"We know what's best for you"

It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can believe that women need help making a decision as to whether to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. There isn't a woman in the world, no matter how scrupulous she is about contraception, who hasn't at some point spent days running to the bathroom every ten minutes hoping for a period that doesn't come and making bargains with God that we'll lose ten pounds, be nicer to our mothers, do volunteer work, save more money, go to church every Sunday, or whatever, if He will just please, please, please bring our periods on -- and hasn't danced for joy when it does come, even if it means embarrassing stains on our brand-new white jeans.

But at a time when the wingnut so-called pro-life crowd is also cheerleading the relentless carnage in Iraq, the claims of revering the "sanctity of human life" ring just a bit hollow.

So now the fetophiles have changed their tune. Now they've decided to attack abortion rights by spreading propaganda about the "serious health problems" caused by abortions:

The anti-abortion movement’s focus on women has been building for a decade or more, advanced by groups like the conservative Justice Foundation, the National Right to Life Committee and Feminists for Life.

“We think of ourselves as very pro-woman,” said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee. “We believe that when you help the woman, you help the baby.”

It is embodied in much of the imagery and advertising of the anti-abortion movement in recent years, especially the “Women Deserve Better Than Abortion” campaign by Feminists for Life, the group that counts Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of the chief justice, among its most prominent supporters.

It is also at the heart of an effort — expected to escalate in next year’s state legislative sessions — to enact new “informed consent” and mandatory counseling laws that critics assert often amount to a not-so-subtle pitch against abortion. Abortion-rights advocates, still reeling from last month’s decision, argue that this effort is motivated by ideology, not women’s health.

“Informed consent is really a misleading way to characterize it,” said Roger Evans, senior director of public policy litigation and law for Planned Parenthood. “To me, what we’ll see is an increasing attempt to push a state’s ideology into a doctor-patient relationship, to force doctors to communicate more and more of the state’s viewpoint.”

Nancy Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said, “It’s motivated by politics, not by science, not by medical care, and not for the purposes of compassion.”

The Guttmacher Institute, a research group and an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, said recently that “a considerable body of credible evidence” over 30 years contradicted the notion that legal abortion posed long-term dangers to women’s health, physically or mentally.

But Allan E. Parker Jr., president of the Justice Foundation, a conservative group based in Texas, compares the campaign intended for women to the long struggle to inform Americans about the risks of smoking. “We’re kind of in the early stages of tobacco litigation,” Mr. Parker said.

All sides agree that the debate reached a new level of significance when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case last month, approvingly cited a friend-of-the court brief filed by the Justice Foundation.

The foundation, a nonprofit public interest litigation firm that has handled an array of conservative causes, has increasingly focused on abortion through its project called Operation Outcry. Mr. Parker said the group began hearing from women in the late 1990s who considered themselves victims of legalized abortion — physically and emotionally — and wanted to tell their stories. Operation Outcry, which grew to include a Web site, a national hot line and chapters around the country, eventually collected statements from more than 2,000 women, officials said.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, the group submitted statements from 180 of those women who said that abortion had left them depressed, distraught, in emotional turmoil. “Thirty-three years of real life experiences,” the foundation said, “attests that abortion hurts women and endangers their physical, emotional and psychological health.”

[snip]

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained,” Justice Kennedy wrote, alluding to the brief. “Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.”

Since when do these people care about women's depression and loss of esteem? First of all, for every woman who has regretted her decision to have an abortion, there is a woman who feels mostly a deep sense of relief -- and her regret is only that it was necessary in the first place. No woman should ever be pressured to have an abortion, and I don't believe for one minute that there is a widespread effort in family planning clinics to pressure women either way. I worked in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Easton, Pennsylvania while in college in the 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, and our training was very clear -- to try to elicit from the woman what SHE wanted to do. Explaining the options and including abortion among them is hardly pressuring a woman to have an abortion -- and this was long before the Christofascist Zombie Brigade began its War on Sanity.

The idea of a male Supreme Court Justice, or for that matter, a woman who had an abortion and wishes she hadn't, thinking he or she has the right to dictate what any other woman does is repugnant. There is no credible scientific research indicating widespread mental illness resulting from abortion, and that this bogus notion has crept into government is a crime. And to hide behind a paternalistic "We're just trying to save your from your evil, unchaste self" notion of "We know what's best for you" is insulting.

In this life we're all going to do things we regret. As the years went by and I hadn't changed my mind about not having children, people would ask me, "Well, what are you going to do if you regret your decision later on?" And I would say, "Live with it." Because we make decisions every day. Some of them are intelligent decisions and some are stupid. But we all, male and female, have to live with the consequences of what we do. We do what seems right at the time, and if we have regrets later on, well, such is life. Abortion is no different.