In preparation for President Obama’s controversial commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, where he will no doubt speak at length about the virtues of killing newborns, anti-abortion protesters have converged on the University of Notre Dame campus. Some of them are simply rolling around vacant strollers (representing the never-born) or crafting signs reading “I Regret My Abortion”—bush league.

Only one dude is shaming our abortionist president the right way: with a small plane that tows “a banner depicting the remains of an aborted fetus and the words ‘10 Week Abortion.’”

Pwned.

Catholic Universities: respecting the lives of women since probably never.

Photo by Fated to Pretend

If only! Ann Coulter voices her support of an investigator’s right to choose to waterboard.

I think I’m arriving at some sort of unified theory of Coulterism:

abortion IS WORSE THAN terrorism IS WORSE THAN waterboarding

terrorists DESERVE TO BE waterboarded

abortionists DESERVE TO BE terrorized

Joy Behar DESERVES TO BE aborted

This one’s a two-fer, in response to my post on the omnipresent anti-abortion Metro ads, “Metro Swathed in Anti-Abortion Shame.”

Craig Howell writes:

Um, there’s a First Amendment issue here, folks. As a government agency, Metro cannot indulge in viewpoint discrimination. This matter was settled 30 years ago when the courts told Metro it could not refuse to run bus ads sponsored by the Gay Activists Alliance. I have been a member of what is now the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance since 1973, and this victory remains one of our signature achievements.

Lisa responds:

Read More “Sexist Comment of the Week” »

In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker writes on the Notre Dame Barack Obama abortionist love-fest speaker scandal:

Abortion, after all, is settled law, and Obama is the duly elected president. Clearly, the American people have moved on.

Or have they? And should we? Is there really ever a time when we should be comfortable with the ratification of abortion? It has always seemed to me that the truest form of feminism, as in the earliest days of suffrage, would be to hold abhorrent the state-sanctioned destruction of women’s unique life-bearing gifts. Out of material expedience, we’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that life is a mistake. [Emphasis all mine].

Oh yeah, the “truest form of feminism” must be wherever feminism was ONE HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS AGO. Now that women have the vote, what more do they want—the capacity to murder babies at will?

I, too, wish we could go back to the good ‘ol days of feminism, when women were forced to provide their “unique life-bearing gifts” on demand instead of, you know, if and when they chose to give the fucking gift. I WANT ALL GIFTS ALL THE TIME! MORE GIFTS! MORE MORE MORE!

[via Pukeimmediately].

Last month, Virginia liberals were up in arms over the state’s proposal to offer a “Choose Life” vanity plate option at the DMV. On March 30, Gov. Tim Kaine signed the plates into law.

Now, a new proposition would allow Florida drivers to choose Christ. Drivers could also choose Cross In Front of Stained Glass. When the proposed legislation surfaced, Democratic state senator Nan Rich urged Gov. Charlie Crist to veto the Jesus plate.

Crist responded that those who didn’t want Jesus on their license plates “don’t have to buy one.”

Which raises the question: Who wouldn’t want Jesus on their license plate? Look how fucking sweet that is! This is a momentous occasion: A vanity plate that both right-wing religious drivers and ironic liberal drivers can both believe in.

Over at Beliefnet, Steven Waldman is arguing for the abortion debate to drop its central moral question—”Does life begin at conception?”—and begin to address the fact that “Most Americans believe there are gradations of life.”

Waldman cites a 2007 Third Way study which found that “69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the ‘taking of a human life,’ but 72 percent believe it should be legal.” Waldman attributes the statistic to the idea that most people believe that “some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. . . . they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more ‘killable’ than a nine-month-old fetus.”

Read More “Hot Trend: Pro-Choicers Who Believe Abortion Is Murder” »

That’s what Ruth Marcus claims in today’s Washington Post, quoting Sarah Palin’s remarks from a—what else—a pro-life fundraiser. At the dinner, Palin discussed her “choice” to have a child with Down syndrome  at the age of 44—a choice that, as Marcus points out, Palin wants to deny other women. Marcus is miffed that right-to-lifers like Palin routinely justify their anti-choice positions by describing their own “correct” “decisions” to have children. This isn’t the fist time Palin has used choice to explain why women shouldn’t chose—who could forget Palin’s election-season classic, “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby”?

Palin’s pro-”choice” comments—where she describes twice considering abortion before deciding to carry her pregnancy to term—after the jump.

Read More “Sarah Palin Makes Case For Abortion” »

According to Slate’s William Saletan, whose abortiony rhetorical stylings my colleagues and I have discussed at length, “Sixteen million girls are missing in China.”

Holy shit, China. How did you manage to lose all these little girls?! Prepare to send out the biggest fucking Amber alert of all time!

Oh wait, this is Saletan we’re talking about—the reluctant pro-choice columnist of our time. That unbelievable lede that refers to real humans is actually about fetuses, right?

Read More ““Sixteen Million Girls Are Missing in China”” »

Tomorrow marks the end of the 30-day comment period on Obama’s proposed scrapping of Bush’s so-called “conscience rule.” Bush snuck the conscience rule in at the end of his godforsaken presidency to allow all healthcare providers to deny services (or “abortions”) to patients (or “women) based on their moral beliefs (or “misogyny”). Obama swiftly moved to resciend the rule; Shakesville has the deets on how to speak up as to  why it should stay that way:

Go to the ACLU Action Center here, or visit Planned Parenthood’s action page here, or Compassion & Choices’ action page here, all of whom have made it incredibly easy to make your voice heard by the Obama administration.

If all goes according to plan, the conscience rule will have accomplished nothing at all. Mwa ha ha.

And we’ve got the whole, non-white-trashy thing on tape:

Sarah Seltzer for Reproductive Health Reality Check wonders if Levi is a “victim” in the Palin spotlight. “The Internet is buzzing over Levi Johnston’s appearance on Tyra yesterday to ‘break his silence,’ and providing us all with a reminder that patriarchal policies like abstinence-only education hurt young men, too,” writes Seltzer.

I couldn’t agree more: We’re all victims here: Levi, Bristol, Tripp, and Palin herself all suffered at the hands of her ridiculous abstinence (with a teenage pregnancy backup) method. Everyone, that is, except Tyra, who pulls a fierce Katie Couric to get the daytime interview of the post-pregnancy season.