Pregnant Pause for Thought

We need to impregnate Bill O'Reilly and Terry Randall (at least as a start, as any man who thinks he should make a peep about abortion needs this treatment too). For that's what it might take for them to get it--women don't do the late-term abortion thing on a whim. Indeed only 1% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, but the specter of a fetus getting closer to something viable was too good for the anti-abortion terrorists to pass up as a way to rally their troops. So they didn't, and now Dr. George Tiller is dead.

Then O'Reilly and Randall need to end up like one of these people "the pregnant woman who was diagnosed with metastic melanoma and needed immediate chemotherapy, the woman who was carrying conjoined twins that had only one set of lungs and one heart, the woman whose baby had a three-chambered heart and would never live." Perhaps that would then help them do this: "imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right."

Here's how Jessica Arons, Director of the Women's Health & Rights Program at the Center for American Progress, put it in The Nation last year:

If we trusted women to bring an appropriate moral weight to the decision to end a pregnancy, if we put our faith in a woman's own determination of when an abortion is necessary in her life, if we believed a woman's life is ultimately more important than the one developing inside her and if we recognized that her right to live her life according to her own conscience trumps our opinions about what we think we would do in her situation, then we would not even be having this conversation.

If it were only just a conversation.