The Great Debate

This has been a big month for abortion rights. In North Dakota, where there is only one abortion clinic, a District Court judge voided a two-year-old set of state restrictions on the use of medications to induce first-trimester abortions. And in Mississippi last Monday, a federal judge blocked some elements of state law intended to shut down the state’s only abortion clinic.

But make no mistake: The competition to shut down “the last clinics” in states with only one clinic is ongoing; call it The Red State Derby. In Mississippi, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, pro-life groups such as 40 Days for Life are working to bring about “the first abortion-free state where abortion is legal but it’s simply not available.”

Forty years after Roe v. Wade made abortion a constitutional right across the nation individual states are staging subtle and not-so-subtle insurrections, aiming to be the first  clinic-less state.

This session, Arkansas passed a ban on abortions after 12 weeks with very limited exceptions. It briefly had banned any abortions after six weeks, according to Julie Rikelman, litigation director at the Center for Reproductive Rights. As Rikelman told me, North Dakota was not to be outdone by Arkansas. So North Dakota recently passed a ban on abortion at six weeks (which is when a fetal heartbeat can be detected) that hasn’t yet taken effect.

In Mississippi, the Red State Derby started to intensify in the spring of 2012. That was when the doctors at Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an abortion clinic in Mississippi’s state capital, were pressured to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. This was impossible: No local hospital would offer the clinic’s two doctors such privileges because the doctors fly in from out of state (partially for their own safety) and thus have no particular relationships with hospitals in the area. Privileges are typically only granted in-state. This pressure simply intensified other prohibitions  — that parents of a minor must provide consent; that women must come to the facility twice to get a procedure and wait 24 hours.

No matter how artificial and canned the candidates can seem at a presidential debate, no matter how competent or ineffectual the moderator — the nominee’s true self will peak out at some point.

Thus did GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney tip his hand when it comes to the all-important female vote — which both he and President Barack Obama have been scrambling after. He didn’t make a huge gaffe or get ensnared in a tough debate about choice. Moving around the stage, he seemed a 1950s throwback who had wandered in from a different decade — one where men were men, women wore shirtwaist dresses (Ann Romney’s uniform) and marriage was between a man and a woman.

Of course what drove this home was Romney’s anecdote about trying to find talented women for his staff when he was governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007. He said he actually went to a number of women’s groups “and they brought us whole binders full of women.” Though he apparently flipped this story: The groups came to him unsolicited.

By Abe Sauer
The opinions expressed are his own.

The morning after Mississippi voters rejected a constitutional amendment to define a fertilized human egg as a person, Personhood USA was far from conceding defeat. Instead, after its second such defeat in as many years, the personhood movement was learning from its mistakes and planning a next attempt, which may come as early as 2012, and maybe in your state.

The amendment—which was heavily favored until it was not—would have made abortion, already roadblocked by process requirements and done by only one provider in the state, illegal. That was an intended consequence most Mississippians were behind. It was the amendment’s unknowns that scared off those who were unsure they were ready to go to Walgreens for “Personhood Tests.”

The measure collapsed because three constituencies got nervous: the medical community, Christians who had used in vitro fertilization (which may have been made illegal under the amendment), and, surprisingly, traditional allies of the anti-abortion movement, such as the Catholic Church, who were uncomfortable with the amendment’s vague language. Late polling found a 20-point drop in support from just a few weeks earlier.

Far from being lauded as a virtue, China's high savings rate has been blamed for the economic imbalances underlying the global financial crisis. The criticism being that the Chinese spend too little and rely too much on exporting to Western consumers.

The IMF and World Bank have long called for Beijing to ramp up social spending so its citizens will feel less need to save for a rainy day and instead consume more.

But in their intriguingly named paper,  'A Sexually Unbalanced Model of Current Account Imbalances', New York-based researchers Du Qingyuan and Wei Shang-Jin suggest China's gender imbalance could also be a significant factor in the persistence of its high savings rate.

The murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller has been condemned by prominent groups and activists on both sides of this divisive and emotive issue.

But the language used by some opponents of abortion rights who reviled Tiller for his work providing late-term abortions remained very strong.

Take this statement by Dr. James Dobson, founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family.