a threat and who, to this day (and typically out of bourgeois stockholder-blindness) deny that capitalism is methodically enslaving the world even as it destroys the planetary environment. Do you doubt global warming too?

Here -- not for your sake but for the sake of those readers who might be mislead by your don't-worry-be-happy diatribe -- are several authoritative links on the Christian Fundamentalist threat, and one link on the more generalized threat posed by all Abrahamic Fundamentalism:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm

(Believing the Bible is "literally true" is what defines whether one is a Fundamentalist or not. In other words, 63 percent of the U.S. population is Fundamentalist -- and therefore an enemy of liberty.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1651333,00.html

(More proof of the growing dominance of Christian Fundamentalism and thus the impending and now ever more inevitable Dark Age -- one in which the U.S. population is already becoming both the laughing stock and the horror-object of the entire civilized world.)

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html

(Scroll down for an utterly terrifying look at Christian Fundamentalism and its intent to replace the Constitution with the Bible -- literally a Christian equivalent of Sharia with not only all the horrors inherent therein but some unique to Christianity too: witch-burning, for instance.)

http://www.theocracywatch.org/

(More general information on the Christian Fundamentalist attack on liberty and privacy.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1398055,00.html

(How despite their public differences, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are finding a common bond in their hatred of liberty and intent to impose theocracy on the entire world.)

And your mathematics are simply wrong:

http://www.savethecourt.org/site/c.mwK0JbNTJrF/b.865549/k.C077/Critical_OConnor_54_Decisions.htm

Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) overturned a state law that would have had the effect of banning abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy and that lacked any exception to protect a woman’s health.

(The decisive vote in this case was cast by O'Connor. With Alito on the court there is now an anti-choice majority.)

Moreover:

History demonstrates unequivocally how the ultimate purpose of theocracy is creation and maintenance of an environment in which the working class can be subjugated for maximum exploitation. It is thus the ultimate form of fascism -- and the ultimate wet dream of capitalists everywhere.

The fact that through their churches and mosques the Fundamentalists have bottomless wealth merely underscores the extent to which they are tools of global capitalism.

The Fundamentalist tyrannies of the Middle East are perfect examples.

So was the anti-union Jim Crow pre-Civil-Rights-Movement South: brain-policed by Christianity both Fundamentalist and Mainstream, terrorized by that most Christian of all death squads the Ku Klux Klan aka "the Saturday night men's Bible-study class," and to this day more stubbornly anti-union than any other region of the U.S. Note too how the Fundamentalists are now methodically regaining all their former power, how the preponderance of post-Alito anti-abortion laws are coming out of the region's legislatures.

(I know first hand and all too well of what I speak: I lived nearly a third of my life in the South, including a summer in the Civil Rights Movement and seven years of my journalism career. The Ku Klux Klan fatally poisoned an especially beloved dog of mine -- a female German shepherd I raised from pocket-sized puppyhood -- and the same Klansmen tried twice to kill me.)

Not that the South is unique: Christian Fundamentalists are just as savage elsewhere too, for example in the rural Pacific Northwest, where they conducted a six-year "vigilante war" against Back-to-the-Land communards c. 1969-1975 and to this day will viciously torment non-churchgoing neighbors.

Not "mere paranoia" but bitter, terrifying truth.

there is no way of dealing with paranoia and lack of measure like yours except to let it take you over the cliff.

Let's see...
-I do know more about Hitler and Germans than you ever will. And Communists and Greens, too.
-During the Cold War the West did not fight for capitalism, it fought for colonialism and economic feudalism of the Western European variety.
-Since I'm not Leftist or moderate, I must be Right? Very blind to serious liberalism ye seem to be. But typically Leftist.
-Uh, my professional training is in science. You can't lecture me on global warming (or its absence).
-I've been on to the Christian Right for for longer than you seem to be. Take thee hither to www.chalcedon.edu for where it all really begins.
-Absent O'Connor, Kennedy is the swing vote on the Court. Have a look at how he voted in PPSWPA vs Casey, and why.

-Reality: have a look at the very long term records, e.g. Gallup's to 1975
http://www.pollingreport.com/abortion.htm
-the present situation by state:
http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyProChoice.htm

-About the South and Midwest, and rural people, vs the rest: abortion is the issue in the religious divide between people whose frame of reference is the Agrarian Age and fertility cultism, and the Industrial Age with its hard materialist utilitarianism.
-Some Americans do live in post-Industrial subsocieties already and subscribe to neither value system
-about Southern society: it's a rigid caste system there. It doesn't matter whether you focus on the racial, economic, cultural, or religious partitions specifically. The same vigor of defense will be mounted for the caste privileges, and people are famously more violent and determined to retain their state of privilege than retain fundamental rights. (Fundamental rights can be recovered when lost. Privilege never is, the merits on which it was gained are long vanished, and people become attached to privilege as a form of identity when they have no strong other kind.)
-The South will retain its caste structure until a large group of people immigrates into the region which intermarries with all groups there and is disinterested in the history or the obsolete desires of the groups. That group will be Latinos.

Let me invite you to look outside your Leftist class struggle box and the assumption that we live in country that remains constant. Colonialism/feudalism and a caste system is not the perpetual fate of the United States or the world. This country was 80% white people when you were born, who made up ~95% of its voters due to Jim Crow. It is now under 65% white people, though they still make up ~77% of voters due to age demographics and age-related voting rates. Dechristianization and general departure from traditional organized religion is also picking up pace. If it's only at a rate of 8% per decade, and that seems to be low estimate, it's four decades until the U.S. is the first country to give up Christianity as majority religion since the spread of Islam. (Well, unless you count Europe as dechristianized already.) And if you want to accelerate real dechristianization, there's nothing more efficient than the threat or actuality of Christian Right theocracy. Which I believe peaked in the U.S. in the mid/late Eighties and early Nineties anyway.

The arrogance of your assumptions is as indicative as your non sequiturs are revealing.

Even so -- especially as to Roe v. Wade -- I hope you are right and I am wrong.

Jesus, just when I get clear of that crap on a personal level, it comes back on a political level. Sucks ass, man. :(

But then that is mostly what all of their campaigns are based on.

They want to use ultrasounds of a blob to try to "humanize" the embryo, and browbeat the pregnant woman into seeing it as a "child".

And they want the doctor to lie to the woman about how the fetus feels pain, which simply isn't true according to medical research.

The last hard pushes of a slowly dying, intensely stupid, movement...ugh.

But I hate how some pro-choice side people keep on giving them concessions. It's not worth it and it's not give-them-enough-rope either.

This is a 60 to 35 issue. Ironly concede the banners nothing and say no more, let the internal idiocy fray them and expose their beliefs as hollow and unsustainable, and by fall this will be the 60 to 25 issue it really is.

after birth, I don't really care much what they have to say.

No one is pro-abortion.

:hi:

:hi:

I'm also trying to make sure I don't call them anti-abortionists, but proslavery or anti-choice.

;) :hi:

one letter to a South Dakota newspaper mentioned that. . .and before being issued one, all men have to look at a microscopic closeup of the millions of swimmers they are killing that could be creating "life" each time they play with themselves.

Can't we get someone to draft this legislation?