Another of the dirty sluts that Mike Pence and Chris Smith believe should be punished for their unchastity

Here's another woman for whom Mike Pence and Chris Smith think THEY should have the power to make decisions:

Thanks to Mike Stark, whom if he didn't exist we would have to invent him. Go. Read.

UPDATE: Here's Jamie, another woman that Mike Pence and Chris Smith would rather see die than have an abortion of a much-wanted fetus that had no chance of survival anyway:

Halloween is over; it's NLQ Carnival Days!

What's NLQ Carnival Days, you might ask? It's arguably the most awesome idea for blog promotion that I've ever seen, and while every blog we blogroll is worthy in its own way, No Longer Quivering is one to which you ought to be paying attention, as the teabagger lunatics take over the Republican Party. Vyckie of NLQ started the blog to tell her story of her "escape" from the Quiverfull movement.

Quiverfull's web site is deliberately innocuous, as is it's "about us" statement: "Quiverfull.com's first priority is to serve God through proclaiming that every child is a gift and blessing from our gracious heavenly father." Sounds benign enough; it's standard fetophile boilerplate only without the "shoving our views down everyone else's throat" rhetoric. Have as many children as you want, folks, that's part of what "choice" is about. The problem with Quiverfull is that it's about more than just not using birth control; it's about subjugation of women and about reproducing faster than your "adversaries" can. Quiverfull conjures up images of Armies of Children for Jesus -- horrific little Village of the Damned zombies killing heathens for Christ -- and I'm not sure that's all that far off from the truth.

The problem with Quiverfull isn't in its advocacy of large families, it's in its view of women, and in questions about just how much "free will" is involved with women who become embroiled in its clutches. Kathryn Joyce wrote about Quiverfull, and about Vyckie, back in March, and what emerges is a picture of something akin to any other cult, which presents to troubled young people a sense of belonging, of meaning, of something important, as well as providing a rigid structure that so many troubled young people lack in the chaos of their own families. Cults pray on these kids, and Quiverfull appears to be no different as it lures young women into its web. Religion and spirituality contain strong elements of mind control, and it's clear, reading the stories of the women who have been drawn into, and then escaped, the Quiverfull web, that just invoking Jesus is not enough to turn a cult into a mainstream religion.

So go check out the NLQ Carnival, and read about what Vyckie and her colleagues have been doing since leaving the movement. But make sure you have a lot of time. Because once you start reading you won't be able to stop. And catch Vyckie on The Joy Behar Show on Tuesday.

It's interesting that the NLQ Carnival comes the same weekend that has brought us customary New York Times hack Jodi Kantor for once not being completely hacktastic in her article for the Magazine about the First Marriage. Perhaps it's the ambiguity, the "charting one's own course" aspect to this article that fully puts the Quiverfull movement in perspective. If there has ever been an institution that has its own peculiar rules, it's the political marriage. Historically the political marriage has consisted of Ambitious Man and his Pastel-Suit-Clad Helpmeet. Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to bash through this stereotype, and I think she can be forgiven for being clumsy at it, especially when she put her own goals on hold in favor of her far more charismatic husband's political career. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from the Village when Laura Bush, with her thorazine vacant smile entered the White House and promised us a period blessedly free of uppity women.

And then came the Obamas.

This is a marriage that fascinates people far out of proportion to its own dynamic. Perhaps it's the idea of an intact black family that blows people's minds, which means that the fictional Huxtables really didn't make much of a difference after all. Or perhaps it's a marriage in which its partners seem to genuinely care for and respect each other. That the participants are black while pious white advocates of family values such as Mark Sanford and John Ensign fall like dominoes creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance among those for whom "black" still connotes gang members in bandannas on street corners who don't pay child support. Perhaps it's the idea that the Obamas are, well, sexy, which creates an uncomfortable sense of "I just don't want to know" that Wanda Sykes blew right through in her recent HBO special:

And once again, we see an accomplished, achieving woman trying to navigate through the minefield of Political Marriage at the same time as trying to navigate through Marriage itself. And it's a public service that the Obamas have done in consenting to this article, for all of America has tended to insert the Obamas into a kind of marital fairy tale, where they seem to be living a magical existence that the rest of us can't even hope to aspire to. What the Obamas are saying in this article is that we CAN aspire to what they have, but it doesn't happen by magic, it takes constant work and compromise and consideration.

On the one hand we have this Bridezilla culture of diamond solitaire rings and big puffy white dresses and big parties, and by the time the couple is done with all the foofarah they have no idea how to live together for the decades to follow. On the other hand we have Quiverfull, in which women passively agree to a set of rules so they don't HAVE to think or do any emotional work. The Obamas have found a middle ground, and while it's clear that they have to work every day to stay there, they're also demonstrating that the rewards are there too.

"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.