Overlooked perhaps in the historic vote that made Barack Obama the nation's first African-American president is something that didn't happen. With the defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket and its extremist anti-abortion platform, Americans voted against an abrogation of women's reproductive rights that might have taken a generation to undo. And by rejecting draconian ballot measures in Colorado, South Dakota and California, voters protected a woman's right to choose - at least for now.

To be sure, Obama's victory prevented the emergence of conservative Supreme Court supermajority committed to sweeping away Roe v. Wade. With the potential retirement of Justices Stevens (88) and Ginsburg (83), Obama may the opportunity to make at least two nominations to the Court. (There may be 14 openings on the nation's appellate courts, all but one which currently has a Republican majority.) Given Justice Kennedy's condescending and paternalistic opinion in the 5-4 Gonzales v. Carhart case upholding the so-called federal partial birth abortion ban, the direction of the Court and the fate of Roe surely hung in the balance last Tuesday.

On that point, John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party were quite clear. McCain not only supported judicial appointees in the mold of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, he reversed course to support overturning Roe v. Wade. And to be sure, the 2008 Republican platform incorporated Palin's extremist views on abortion, banning the procedure even in cases of rape and incest:

"We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."

In Colorado, anti-abortion activists tried – and failed - to enshrine the GOP plank's logical extreme in the state constitution.

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(h/t Debra C for first picture)
WCBS-TV:

They're ads you may have seen around New York City. They're supposed to be promoting storage, but they have a political and comical edge to them.

But their latest ad doesn't have too many people laughing.

Its billboards have always been edgy, but has Manhattan Mini Storage gone over the edge?

The ad causing controversy depicts a coat hanger and takes a stance on abortion, along with the slogan: "Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose."

Needless to say, it didn't take long for the backlash to come.

"These billboards, we think they're absolutely disgusting," said Kiera McCaffrey of the Catholic League. [..]

Manhattan Mini Storage often uses liberal messages in its billboards, reflecting the politics of a city in which three-quarters of voters picked John Kerry over George Bush in 2004.

Their latest ad, as shown in a NYC subway station shows a woman's body, wearing a Palin-esque suit with a button that says "Choice" with a circle and a line through the word, with the ad line, "What's more limited, your closet space or her experience?"

Personally, I like the coathanger ad. I think that image is a stark reminder of the dangers of letting the government take choices away from women. Abortions will not decline if they repeal Roe v. Wade, they'll just become more dangerous.

Clearly, in all his debate prep, no one thought to coach McCain not to go to the third rail of the abortion issue. Boy, was that an oversight. Because not only did McCain go there, he jumped right on to it.

In trying to paint Obama as being for the great Republican bugaboo of late term abortions (because, you know, there are so many women running around and deciding after being pregnant for six or more months that being pregnant is no longer convenient for them), Obama replied that he didn't vote for the late term abortion ban because it had no provision for the health or life of the mother. And that's when McCain proved how heartless and clueless he is:

Again…just again, an example of the eloquence of Senator Obama, health (indicates air quotes) of the mother. You know that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement to mean almost anything.

Really? Not a legitimate concern? Tell that to these women.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does.

Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

Palin: Well, let's see. There's, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I could think of … any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today. <!-- sphereit end -->

To be fair, it's probably easier to come up with a case that you agree with, but that's what skilled and smart politicians do: they re-frame the question the way they want to answer it. I'm just afraid that if the question were phrased the other way around, she still would have been stumped. This is what people mean when they say she is unqualified to be (Vice-) President. Just contrast her answer with Biden's and that becomes crystal clear.  

(h/t Heather)

Rocky Mountain News: 

Planned Parenthood is suddenly a lot richer because of Sarah Palin.

And the Republican vice presidential nominee will soon be receiving tens of thousands of thank-you notes.

A three-week-old Internet campaign is asking abortion-rights activists to send donations to Planned Parenthood in honor of the Alaska governor.[..]

One e-mail making the rounds on the Internet says: "Instead of (actually, in addition to) all of us all sending more e-mails about how absolutely horrible she is, let's all make a donation to Planned Parenthood in Sarah Palin's name."

Katie Groke Ellis, field manager for the Planned Parenthood of the Rockies Action Fund, predicts that the five-state chapter of the group alone could draw $100,000 in donations.[..]

Planned Parenthood sends a handwritten thank-you card to the donor. If a donation is made in someone's name, he or she gets one, too.

In this case, the Palin cards will go to Republican presidential nominee John McCain's national headquarters.

Never thought I'd say this, but thank goodness for Sarah Palin!

In an interview with CBS' Katie Couric Wednesday, Cindy McCain seemed surprised to learn that her husband John wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned. But as it turns out, the surprises hardly end there for the McCains when it comes to abortion and the 2008 Republican platform. By rejecting John McCain's limited proposed exemptions for cases involving rape, incest and the life of the mother, the GOP's hard-line abortion banning plank echoes not its presidential nominee, but his running mate Sarah Palin.

That result was to be expected.  During a July 30 interview, John McCain admitted he had "not gotten into the platform discussions." And it shows. Unlike Barack Obama, who personally intervened to help create a new abortion plank in the Democratic platform, John McCain left the GOP committee to its own devices in producing a document that is far more radical than even McCain's own draconian anti-abortion stand.

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  Back in 2000, during a debate with George W. Bush, Senator John McCain chastised the future President for embracing a Republican platform on abortion that didn't include exemptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother. Eight years later, and now the GOP nominee for President, McCain has abandoned his own convictions, and is taking a "hands off approach" to the drafting of the new party platform, which will of course not include those crucial exemptions. This video tracks the evolution of McCain's position from thoughtful and nuanced to simplistic and extremist.

Download | play   Download | play  

"I have kept a consistent position on right to life. And I haven't changed my position on even numbered years or have changed because of the different offices I'm running for."

John McCain: Doing anything necessary to win.

[HT: MissLaura for the idea]

This is something that he can't run away from anymore. Ladies, he's not your man. He said he will run a pro-life---or---anti-choice White House. Apparently---the innocent Iraqis that have been killed didn't get a chance to share in his vision for America.

Thanks Jed for the vid...

On Saturday, August 16th, megachurch preacher and Purpose-Driven Life author Rick Warren will host the first joint appearance of campaign '08 by Barack Obama and John McCain. In what CNN is billing as the "Compassionate Leader Forum," Warren will lead separate conversations with Obama and McCain, who will meet on stage at the beginning and/or end of the event at Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.

While the anti-gay Warren and his co-sponsor the multi-denominational group Faith in Public Life will apparently be the arbiters of presidential compassion, Reverend Warren insists Saturday's event is not about "gotcha" questions for the candidates:

"This is a critical time for our nation and the American people deserve to hear both candidates speak from the heart -- without interruption -- in a civil and thoughtful format absent the partisan 'gotcha' questions that typically produce heat instead of light."

But for the good people at the Red State blog, that's simply not good enough. Declaring that "abortion on demand is non-negotiable," Red State's open letter to Reverend Warren insists he promise to confront Obama on the issue. Failing to do so at the event, "it would be better to cancel it." No doubt, Rick Warren will ask Barack Obama about his views on abortion and women's reproductive rights.

But among the questions on AIDS, poverty, climate change and the candidates' personal faith, the notoriously reserved on religion John McCain can rest assured he won't face tough questions about his own.

Here, then, are 10 questions Rick Warren won't ask John McCain.

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Digby discusses the "Draft Democratic Platform Rejects Anti-Abortion "Reduction" Plank"

You can read the relevant pieces of the platform at the link. I've always felt that the emphasis in the party should be less on reducing abortion and more on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which every liberal, pro-choice or pro-life, can agree upon. This does that while acknowledging that reducing unwanted pregnancies naturally leads to reduced abortions, which is true without unnecessarily stigmatizing the procedure or the women who find themselves in need of it.

Pro-choice advocates have always been in the forefront of reducing unwanted pregnancies. If we had our way the government would give free birth control and reproductive health information to all Americans. But then, that's really the issue. We don't think sex is the problem (it's pretty uhm, unstoppable) --- we think unwanted pregnancies are the problem. The social conservatives clearly do think sex is the problem or they wouldn't be intent upon keeping kids ignorant, making birth control unavailable and then forcing women to have children against their will.

Good for the platform committee for adopting language that everyone who is engaging in good faith can probably support.

What a straight talker, what a maverick...

ABC:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP's platform on abortion.

"If he were to change the party platform," to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother's life, "I think that would be political suicide," said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. "I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble."

A senior Republican close to McCain told ABC News that building a more inclusive GOP is a top priority for the Arizona senator. But this adviser does not see changing the party platform to include exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother as necessary for achieving that vision.

The problem for McCain, however, is that he excoriated then-Gov. George W. Bush during a 2000 debate for not being willing to make this change to the platform, and Democrats are salivating at the prospect of arguing, in the words of one strategist, "that another four years of Bush begins with another four years of Bush's platform."

Watch McCain's heated exchange with Bush here.

While McCain has not addressed the abortion platform since becoming the presumed Republican nominee, he reaffirmed his desire to change the GOP's official abortion stance following a multicandidate forum that took place in Des Moines, Iowa, April 14, 2007.

Despite McCain's support for changing the platform in 2000 and 2007, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the co-chairman of McCain's Justice Advisory Committee, significantly downplays the possibility that McCain would revise the party's call for a nationwide constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions.

"I don't think that's going to happen. I think you're going to see a platform process that is going to maintain that plank," said Brownback, a leading abortion rights opponent who endorsed McCain after ending his own White House bid.

"There are going to be a number of people supporting his nomination that want that plank left exactly as it is," he said. "They're going to be a strong majority."

The GOP's platform committee will meet in Minneapolis-St. Paul the week before the Sept. 1-4 Republican National Convention.

While leaving the platform untouched would please many in the GOP's socially conservative base, it could alienate some of the more moderate voters that McCain hopes to woo.

"If he doesn't change the platform, then he's being the same kind of hypocrite that he accused Bush of being in 2000," said Jennifer Blei Stockman, the co-chairwoman of Republican Majority for Choice. "To not accept abortion in cases of rape and incest, give me a break. That's sick. That's inhumane."

Speaking of which, friends active in the reproductive health community have told me to keep a close eye on Bush over the Memorial Day weekend, where he is suspected to reinstate the "Global Gag Rule" domestically. Recently the Family Research Council, as mentioned above, an ardent opponent of Planned Parenthood was received at the White House to deliver their petitions of over 80 right wing organizations calling for the gag rule to be enforced and thus disqualify PP from participating in the program. The "Gag Rule" would limit federal funding to reproductive health outlets that give women information about abortion, as was specified in Rust vs. Sullivan.

This is good news. We all took action and the results followed. C&L thanks Michael J. Klag for his handling of the situation on POPLINE so quickly.

Here's the letter posted on Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:

I was informed this morning that the word "abortion" was blocked as a search term in the POPLINE family planning database administered by the Bloomberg School’s Center for Communication Programs. POPLINE provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning and is the world’s largest database on these issues.

USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.

I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore "abortion" as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH
Dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Why would anyone restrict the word 'abortion' on a government funded data base with thousands upon thousands of articles for research ? I'm very interested to see how that decision was reached. Yea, I know---I'll be nice for now,  but I'll keep on it....Many thanks to Women's Health News for the heads up and the many emails I received on this issue.

A medical librarian, who ran a typical search on POPLINE, (the world's largest database on reproductive health) found something very disturbing. The term "abortion" had been pretty much blocked from its database for normal searches . Go here and try the search. I did and got "No records found by latest query."

What is POPLINE?

the world's largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID).

I was contacted yesterday by someone and given this email thread. Here's what he/she said in the email:

The e-mail exchange below is fairly straight-forward: a governmental database on Population, POPLINE (POPulation OnLINE) has been changed so that one can no longer search the term "abortion." As the representative from POPLINE states, "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

I suspect pressure was placed from on high to do this. Why would the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where POPLINE is hosted, decide on its own to eliminate searching for information on abortion? I hope you can publicize this outrageous maneuver.

Here's the email conversation that was posted here. It's quite troubling. Names were edited for confidentiality!

To: Debra L. Dickson
POPLINE Database Manager/Administrator
INFO Project
111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, MD 21202
ddickson@jhuccp.org
Tel: 410-659-6300 / Fax: 410-659-6266

Hi Debbie –

Thank you for your quick response to my e-mail. I have forwarded your e-mail to researchers with whom I am working; I suspect they will be as puzzled as I about the decision to make “all abortion terms stop words” in the government funded, publically available “POPLINE” database. Even more troubling is the implications for the average user – eliminating this term essentially blocks access to the reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. “Unwanted w2 pregnancy” is not a synonym for abortion.

Continue reading »

While I was watching and transcribing Mike Huckabee's appearance on SNL this weekend, I kept thinking he is so good at being likeable that if you don't have a clear sense of what he really stands for, it would be easy to be swayed by Huckabee. But then a story like this comes down the wires and you realize that it is really, really important to know EXACTLY what candidates do stand for. Denver Post:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Monday endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

The former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister also supports a human-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Huckabee spoke favorably about the Colorado ballot initiative, sponsored by 20-year-old Kristi Burton and her Colorado for Equal Rights group, during his Friday visit to Colorado Springs.

On Monday, Huckabee lent official support to the measure.

"This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception," Huckabee said in a statement.

"With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value," Huckabee said. "Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs."

Well, it's actually a little stickier than that, Huckabee. After all, would we consider a woman who had a miscarriage (also known medically as a "spontaneous abortion" *gasp*) a murderer? What if she conceives ectopically? Would the doctor who operates on her to remove the pregnancy so that the mother will not die also a murderer? Michael Froomkin points out another issue: citizenship.

Aside from the not-so-small point that citizenship is a federal issue and it is not clear from first principles whether the federal rule should or would follow the state rule, there’s obviously something powerful about this logic especially if the Colorado model were ever to be adopted on a national basis.

In that case, if a noncitizen female conceives a child in the US, presumably it would be wrong to deport the blastocyte or fetus. And that means we can’t deport the mother either. At least until the kid is born after which we are, as news reports from all over show, perfectly willing to deport mothers of small citizens if the mothers lack proper documentation.

  This week saw the last “March of Life” of Bush’s presidency, as thousands of opponents of abortion rights gathered just a few blocks from the White House, as they do every year, to protest on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. As with every other year, Bush showed his solidarity with the crowd’s cause by picking up the phone and telling them what a great job they’re doing. The invitation to appear in person was, of course, ignored.

Some have noticed the Republican record of snubs.

The annual March for Life has come and gone. One of its more bizarre qualities is the way GOP presidents participate: by recorded message or telephone hook-up, but never in person. This began during Ronald Reagan’s presidency when some advisors did not want a photo beamed around the world of Reagan addressing the crowd, but those same advisors knew they had to at least acknowledge the role that pro-life forces played in Reagan’s 1980 victory. Reagan could look out the window of the Oval Office and see that marchers, as could every president since, but the phone connection has remained the means of participation. Even George W. Bush, who will never face another election and seems plenty unconcerned about the political fallout of other decisions, could not manage to emerge from his office to address the crowd in person. […]

At some point, pro-life groups need to challenge those whose disembodied voices fill their ears every January. This bizarre “telephone hook-up” is, in both the literal and figurative senses of the phrase, lip service to the cause. The loyal pro-life members of the GOP coalition deserve more, to say nothing of the unborn.

Of the pro-life Republican candidates, John McCain sent a letter, Mitt Romney issued a press release, Mike Huckabee was in Georgia, and Ron Paul (who opposes abortion rights despite his libertarianism) didn’t communicate with the crowd, though he did announce an endorsement from Norma McCorvey.

In response to all of this, Kevin Drum asked, “[W]hy do the pro-life forces put up with this?”