We did it before, and we can do it again.

While doing a bit of Googling for a citation of the decision in Roe v. Wade, I was reminded of a rather unpleasant fact: anti-abortion nuts have, up to this point, done a pretty good job at getting their agitprop ranked above factual information about Roe v. Wade and abortion in web searches. (On a related topic, see Crisis Pregnancy Centers Move Online.) As of 1 February 2005, the top search result for “Roe v. Wade” on Google (the one you’ll get from “I Feel Lucky”) is not the text of the case; it’s an anti-choice advocacy site called RoevWade-dot-org (I won’t link it here, lest it throw off the Google Bombing) — a one-stop shop for anti-abortion myths such as Post-Abortion Syndrome, the abortion-breast cancer link, and more, along with a heaping helping of wit and wisdom from everyone from Feminists for Life to Dr. James Dobson. You can find similar wingnut sites at the top of many other abortion-related Google searches.

Therefore, I propose that we do something about it. Specifically, I suggest we start throwing bombs.

Google Bombs.

Here is how you do it:

1. Go to your webpage, weblog, LiveJournal, or anything else that Google can see. If you don’t have one, get one. Just sprinkle it with a bit of personal information (or put up that huge site you?@ef;bf;½ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below).

2. Somewhere in the HTML on your site, include the following snippet. You can either include it in the HTML of updates themselves, or in the linkroll, or (best of all) both:

   <a href="http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/" title="Touro Law Center: Roe v. Wade (1973-01-22)">Roe v. Wade</a>

   And while you’re at it, add the following snippet too, to help women who are considering abortion find useful information on where to go, instead of political harangues and anti-abortion deception:

   <a href="http://www.gynpages.com/" title="GynPages.com: Abortion Clinics Online">abortion</a>

   If you want a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste that you can add to your web page without the trouble of editing, here you go:

   <p>Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/" title="Touro Law Center: Roe v. Wade (1973-01-22)">Roe v. Wade</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gynpages.com/" title="GynPages.com: Abortion Clinics Online">abortion</a></li>
</ul>
<p>You can too. Join me in <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/02/01/bombing_for">Bombing for Choice</a>.</p>

   The more pages on your site you include these snippets on, and the more frequently you update your site while the HTML snippet is present on it, the better the results.

3. If you want to be extra helpful, you can help spread the idea further: provide a link back to this page to explain what you’re doing, or provide your own explanation of what the GoogleBomb is and how people can get involved.

4. Add your site to Google, if you haven’t already.

And from there, watch the magic of precision GoogleBombing do its work!

Once you’ve joined in the bombing campaign, let me know about it (by e-mail or by TrackBack), and I’ll be glad to give you a shout-out in a later update on the campaign.

Bombs away!

P.S. This is not a meme. Please don’t call it one. Thank you.

Update 2005-02-02: I made a mistake in the cut-and-paste option below: I accidentally used a relative URI when I should have used an absolute one; this means that if you cut-and-pasted from this page before this notice went up you’ll have a broken link. You can fix it by getting the new cut-and-paste below and replacing the old one with it.

Seven years ago today, on 29 January 1998, an anti-personnel bomb studded with nails exploded at the New Woman All Women health clinic in Birmingham. The clinic was targeted for bombing because it provided abortions; a nurse named Emily Lyons was maimed in the explosion and Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer working for the clinic as a security guard, was killed. An anti-abortion fanatic claiming to be a member of the Army of God sent anonymous letters to the media taking credit for the bombing; the murderer was probably Eric Robert Rudolph, also suspected in the bombing of an abortion clinic, a lesbian nightclub, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Rudolph was finally captured in May 2003, and he is now standing trial for murder in Birmingham, and awaits trial in Georgia for the Atlanta bombings. I think that at this point there is every reason to believe that he’s guilty as hell, and also that he will be convicted of cold-blooded murder and justice will be done. Of course justice will not bring Robert Sanderson back and it will not heal Emily Lyons’ wounds. But it is something to hope for, even if any victory in this case will be one gained with terrible sadness.

This seems, actually, to be a point that unites nearly everyone. Both pro-choicers and most anti-abortionists have condemned Rudolph as a dangerous fanatic, a murderer, and a terrorist; both pro-choice and pro-life organizations issued public statements celebrating Rudolph’s capture. Now, I don’t want to spoil this remarkable point of unity against violence. But the simple truth is that I don’t know how it can be supported. I understand why I am glad that Rudolph is finally facing murder charges, and why my fellow pro-choicers and I condemn him as a murderer. But I don’t see how most of the anti-abortion movement’s reaction to Rudolph could result from anything other than a profound distortion of their beliefs. Let me explain.

Most people who oppose abortion–at least, most of those who express their opposition as part of the organized and agitating anti-abortion movement–claim to believe that, as a matter of moral principle, abortion under almost all circumstances is murder. They tell us that that is why they oppose it: that the intentional killing of an embryo or a fetus is a violation of the rights of that embryo or fetus just as much as infanticide is a violation of the rights of the baby.

Now, I think that this claim is outrageously false, and that the arguments for it use profoundly misogynist premises in order to justify the most brutal sorts of State violence against women. But my beliefs aren’t the issue here. The question is whether pro-lifers actually believe this. Let’s take a quick review of the facts (thanks to the Alan Guttmacher Institute):

• About 1/2 of all unplanned pregnancies in the United States are terminated in abortion.

• Every year, about 2 out of every 100 women aged 15-44 has an abortion.

• In 2000, in the United States alone, about were 1,360,000 abortions performed. About 1,300,000-1,400,000 abortions are performed every single year in the United States; from 1973, when Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion in all 50 states, to 2000, about 39,000,000 abortions were performed.

For those of us who believe that abortion is a woman’s right, these numbers may or may not be troubling, depending on what they tell us about other issues that we care about (such as the availability of contraception and responsible sex education). But consider what they mean to someone who earnestly believes that almost every single abortion is an act of murder. If you really believe that, and you have even a marginally adequate grasp on how common abortion is, then a fortiori you must believe that well over 1,000,000 people are being murdered every single year while the United States government stands by allowing most of those murders and even protecting the women who have them committed and the doctors who they hire to carry them out.

If you earnestly believe that abortion is murder, in other words, you are committed to believing that you are living through what is probably the worst holocaust in the history of humanity. How should someone witnessing murder on so massive a scale, ignored or even protected by the government and sanctioned by official organs of the medical establishment, react?

If that is what you earnestly believe, then why wouldn’t you react as Eric Rudolph and James Kopp did–by setting out to stop abortion providers, injuring or killing them if necessary? You might say Well, that doesn’t seem pro-life at all! But if someone earnestly believes that abortion is murder, hten why wouldn’t he or she also believe that injuring or even killing an abortion provider in order to stop that murder is a legitimate use of violence in defense of the innocent? Particularly when every single day that passes with an abortion provider healthy and working means that (according to your beliefs) nearly 4,000 more innocent people will be murdered?

Now, I can think of some reasons why someone who earnestly believed abortion to be murder still wouldn’t start attacking abortion providers. The problem is that none of them can account for all the prominent members of the anti-abortion movement, let alone everyone in the anti-abortion rank-and-file. You might, for example, believe that abortion is murder but refuse to use violence to stop it because you’re a principled pacifist, and believe that even violence in defense of self or innocent others is unjustified. Some consistent-ethic-of-life abortion opponents do endorse, or come very close to endorsing, a comprehensive principled pacifism. But most of the anti-abortion movement does not; the Catholic hierarchy mainly supports Just War theory and conservative evangelical abortion opponents such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson loudly trumpet their support for warfare and the death penalty.

You might believe violence in defense of the innocent would be justifiable, if it were an effective means to the end of stopping abortion. But–you might say–it isn’t: it just brings both the cops and public opinion down on the side of the abortionists, and hurts the movement to end abortion through orderly political means. But whether or not this is an accurate assessment of the strategic effects of anti-abortion violence–and I’m not sure that it is–it is not the reason that most pro-lifers who came out against Rudolph’s bombing campaign or Kopp’s murder-by-sniping gave for condemning them. It’s true that many pro-lifers said that they thought actions like these hurt the cause; but besides that, most of them also repeatedly made statements that anti-abortion terrorism is not only strategically foolish, but also morally wrong. Most of them seem quite earnestly to believe that folks like Eric Rudolph and James Kopp are murderers and dangerous lunatics.

But look. If you do think that Eric Rudolph is a dangerous lunatic–and I agree you should–then what can you think about someone who believes exactly what Eric Rudolph believes about abortion, and does not have any principled opposition to the use of force to defend the innocent, and yet, unlike Rudolph, sits back comfortably while doing absolutely absolutely nothing about it? Such a person would be a moral monster of the most wretched sort; perhaps less dangerous than Rudolph, but also even more contemptible. Yet this is exactly the condition that a very large segment of the anti-abortion movement seems to confess to every time they state their basic beliefs about abortion and acceptable political strategy.

Now, the point here is not, of course, to exhort anti-abortionists to take up arms and start shooting. My argument is a modus tollens, not a modus ponens. If you earnestly believe that abortion is murder and that violence in defense of the innocent is justifiable, but do nothing, then you are a moral monster. But principles of charity demand that you try to find some other way to understand a person’s actions, if any plausible candidate is available, other than a way that makes them a moral monster. In this case, the answer is: most people in the anti-abortion movement don’t really believe that abortion is murder.

No, they really don’t. They certainly believe that abortion is wrong. And apparently they believe that it’s wrong in a way that justifies State intervention to stop it. But they cannot honestly and consistently regard it as a violation of an innocent person’s rights just as bad as infanticide without being moral monsters even worse than the murderers they claim to deplore. Since I don’t think they are that, I conclude that they don’t honestly and consistently believe it as anything more than a rhetorical flourish.

Here’s some more reasons to think that this is true:

• Most anti-abortionists are roughly aware of the scale of abortion. And most of them say that it shows something is profoundly wrong with our society. But very few actually give any indication, in their language and in their actions, of genuinely believing that they are witnessing mass slaughter on such an unprecedented scale. Those who do talk this way–drawing comparisons to the Holocaust, for example–are mostly folks like Operation Rescue, Joe Scheidler, and further on out to the Army of God, who are marginalized or condemned as lunatic fringe elements.

• The fact that most anti-abortionsts do, as I mentioned above, seem to think that when Eric Rudolph bombed New Woman All Women seven years ago he did do something that was not only strategically foolish, but also morally wrong indicates that they are speaking either (1) as principled pacifists or (2) as people who believe that deadly force is not a proportional response to whatever is wrong about abortion. Since (1) clearly doesn’t apply for many, it seems that (2) is what they are best understood as believing. Yet if they believe (2), that just is a good reason to say that they don’t believe that abortion is murder–because if any threatened wrong would permit deadly force as a response, wouldn’t murder be it?

• Most anti-abortionists, even while claiming that abortion is murder and ought to be illegal for precisely the same reasons that infanticide is, very conspicuously shy away from claiming that the people primarily responsible for these murders–women with unwanted pregnancies who procure an abortion–should be punished like murderers are punished. Some (George H. W. Bush, for example) seem to believe that laws should only punish abortion providers and should not punish women who seek abortions at all; almost nobody other than those who already support violence against abortion providers argues that they should be imprisoned for life or executed. Yet if you honestly and consistently believe that these women are guilty of infanticide, then why would you call for the legal system to treat them at all differently from Susan Smith or Andrea Yates? Answer: most abortion opponents don’t honestly and consistently believe that they are guilty of infanticide; however wrong they may think abortion is, their sense of compassion compels them to treat women who seek abortions less harshly than they would ever treat a child murderer.

If what I have been saying is the case, then abortion opponents are better people than Eric Rudolph in spite of their bloody rhetoric of abortion-as-murder. But that also means that they need to give up the bloody rhetoric and they need to give it up now. It is a distortion of their views; they might regard abortion as cruel or tragic or irresponsible but if what I have been saying is true they do not earnestly and consistently think of it as murder. Worse, it’s a distortion of their views that places demands of them that their own sense of compassion and shame prohibits them from ever fulfilling. Nearly all pro-lifers realize that it would be inhuman to punish women who seek abortions as murderers, and that it is wicked to bomb clinics or shoot doctors. Yet to give reasons for seeing these things as wrong they must logically give up on the claim that abortion is murder. As long as they insist on hurling that rhetorical thunderbolt, they are committing their conscience to a principle that demands precisely the actions of an Eric Rudolph or a James Kopp, and they are giving truth to what Ani DiFranco mournfully sang, in the most heartbreaking and fitting commemoration of this day that I know, after the shooting of Dr. Slepian in Buffalo and the bombing in Birmingham:

and the blood poured off the pulpit
the blood poured down the picket line
yeah, the hatred was immediate
and the vengeance was divine
so they went and stuffed god
down the barrel of a gun
and after him
they stuffed his only son

–Ani DiFranco, Hello Birmingham

Nobody likes to have an abortion, and nobody would like to have one even under the best of conditions. Things are much better now than they were in the dark days of back-alley butchers; and they could be made much better yet if it weren’t for miles of punitive regulations and red tape made with the explicit purpose of making abortions harder for legally vulnerable women to obtain. But even without the cultural bullies and screaming protestors, even without the government-imposed cartel costs and the intense curtailment of options for procedures, your choices would still in the end be between invasive surgery of some form or another or drugs that make you nauseous and bleeding over the course of a few days. Of course abortion is not the horrendous experience that anti-choicers repeatedly make it out to be; it is far safer and quicker and easier on both patient and provider than nearly every other kind of surgery that there is. It’s safer and less psychologically taxing than giving birth. (Somehow these comparisons don’t seem to get made very often by either the anti-choice leadership or their foot soldiers. How strange.) But root canals are very safe and relatively simple too; that doesn’t mean that anyone is excited to have one.

But so what? Nobody goes around talking about the terrible tragedy of root canals either, or about the need to reach across the divide to unite with the anti-root-canal community (I take it that there are some Christian Scientist types who oppose dental surgery out of deeply felt religious conviction) in order to prevent unwanted tooth decay. Nobody feels the need to prefix every remark about their support for the right to get a root canal with a half-hour of qualifications and apologies. Yet the Party Hack wing of the Democratic leadership seems to have decided, yet again, that this is just what they need. Here, for example, is how Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest political triumphs for women’s liberation in recent history:

In a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters near the New York State Capitol, Mrs. Clinton firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of “religious and moral values” on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.

There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate — we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved, Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech came on the same day as the annual anti-abortion rally in Washington marking the Roe v. Wade anniversary.

…

Mrs. Clinton, widely seen as a possible candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, appeared to be reaching out beyond traditional core Democrats who support abortion rights. She did so not by changing her political stands, but by underscoring her views in preventing unplanned pregnancies, promoting adoption, recognizing the influence of religion in abstinence and championing what she has long called teenage celibacy.

She called on abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion campaigners to form a broad alliance to support sexual education — including abstinence counseling — family planning, and morning-after emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault as ways to reduce unintended pregnancies.

We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women, Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Most of this is true enough, as far as it goes. Nobody wants abortion instead of widesperad contraception and responsible sexual education. Nobody likes to get an abortion. And in the present political and cultural climate, all too many women are made to feel far worse about their decision to have an abortion than should be. Fine. But the latter isn’t an unchangeable given; it’s a political fact that is enforced by a constant and intentional climate of harassment and intimidation. And the fact that we’d rather women were able to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place is no reason to spend hours hand-wringing over it and apologizing for it unless you already think that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion. But why should you think that?

Actually, there is one other reason that you might do all that hand-wringing. You might be cavilling in spite of your own beliefs because you think that kind of dissembling is politically useful. I hate to say it about Hillary — she gave such a great speech at the March and all — but it’s hard to know what else to conclude about this particular strategy:

Mrs. Clinton’s address came as the Democratic Party itself engages in its own re-examination of its handling of the issue in the wake of Senator John Kerry’s loss in the presidential race.

Democratic senators such as Harry Reid of Nevada and Dianne Feinstein of California have also pressed for a greater focus on reducing unintended pregnancies, and some Democratic consultants have urged that party leaders mint new language to reach voters who identified moral values as a top issue for them in last November’s election.

Jesus Christ people. Look. No. Just, no.

First, you’re not trying to mint new language. You’re repeating the same crap that you did for the past 12 years. Here, for example, is how Electable John Kerry answered questions on abortion during the second and third debates:

Mr. Schieffer Senator Kerry a new question for you. The New York Times reports that some Catholic archbishops are telling their church members that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate like you because you support a woman’s right to choose an abortion and unlimited stem call research. What is your reaction to that?

Mr. Kerry I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views, but I disagree with them, as do many. I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice, a woman’s choice is between a woman, God and her doctor. And that’s why I support that. Now I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade. The president has never said whether or not he would do that. But we know from the people he’s tried to appoint to the court he wants to. I will not. I will defend the right of Roe v. Wade.

Now with respect to religion, you know, as I said I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me. And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I’m not running to be a Catholic president. I’m running to be a president who happens to be Catholic. Now my faith affects everything that I do and choose. There’s a great passage of the Bible that says What does it mean my brother to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead. And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people. That’s why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith. But I know this: that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told of us that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. And that’s what we have to – I think that’s the test of public service.

And before that in the second debate:

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don’t deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can’t afford it otherwise.

That’s why I think it’s important. That’s why I think it’s important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

You’ll help prevent AIDS.

You’ll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.

You’ll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.

Apparently the apparatchiks have decided that there isn’t enough hand-wringing and pandering to the sensibilities of the Religious Right there. I don’t know how you could add any more hand-wringing and searching for “common ground” with the Christian Right there without the references to a woman’s right to an abortion disappearing entirely, but there you have it.

Guess what? It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Why in the world do they think that it would? Are they trying to win votes from the Christian Right? Do they honestly think that moving the political debate over reproductive freedom back from abortion to the Sanger-era fights over birth control and sex education is going to improve the political climate in this country?

In other words: stop treating the right to abortion like you treat free speech rights for the Klan. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion then quit hemming and hawing forever about how much you respect the position of people who do and how much you’d like to work with them on birth control. You’re wasting your time: a lot if not most ofthem also hate birth control and sex education anyway. And in the process of wasting your time you are also dissembling about your real motives and spitting on women’s struggle for freedom.

Incidentally, Rox, among the reasons I like Howard Dean as much as I do is that in the heat of an election, this is how he answers a question about abortion:

Diane Rehm: We have seen reports that builders across the country are refusing to participate in the construction of Planned Parenthood buildings. What would you do about the threats to freedom for a woman to choose?

Howard Dean: Well, I think that’s a very dangerous game those builders are playing, especially in the city of Austin, which is where it’s going on. Were I down there I would immediately refuse to do business with any of the contractors who were boycotting that. So all groups can play that game; you have the right-wingers playing the game today, but other groups who may disagree with that can also play that game. And I think that’s a mistake for them to do that.

I am pro-choice. I’m a doctor; I frankly believe that it’s none of the government’s business to interfere in a woman’s making decisions about her own healthcare. And I tend not to be very supportive of efforts to enforce political points of view on individuals’ healthcare, and that’s what’s going on in Austin, Texas.

— On the Diane Rehms show, WAMU, 2004-12-01 10:00am (they don’t seem to have a transcript; the question is around 45’45” on the audio version)

Elsewhere he’s also directly, and without apology or cavil, taken on both parental consent restrictions and late-term abortion bans, and pointedly insisted that on the issue of abortion, We can change our vocabulary but I don’t think we ought to change our principles..

Second, even if this were a new tack, and even if there were any reason to believe that it would get anything worth accomplishing accomplished, why would you think that women’s control over their own bodies is an acceptable bargaining chip? Women are not pawns to be sacrificed for better board position. Lots of Democrats bolted the party in the late 1960s to become Republicans because the national leadership would no longer keep silent about Jim Crow and the efforts of efforts such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally broke the Eastland-Wallace white supremacist stranglehold on the Southern state parties. That lost the Democrats a lot of voters. The difference even lost them several elections. So what? Does anyone think that it would be a good idea to endlessly fret about how to reach out across the divide and find common ground to bring the Klan vote back into the party?

To hell with that. If you’re going to get hung up on winning political office, this is not how you should be trying to do it. Falling back on the apparatchiks and electable candidates using electably mealy-mouthed rhetoric doesn’t work and it wouldn’t have gained anything worth winning even if it did. Meanwhile, the other side won’t believe it, your side won’t pull out the stops for you, and the people in the middle won’t know where the hell you actually stand.

If Democrats are looking for new language with which to frame the abortion debate, I’d like to suggest a good old standard: ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY.

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, a limited and limiting bit of jurisprudence, yes, but also the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition–even if in a partial and problematic way–that women have a human right to control their own internal organs, including the reproductive ones. It’s sometimes frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’re stuck having to defend, but January 22 is the jubilee day in which most abortion was decriminalized in every state in the U.S., and it is a good day to celebrate the remarkable story of the radical feminist movement. (You do know that it was radical feminists who organized the first abortion speak-outs and who drove the movement for abortion law repeal rather than weak health-of-the-mother reform, don’t you?) Roe was the capstone victory in a remarkable struggle that exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, with the first abortion speak-out in 1969, and transformed the lives of millions of women for the better over the course of 4 years. And if that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

In honor of the occasion:

• Most of what I want to say today are things that I’ve already said, in Happy Roe v. Wade Day!, April March, Why We Marched, and Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I.

• Digging even deeper into the archives, I can’t encourage you enough to give a read to Lucinda Cisler’s Abortion law repeal (sort of). It’s a remarkable, sometimes depressingly prescient, essay written four years before Roe, on the opportunities and dangers that lay ahead, and on the need to be consistent and completely unapologetic about abortion rights. It’s a woman’s right to control her body that’s at stake here, and there’s no excuse for letting anti-choicers Mau-Mau us into acting as if they had some kind of monopoly on moral discourse.

  The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

  …

  There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

• Lauryn at Feministing exhorts:

  Hopefully you have some kickass events planned for the day, however, if Thursday’s festivities left you feeling like you have little left to celebrate, then take a moment to reflect on what you’re willing to do to for the reproductive rights movement.

  Whether it’s a commitment to start escorting at your local abortion clinic, writing a quick email to Congress, taking a pro-choice picture, making a donation, or posting on BushvChoice–just get busy.

  Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, encourages that: “We need to talk to neighbors around the kitchen table about the values of freedom and privacy; we don’t run away from the arguments. Our movement is on stronger ground when we take seriously the moral dimensions of the issue.”

• Of course Keenan is absolutely right that there is a moral principle here, and it’s one worth being unapologetic over. The Well-Timed Period makes that especially clear by offering us a harrowing history lesson. Criminalizing abortion is State violence against women. We must never go back.

• BlackFeminism.org marks the occasion by reminding that for all too many communities, Roe is only a slip of paper, since abortion providers have been run out by the bullies, the thugs, and the constant daily assault from reactionary state governments. Today is a day to celebrate what we’ve won; but it’s also a day to commit ourselves to a struggle that is far from over.

• And finally, L. reminds us of just how far we have come, and how important that struggle has been:

  So just do me a favor and thank dumb luck or the deity of your choice that you were born in an age of reasonably effective birth control and open, legal abortion Better yet, thank your mothers and your grandmothers, for what they forced into being and what they lived through, and admire their strength without being nostalgic for its necessity. You don’t have to wallow in any grim hypothetical details, though there are plenty to be had. Just pause for a few seconds and consider that, yeah, ok, it really is better this way.

I mentioned here before that Roderick and I would be presenting an essay for the Molinari Society inaugural symposium on feminism and libertarianism. The symposium was excellent; besides a helpful and provoking discussion on our essay, I also got to hear excellent essays by co-panelists Jennifer McKitrick and Elizabeth Brake. Back home, we found that the discussion had spread ahead of us: some of our comments surrounding the essay have already stirred up an engaging, if sometimes frustrating, discussion/contrversy at Liberty & Power, involving folks who had gotten the chance to hear the essay in Boston and others who are still awaiting a look at the text.

What therefore you debate as unknown, this I proclaim to you: I’m glad to announce that a draft-in-progress of our essay, Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved? This is a draft-in-progress of the essay, which we read in abbreviated form in Boston. Comments, questions, applause, and brickbats are all welcome–nay, encouraged.

The current debate arose from something that was actually fairly peripheral to our essay: the kind words we had for Andrea Dworkin in the course of drawing a comparison between her analysis of the relationship between rape culture and militarism and Herbert Spencer’s. And yes, we partly did that because it was fun and provocative, as a tangent, to draw the comparison between the oft-denounced and seldom-read Spencer, and the oft-denounced and seldom-read Dworkin. But while the remarks were mostly tangential, the issues raised in the controversy are important; both because Andrea Dworkin’s worth defending and because the issues under debate all come back either to central points raised in the essay, or else points that probably should have been addressed there. So if you’ve really been dying to find out whether libertarianism and radical feminism are compatible, why radical feminists should be radical individualists, why existing libertarian feminist projects are so often limiting when they come to really existing contemporary feminist efforts, and how putting the feminism back in libertarian feminism will aid both causes but make for some strange attractors … tolle, lege.

Fire away.