On the Daily Beast today, Amy Siskind decries Nancy Pelosi as a “feminist nightmare.” Why so serious? Because “the House Speaker pushed the Stupak amendment through—then moved to block the woman bidding for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.”

That first point makes sense—feminist women were thrown under the bus in order to pass the health care bill, and they’re right to be pissed about it. But what’s this business about forcing us to vote for lady politicians? “A major element in our battle for equality is getting women into positions of power,” Siskind explains. “The hope is that these leaders, once in place, would promote women’s issues and encourage the next generation of women leaders. Speaker Pelosi reveals a flaw in feminist thinking: There are exceptions. A powerful woman can in fact be an enemy to women.”

Speaker Pelosi has taught Siskind a very important lesson: Supporting female politicians is not the same as supporting women. If only Siskind had figured that out sooner, before she wrote a big ‘ol article entitled “Should Women Back Palin in 2012?”

Read More “Why Sarah Palin Is A Better Feminist Than Nancy Pelosi” »

Daily Telegraph advice columnist Lesley Garner is faced with a doozy of a conundrum this week, a situation so horrible that it could only possibly be made worse by . . . the recommendations of Daily Telegraph advice columnist Lesley Garner!

The situation: “Eva,” a married woman, is raped by her boss on a business trip. She becomes pregnant. She decides to get an abortion. Her husband is supportive of the abortion, but not of Eva—”He drove me to a clinic for a consultation and waited outside in the car because he ‘didn’t want to hear me talk about conception dates,’” she writes. Eva later decides not to go through with the abortion. Her husband leaves her. She raises a beautiful baby boy on her own. Now, seven years later, she wants to reconnect with her ex. But there is a complication: “What happened on that trip wasn’t quite rape but I wasn’t exactly willing either. The man was my boss and he was very drunk and forceful. I tried to push him away without upsetting him, but he was too strong and I didn’t fight him.”

Now, if I were the advice columnist here, I know what I’d say: “your ex-husband is a dickwad.” But I’m not an advice columnist. Lesley Garner is. Her advice is of the “stop lying about getting raped and admit that it was selfish to not get an abortion” variety.

Read More “Advice Columnist Tells Victim She Wasn’t Actually Raped, And Should Have Aborted Her Not-Rape Baby” »

The battle for ideological dominance in our nation’s capital’s collegiate sex columns continues. Are our local campus columnists on the forefront of radical sex writing, or are they bringing back the good old days of romance born out of  aggressive homophobia?

This week: pro-life gay man worries that if he could have children, his pro-choice boyfriend might kill them; how to talk to a girl without being a creep; your boyfriend is cheating on you to avoid rumors he’s on the down low.

Read More “University Sex Columns, Reviewed: Pro-Life Gays Edition” »

This week, anti-abortion activists staged an eBay auction to help raise a legal defense fund for Scott Roeder, who was charged with murdering abortion provider George Tiller back in May. With the auction, anti-abortion activists were hoping to capitalize on Roeder’s newfound notoriety by selling off a series of his signed, pro-life memorabilia.

But before the items could hit the virtual auction block, eBay announced that the memorabilia would be removed from the Web site. In a statement, the company said that it would “not allow listings that promote or glorify violence, hate, racial or religious intolerance, or items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

St. Louis cartoonist Gary McCoy had a more personal beef with the auction: It totally ripped off his work.

Read More “Scott Roeder: Pro-Life Activist, Murderer, and Cartoon Plagiarist?” »

The folks at Overturn Roe have put together an instructional video to help you burn your very own effigies of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid this Halloween, instead of engaging in normal human activity like dispensing candy to children. According to Overturn Roe’s set of “Marching Orders” [PDF], demonstrating that our Congressional leaders are going to burn in hell if they don’t repent for making us pay for child killing in the health care bill is not going to be easy. “Decide you are going to do this—no matter what—even if it is just you and 2 other people,” the orders read. “Do not ask permission; do not ask for peoples’ opinions as to whether or not you should do this.”

Alright then. Let’s get started!

Read More “How to Burn Your Halloween Abortion Effigy In 10 Easy Steps” »

The danger of swine flu in pregnant women has received a great deal of press attention recently. As concerns over the health of pregnant women rise, the abortion debate has slyly emerged as a a central influence in the dialogue.

Yesterday, the New York Times told the story of Aubrey Opdyke, a 27-year-old woman who was pregnant when she contracted swine flu last June. What began as mild symptoms of aches and fatigue turned into a harrowing four month ordeal. Writes reporter John McNeil:
Read More “Swine Flu and the Abortion Debate” »

I’m not much of an expert in feminist economics—I count on my fingers—but I can appreciate a visually interesting, sufficiently dumbed-down lady-graph when it comes my way. This week, my foray into quantitative analysis of feminist issues left me kinda down. Behold, graphical representations of Bad News in abortion and stripping:

Depressing Feminist Graph #1:

Read More “Depressing Feminist Economics Lessons: Unsafe Abortions and Underpaid Strippers” »

In today’s New York Times, Stephanie Saul detailed one of the most difficult decisions facing women who are desperate to become pregnant: whether or not to have an abortion. Women who undergo intrauterine insemination in order to conceive, Saul writes, are at a high risk of producing “quadruplets, quintuplets and sextuplets—the most dangerous pregnancies for both mother and children.” Women carrying “multiples” are often encouraged by their doctors to undergo “selective reduction”—the purposeful “elimination” of some fetuses in order to increase the likelihood that the remaining fetuses—and the mother—will survive.

“Reducing.” “Eliminating.” Saul doesn’t use the word “abortion” until page three, when she notes that “many opponents criticize selective reduction as a form of abortion.” It is abortion. So why don’t we call it that?

Read More “Why Some Fetuses Are “Reduced” Instead of “Aborted”” »

In “Secret Lives of the Presidents,” New York Times writer Timothy Egan airs some private political views of former presidents, and wonders aloud, “What if they had been honest?” Let’s take a look inside Egan’s alternate history:

What if Bill Clinton had openly announced, as he later did to his biographer, that Al Gore was “blowing” the 2000 election by refusing to allow Clinton to campaign for him? Maybe George W. Bush would never be president!

What if Bush had openly announced, as he did privately to his speech-writer, that his “heart was never into” banning gay marriage? Maybe gay people could be married!

And what if Richard Nixon had openly announced, as he did to his Oval Office tapes, that he thought abortion was okay “when you have a black and a white”? Maybe . . . Barack Obama’s mom would have aborted him, and “the world’s most famous mixed-race man” would never have even existed!

Wait, what?

Read More “Could Richard Nixon Have Aborted Barack Obama?” »

DoubleX is collecting memories of women who received abortions from Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered in his Witchita, Kan. church on Sunday morning. The stories provide a good deal of insight into why women receive late-term abortions, and why Tiller’s work was so important. Tiller’s clinic was one of only three to provide late-term abortions in the United States.

One woman recalls her post-20 week abortion:

The baby had contracted a virus and you could see on the MRI that its organs were all messed up. It looked like there were bubbles in them, instead of solid masses like they were supposed to be. Then they figured out that the baby had been exposed to Fifth disease. All sorts of researchers contacted us, because they wanted to study it.

Read More “Memories of Late-Term Abortions” »