‘Abortion is legal in this country’

It begins: In Oklahoma, clinics have stopped operating because the state passed a new ban, even though it clearly conflicts with Roe. “We haven’t had abortion for two and a half weeks,” said Susan Braselton, a clinic escort and a board member of the Roe Fund in Oklahoma, which helps patients finance abortions…. …The only

Pleasure is worth dying for: ‘Happening’

Our political culture — nationally and globally — is so fucked that I can imagine Happening moving an anti-abortion audience. Destroying them maybe. Set in the early 1960s when le nouvelle vague of Godard and Truffaut did not generate a corresponding liberalization of France’s brutal abortion regime, Happening follows Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), a literature student

The coming of Christianist nationalism

Supreme Court decisions, like essays written for an English class, reflect the will, prejudices, and desires of their writers. Justices have reactions to cases, then ask their clerks to find the precedents.

‘Strong ideas about morality and how to uphold it’

In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s fine novel Heat and Dust, her narrator reflects on the experience of her step-grandmother Olivia’s decision to end her pregnancy in 1920s India:

Florida gets serious about hating women

Last night Florida (the state with the prettiest name!) inched closer to a rightist colony that punishes women for lacking the insurance to visit the gynecologist and for being born with systems unable to register a pregnancy before the new deadline. On an almost party-line vote, the state senate approved House Bill 5, aka the

‘We hate all women’

Two quotes from people with a stake in how the Supreme Court abrogated its judicial responsibilities last night by siding with Texas in the abortion case:

On our rigged constitutional system

Behold, readers, the front page of one of America’s best newspapers. Not one mention of the judicial revolution in Texas whereby Roe v. Wade is essence gutted, fatally.

The party of male white supremacy

“The animating impulse of Trump’s campaign — the beating heart of “Make America Great Again” — was a defense of traditional hierarchies,” Jamelle Bouie writes in today’s NYT, seventy-two hours after Bret Stephens wore garlic to protest millennial disgust for lazy thinkers like him.”

Alabama abortion law: ‘guilt women into submission’

I gave up using “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in prose and aloud. Besides the clumsiness of the prefix, I refused to let my opponents define the terms of the debate. Instead, I use abortion supporters or abortion opponents, or, for the latter, assholes.

Abortion and rightist lunacy

I wondered what had gotten Erick Erickson upset again earlier this week besides the rise of atheism among convenience store employees. When he and the Plankton with a Hairpiece, the senior senator from Florida, agree on a rhetorical point, I figure I better investigate. Testifying before a subcommittee, a Democratic legislator in the Virginia House

Strange stirrings

I don’t read Josh Marshall much these days because of his histrionic tendencies and his way of signing off posts with the equivalent of a hastily scrawled, “I don’t know, we’ll see.” But I agree with his conclusion of how the Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations won’t shake the Senate GOP at all: The chance of

Dismissing Roe myths

The most common arguments I endure from opponents of Roe v. Wade concern its reputation as a feebly written decision (“Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said so!”) and as an unwarranted federal protection of a matter best left to the states. Scott Lemieux swats aside these arguments. Few felicities of judicial language have been the subject