The real problem with Todd Akin’s comments

Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin’s awful suggestion that women rarely get pregnant from “legitimate rape” is awful for many reasons — a mind-blowing lack of knowledge of basic human biology, the suggestion that many rape victims who ask for abortions must be lying, etc.

The real problem with his comments, however, is that they are essentially part of the Republican orthodoxy on being adequately “pro-life.” For example, VP nominee Paul Ryan has said that he does not support abortion even in cases of rape or incest — only when the mother’s life is at risk. Five Republican presidential candidates — Gingrich, Bachmann, Santorum, Paul, and Perry — all supported a pledge that only permitted abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at risk (and even then, “every effort should be made to save the baby’s life as well”). As much triangulation as the Romney campaign attempts, the “abortion is always murder” crowd is the core of the Republican base.

In the meantime, Todd Akin will still probably win in Missouri, regardless of his ignorant and offensive comment. The Missouri Republican Party’s official platform supports overturning Roe v. Wade, forced anti-abortion counseling, preventing public money from going to abortions, preventing public employees from referring abortions, etc. Much as Republicans may pretend, Akin’s comments aren’t shocking or surprising at all — they are part and parcel of Republican anti-abortion extremism.

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Legitimate non-snarky question

In this week’s New Yorker, there’s a story about lab-grown meat (subscription required). Much of the article centers on the reaction of animal rights activists to the idea of lab-grown meat, and includes this sentence:

“Some vegetarians would object even to using two animal cells, and the fetal-calf serum would present a bigger problem still.”

So this got me thinking: Most vegetarians are probably pro-choice (guessing based on loose self-identified liberal/conservative swings). But if a human fetus is not “alive” until later in the gestation process, would it be OK to eat a cow fetus? I mean, it’s no more developed than a fertilized chicken egg, right? (Forget vegans for now.) Or is it more like an organ, an essential living piece of an animal that cannot be removed without harming the animal in question?

As the title indicates, this is not snarky. I am wondering how much the moral objection to eating animals is based on a visceral reaction of an animal-looking thing to be eaten (cow fetus) versus a more benign image (chicken fetus), and how much it is based on the animal product’s use (eating) versus a more unique irreplaceable use (embryonic stem cells). (Let’s leave aside general objections to factory farming.)

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A just cause

TPM has a report that Joe Scarborough represented Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion terrorist who murdered abortion provider David Gunn. No doubt, this will make him look worse in many circles, but I don’t think we should hold a lawyer’s clients against him.

True, Scarborough has tried to dodge his connection here, but I think representing clients pro bono is not only legitimate, but noble. Everyone deserves a fair trial; recall that John Adams defended the Boston Massacre murderers.

I wonder, however, whether Scarborough would step in to defend the lawyers who thanklessly defend Guantanamo detainees against impossible odds. From the article:

[Chicago lawyer Candace] Gorman has visited Guantanamo 17 times over the last three years. She will visit again later this month. Razak Ali, her Algerian client, seems to be holding up well, but she fears that Al-Ghizzawi won’t last much longer. Kept in solitary confinement, he spends his days washing and rewashing his clothes. He recently told Gorman that he has started talking to himself, that he is losing his grip on reality.

Gorman has urged him to fight for his sanity while she fights for his release. But she fears this is a race she cannot win. Al-Ghizzawi has given her his last will and testament.

Lawyers who work for clients without representation do so at great cost. I do think Scarborough deserves a bunch of hits for things he says, but we owe it to our legal system to give him a pass.

Quoth John Adams:

The law, (says he,) no passion can disturb. Tis void of desire and fear, lust and anger. ‘Tis mens sine affectu; written reason; retaining some measure of the divine perfection. It does not enjoin that which pleases a weak, frail man, but without any regard to persons, commands that which is good, and punishes evil in all, whether rich, or poor, high or low,’Tis deaf, inexorable, inflexible.  On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.

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I didn’t know Tiller comes from a long history

I knew violence against abortion providers had been around for a while, but to me that mostly meant crimes against the offices themselves, with the occasional skirmish outside the office at a protest line perhaps. But in addition to George Tiller, David Gunn, Barnett Slepian, and John Britton are all abortion doctors who were murdered explicitly for their profession. Of these, the most recent before Tiller’s death was Slepian’s in 1998, so I guess I was too young to be aware of it back then. So, I am genuinely surprised to learn of this now. Like I said previously, this is what you get when you use violent rhetoric all the time.

Here is a letter from a reader to Andrew Sullivan:

“I had been followed home from work.  I had my car vandalized with pictures of aborted fetuses.  My nurses had to receive police escorts to their cars in our parking lots.  My office had rocks thrown through it.  The clinic had to be searched by bomb sniffing dogs one night after being broken into.  I received threats in the mail on a regular basis. My parents were always afraid I would be shot at going to work.

All this in the name of a Christian God and a Christian religion.  It was religious terrorism.  And it was US Citizen on US Citizen happening right here in our suburbs.”

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Is murdering George Tiller pro-life?

For all the debate over abortion and especially late-term abortion, until recently there were only three doctors in the country who would perform an abortion after the 21st week of pregnancy. Now there are two such doctors, because George Tiller was murdered yesterday. He was shot in his church while his wife was watching from the choir.

The blogs are in a frenzy over this, and for good reason I suppose. John Cole says what I thought almost immediately thought when I heard the news. A little while back the Department of Homeland Security put out a report warning of the dangers of the increasing risk posed by domestic violence from right-wing extremists. I’m not going to bother linking to all of it, but basically everyone at The Corner – the premier conservative group blog around – went nuts over it. The report was outrageous, politicized, unjustified, execrable, designed to attack political opponents and veterans, etc.

Since then, what has happened?

A man in Pittsburgh murders three cops because he thinks Obama is going to take his guns. (Obama has no such plan, as if that matters).

And now a doctor in Kansas is murdered.

Tiller was the subject of verbal abuse for many years, from local protests to Bill O’Reilly broadcasts. He was also the victim of violence, from a 1986 bombing on his clinic, to a 1993 shooting that hit both his arms, and now his murder.

If I were in Tiller’s shoes, and bleeding out while lying on the floor of my church, I wonder if I would have the time to think that the man who killed me doubtlessly describes himself as “pro-life.”

Let me make it clear that I am not conflating pro-lifers with murderers. But when you describe abortion as the murder or Holocaust of 40 million babies in the last several decades, as well as describe Tiller as running a death-mill, then killing doctors can seem like the logical conclusion to that argument.

Rhetoric matters. A lot. And the leaders of factions need to cool it. And if that DHS report hurt your feelings, too fucking bad.

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