Reproductive Politics

Salon reporter and analyst Katie McDonough wrote a short and interesting article listing what she labeled the top five  "extreme lawmakers behind some of the most draconian reproductive rights restrictions grabbing headlines in recent months." In 2013, all the glory goes to legislators in states that have been in the vanguard of piecemeal assaults on abortion rights: Texas, Arkansas, North Dakota, Alabama, and Arizona. If one is pro-life, the article naturally has little appeal or value. If one is pro-choice and/or an interested observer of the culture wars, then the article has a "can you believe these crazies?" kind of appeal. I am not taking the article too seriously-- it is what it is. Still, Ms. McDonough raises an interesting question. Are what we consider "extremists" in the United States all that extreme? More to the point, how does one define extremeness, and on what scale? One could measure the extremeness of legislators in two ways: ...

The New York Times has been doing some great reporting on reproductive politics lately. There is a lot of material to work with (!) but the paper has been great at getting behind the surface of events and providing context and analysis. Speaking of which: The NYT published a story today on the pro-life push to use the theory that fetuses feel pain before the point of viability to drive legislative bans on abortions at 20 weeks and beyond. What is accomplished by a 20 week ban based on the theory of fetal pain? This kind of ban largely meshes with public opinion. While these bans tend to not allow abortions that threaten the "health" of the pregnant woman, they do allow for abortions after 20 weeks that threaten the "physical" "life" of the pregnant woman. (The U.S. House version, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act  (PCUCPA) also has a rape and incest exception.) As long as women who have life-threatening pregnancies can have abortions at ...

The Arkansas legislature is poised to enact a restrictive abortion law, over the veto of its governor, that is drawing strong condemnation from the pro-choice activists and politicians. The law is 100% guaranteed to be held unconstitutional under Roe and Casey , but it is worth examining anyway. The law would generally permit abortions up to the 12th week of pregnancy. After 12 weeks, abortions would be generally banned, with a number of exceptions: threats to the life of the mother, pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest, and "highly lethal fetal disorders" ( New York Times ). A separate legislative proposal would generally ban abortions after 20 weeks, with life, rape, and incest exceptions, but not a fetal disorder exception. Observations: First, the two proposed laws are attempting to peg their 'cut points'-- 12 weeks and 20 weeks-- on the ability of technicians to detect a fetus' heartbeat by abdominal ultrasound (at 12 weeks), and the asser...

Yesterday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement about the latest HHS contraceptive mandate rules. While they are still opposed to what they see as a grave threat to religious liberty, the overall tone of the statement is measured, and they waited one week to officially respond while they considered the new rules. In the post-2008 world of hyper-partisanship and hyperbole, I think we are entitled to label that a kind of progress. The bishops still find inadequate the Obama Administration's attempts to create a wall between religiously-affiliated employers and the provision of free birth control to their employees. I think that the firewall is in fact adequate and consistent with norms in American political culture and the current and past relationship of the Catholic Church with the U.S. government and the flow of taxpayer money to the Church (see my prior posts on the subject). For that reason, I don't think that the Church is going to win the ba...

A new survey indicates that the contraception mandate is popular: Most Americans support the Obama administration health reform mandate that requires business owners and faith-based non-profits to offer insurance coverage of contraception for employees, even when doing so conflicts with their [the employer's] religious principles, according to a recent survey by LifeWay Research. (Source : USA Today ) How popular? -- 63% of American adults say businesses should be required to provide their employees with free contraception and birth control, even if it runs counter to the owners' religious principles. -- 56% say nonprofits, such as schools, health facilities and charities should be required to provide the coverage. -- 53% say Catholic and other religious schools, hospitals, and charities should be required to  [provide the coverage]. (Source: USA Today ) LifeWay polled about 1191 people, so the margin of error is a little less than +/- 3%. Of the three results report...

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) was more effective in spending its money and getting positive results than any other political action group in the 2012 election. "Over 98 percent of its spending was in races that ended in the desired result, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation" ( Washington Post ). One might conclude that they were effective because the election swung to the Democrats in many key races and that Planned Parenthood money was simply chasing winners. Sarah Kliff of The Washington Post , who analyzed how and why PPAF used its money and resources, instead concludes that Planned Parenthood actually moved the meter in races, one example being John Tester's unexpected reelection to the U.S. Senate from Montana. If you accept Kliff's analysis, one of the reasons why there was such a tremendous gender gap this election cycle is that PPAF saw that reproductive politics issues were registering as important for women (particularly aft...

Reporters, analysts, and advocates are all discussing newly released abortion data from the Centers for Decease Control and Prevention (CDC): After years of holding steady, new Center for Disease Control  data  shows that the United States abortion rate has fallen to an all-time low. It dropped 5 percent between 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which data is available, the largest decline in the past decade. (Source: The Washington Post )  So, why did abortions go down so much between 2008 and 2009? Analysts and pundits have offered the following explanations: Better contraception = fewer abortions. More women are using more effective methods of contraception. As a result, fewer pregnancies that do occur are unwanted, and therefore fewer pregnancies are terminated. A recent, much-discussed study indicated that, when women have greater access to more effective contraception-- when it was provided for free-- pregnancy and abortion rates went down. From th...

I would say the answer is "no." Most of the people I know who are interested in politics are still digesting and analyzing the 2012 election cycle, which, to many people's surprise (and, for some, despair), went Democratic/liberal on several fronts: President, Senate, state races, state initiatives on same-sex marriage and marijuana, and taxation in California. All of the Republican candidates who made controversial statements about abortion (Akin, Mourdock, Walsh, and Koster) lost their races. And so on. Especially in the amplification chamber of the contemporary 24/7 media, it is normal to over-read election results. In this case, while I do think the election is a wake-up call to the Republican party-- or should be a wake-up call-- there is nothing that occurred in this election cycle that cannot be fixed-- fixed, that is, if the Republican party and conservatives don't under -read the election results. Looking at reproductive politics specifically, people w...

The pro-life movement may have lost the most recent battle-- the reelection of President Barack Obama-- but they are winning the war of hearts and minds. So says Michael J. New, professor of political science, frequent contributor to conservative publications, and data-driven critic of studies that support pro-choice policy positions: I want to encourage you not to despair. We continue to make good progress. In fact, I would argue that our biggest successes during the past twenty years have neither been political nor legislative. Our biggest success story is that we have succeeded in changing the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. What is his evidence? First, he notes that the number of abortions performed annually (NB: the ones of which we are aware) have declined "from 1.6 million in 1990 to 1.2 million in 2008." This could be for any number of reasons, but Professor New attributes it "partly to the state level pro-life laws we have passed." Profes...

Mark Movesian, on a blog at First Things , examined the Fox News exit polls from the 2012 election, and found that voters who self-identified as Catholic voted for President Obama 50-48%. Mr. Movesian notes the seeming oddity of this, given that the Catholic hierarchy has done its very best to make life issues, especially the health care contraceptive mandate, the primary determinant of a Catholic person's vote. What explains the exit polls? Here are some possibilities. Movesian suggests that the exit polls do not necessarily mean that Catholic voters, by a narrow majority, reject the Church view of the contraceptive mandate and other reproductive issues. Instead, like other voters, they may have looked at the whole package offered by President Obama and the whole package offered by Mitt Romney and gone for Obama despite whatever reservations they have about life issues. Another explanation is that Catholic voters, while uncomfortable in general with abortion and contempo...

Despite the Catholic Church's strong stance on abortion and contraception, American Catholics are not all that different from other Americans regarding these issues.  Polls tend to show that Catholics have a diversity of opinion on abortion and contraception that is not all that different from everyone else. The clarity and absolutism of the official Church position prompts heated fights between a) those that see the Church teachings on the family and sexual behavior as organically linked to all other social justice issues and central to what it means to be Catholic, and b) those who appreciate many other aspects of Catholic doctrine (like its teachings on social justice) and wish there could be less of an emphasis on abortion and contraception. Three recent news items illustrate this. First, a poll just released by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that a majority of Catholics would like to see the Church focus more of its attention on social justice and povert...