Presidents and Abortion Rights

George Will argues, correctly, I think, that the next presidential election will have little practical effect on abortion policy. First, the Supreme Court is unlikely to substantially reverse Roe v. Wade, for a variety of reasons. Second, in the unlikely event it did, it wouldn't much matter because only a small handful of states -- none of them Electoral ...

Abortion and Eugenics

While my position on abortion is much closer to that of Ross Douthat than that of Julian Sanchez, I nonetheless found the latter's argument on the "abortion equals eugenics" argument more persuasive. The key line in a very fine essay, to me at least, is, " If we all agree abortion is murder, then whether it has any ...

Thompson Lobbied for Abortion Group, Billing Records Show

Billing records from his old firm show that Fred Thompson spent nearly twenty hours working with the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. According to records from Arent Fox, the law firm based in Washington where Mr. Thompson worked part-time from 1991 to 1994, he charged the organization, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, about $5,000 for ...

Plan B Sales Surge Due to Availability

WaPo fronts a seeming non-story: Now that Plan B is available over-the-counter rather than requiring a prescription, its sales are up. Shocking, that. Next they'll tell me that sales of iPhones are way up over this time last year. More interesting is the reaction. "This is exactly what we hoped would happen," said Susan F. Wood of the ...

Fred Thompson Hired by Pro Abortion Group

The big news overnight is the claim by a pro abortion group that it hired Fred Thompson to lobby the first President Bush to soften his stance on a gag rule. Michael Finnegan broke the story for the LAT (although not before being scooped by The American Spectator): Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted ...

Hitler, Mozart, and Abortion

Gerard Vanderleun laments the social cost of abortion, wondering, "Of all those babies we destroyed, how many were Einsteins, how many were Mozarts?" Harvey Olson retorts, "Statistically, about as many as there were Hitlers, Dahmers, and Chos." A debate ensues about the statistical likelihood that a given aborted fetus would mature into a genius vice a sociopath with a side ...

Supreme Court Upholds Partial Birth Abortion Ban

The Supreme Court has upheld a federal ban on partial birth abortions. The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench. The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate ...

Shorter Dinesh D’Souza

Get the women back in the kitchen (preferable pregnant), stuff those gays back in the closet, prohibit divorce, outlaw birth control methods, ban pornography and there will never be another 9/11 attack again. D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim ...

FDA May Loosen up Morning-After-Pill Restrictions

Well given this post, this news that the FDA is may loosen up the restrictions on the morning-after-pill, and allow non-prescription sale to women 18 years old or older seems worthy of note. Although, the whole thing could simply be political manuevering. WASHINGTON, July 31 (Reuters) - Non-prescription sales of a "morning-after" contraceptive could be approved for women 18 and ...

Transporting Minors for Abortions to Be Illegal

The Senate yesterday overwhelmingly passed a law making it illegal to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion without parental consent. The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to help an under-age girl escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion. The bill was approved on a 65-to-34 vote, with ...

Stem Cell Research Funding

Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute notes that the recent furor over stem cell research really isn't the bioethics, but who should pay for the research. First, this is not a debate about whether stem cell research should be legal. It is, and no one in Congress or the Bush administration has proposed banning it. In fact, there are at least ...

Baby Sex Selection Banned in the UK

The United Kingdom will ban baby sex selection under a sweeping set of changes to health care regulation. Sex selection of babies for non-medical reasons is set to be outlawed in the UK under Government plans for a shake-up of embryology regulation. Health Minister Caroline Flint told MPs she was minded to introduce a "clear and specific ban" on the use ...

Pro-Life Nation

The NYT Magazine has a piece by Jack Hitt about El Salvador's strong criminalization of abortion that might as well have came straight from the NARAL propaganda factory. Mixed in with anecdotes about poor women stigmatized by unwanted pregnancies, we get this type of objective journalism: More than a dozen countries have liberalized their abortion laws in recent years, including South ...

Abortion and Puppies

Ezra Klein has a thoughtful post on the abortion debate entitled, "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Puppies!?" While he agrees with Digby that, intellectually, it makes little sense to argue that life begins at exception but abortion is nonetheless okay in the cases of rape and incest, this does not make abortion foes hypocrites. Instead, it just shows that ...

South Dakota Bans Abortion

South Dakota passes abortion ban (Reuters) SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) -- South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure. The law, which would punish doctors who perform the operation with a five-year prison term and a ...