The filmmakers do not add commentary to the film; they let the activity in- and outside the two buildings speak for itself. The abortion clinic is owned by a middle-aged couple. They peek out their windows to see protesters with signs and tiny plastic baby figurines, calling out to the women heading towards their door. Candace, the woman, treats her patients with kindness and compassion. Their faces are obscured as they explain that they already have three kids to care for, they didn’t want to get pregnant again, or they don’t feel like they have the power to demand that their partners use protection. One says she considers herself a murderer, and Candace tells her not to go through with the procedure if she doesn’t want to.

Every day, the husband drives to a separate location to pick up the clinic doctor. When they return, the doctor’s face is concealed by a sheet inside the passenger side window. The protesters holler at the car and often stand in the driveway as the it pulls in and out. At the end of the day, the husband drives the doctor back to the second location and the doctor drives himself home. One protester makes it his mission to learn the doctor’s identity and find out where the pick up and drop off takes place. He reclines in his car, staking out the local WalMart parking lot until his suspicions are confirmed. Filming took place in the same year as Dr. George Tiller’s murder. The fear is palpable.

Across the street, the literature misinforms patients that abortion causes breast cancer and that 95 percent of women who abort regret their decisions. Anne, the woman who heads up the operation, does whatever it takes to convince women and girls to continue their unplanned pregnancies. She tells one woman with an abusive partner, “For all you know, the baby changes him.” I wanted to cry. Some patients fall for the manipulation. Another laughs bitterly after Anne buys her lunch to butter her up.

I went to the screening with my boyfriend, who was more shocked by what he saw than I was. I read about it every day. The filmmakers took questions after the movie, and I was pleasantly surprised by the pro-choice vibe in the theater. An old man asked how the woman from the CPC could get away with lying to pregnant patients about the ineffectiveness of condoms. People were clearly disturbed by what they’d seen.

The experience affected the filmmakers, as well. Grady remarked that the struggle between the pro-choice and anti-choice camps “has nothing to do with babies. It’s about control, it’s about the power of women and women’s roles, what the purpose of the female gender is, the absolute core of the identity of a woman. It’s so profound and so deep.”
12th & Delaware is an expertly crafted documentary that looks at abortion in a sensitive way. I hope it has as much of an impact as the pair’s earlier films, and I would absolutely recommend seeing it if you have the opportunity.

I love the state motto.

Iowa is a fairly large state with a lot of small towns and not much in the way of family planning clinics:  only 26 Planned Parenthood outlets in a state of over 3 million citizens.

But women in rural Iowa, like women everywhere, need access to safe abortions.  Enter The Magick of the Internets!  Through video teleconferencing, doctors can consult with women in the earliest stages of pregnancy remotely and then prescribe doses of mifepristone and misoprostol to cause a medical abortion.

Cue the misogynist hand-wringers, including Troy Newman, of Operation Rescue (the Fetus, Forget the Woman):

“And think about it:  With this scheme, one abortionist sitting in his pajamas at home could literally do thousands of abortions a week. This is about expanding their abortion base.”

I’m thinking about it, Mr. Newman, and I’m thinking it’s fantastic.  More women, getting the abortions they need and want before an invasive surgical procedure is needed?  Fewer children being born to women/families that don’t want or can’t care for them? That’s a wonderful thing.

Newman claims that his concern is the health of the women, but that’s not anything we haven’t heard before from the forced-birth advocates:    we must protect women because abortion is always emotionally devastating, abortion makes you sterile, abortion gives you cancer.  Lies, all.  And there have been no serious complications in any of the 1500 medical abortions that have been authorized since the middle of 2008.

It’s important that these women are receiving actual medical care, of course.  And that is exactly what’s happening.  It’s not like women are texting a doctor somewhere “OMG AM TOTES PG!  HALP,” and being FedEx’d a syringe full of hydrochloric acid.  There’s a procedure:

Before the videoconference begins, a patient in a distant clinic meets (in person) with a nurse. There, blood tests, a medical history, an exam, an ultrasound and counseling on matters like what to expect from the procedure and plans for a follow-up exam are completed. The results are shared (by computer) with a doctor miles away, and the doctor and the patient (at all times accompanied by the nurse, who sits beside her) meet by videoconference over a private network.

I’ve lived in Iowa, and other small midwestern burgs where access to family planning materials and services wasn’t always easy to get.  The idea that I could get my abortion without taking days off work, without spending money I don’t have to travel and lodge myself, and without waiting any longer than necessary?  That’s a straight-up blessing.  My gratitude to Jill June, head of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, who came up with the idea, and made it happen.

Thanks also to reader Adara for pointing out the New York Times story. 

“The shenanigans have started,” said civil rights attorney Kathryn Kolbert of Barnard College.

The fetal-pain bill is partially meant to shut down Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who performs late-term abortions in Nebraska. It also appears to have been specifically designed to impact the national debate about abortion. Undoubtedly, the bill will be challenged, and the Supreme Court might be forced to answer the medical question of if and when a fetus can feel pain, or whether that matters.

For the record, “There is certainly no solid scientific evidence establishing that a fetus can perceive pain at these earlier stages, so any court decisions to uphold such broader laws could only do so by disregarding the importance of good scientific evidence,” according to Caitlin Borgmann, a law professor at The City University of New York.

Nebraska will also be the first state to restrict access to abortion by requiring doctors to screen women for mental or physical problems before performing the procedure. This law requires a doctor or other health professional to screen women to assess risk factors including “physical, psychological, emotional, demographic, or situational” factors. The law holds doctors civilly responsible if a screening fails to be comprehensive.

I’d love to know the rationale for this. Are those who pass the screening permitted to get their abortions whilst those deemed mentally unsound are prevented from doing so? “You belong to a dwindling demographic! You must help us multiply.” This is disturbing any way you look at it. I predict they will make the screening process drag on beyond the new 20 week deadline. Two birds!

I think ultimately both measures are designed to scare the living daylights out of abortion providers and dissuade them from serving women in need. “It’s very difficult to know for certain if you’re complying with this bill,” said Kyle Carlson, an attorney for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland.

Thomas J. Schetelich, chairman of the board for the Center for Pregnancy Concerns is quoted as whining saying:

Frankly, we would expect our city government to be supporting our sacrificial efforts rather than trying to hinder… We’re disappointed that our stand for life draws opposition.

No, Sir, your misleading advertising is what’s drawing opposition. The Archdiocese is arguing that the ordinance violates the rights of church members to freedom of speech and religion. I thought “Thou shalt not bear false witness” was a component of Christianity.

Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check made a great point:

I find this very, very strange! Because the anti-choice movement in the United States has been whistling while it works assiduously to pass laws in state after state restricting the freedom and compelling the speech–and the actions–of medical doctors, nurses, and clinic personnel in regard to the medically safe, legal procedure called abortion.

Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien said the law, which took effect in January, “is hurting the good people volunteering and giving so much of their resources to come to the help of pregnant women.” Anti-choice liars are so oppressed! Their practice of their religion requires them to mislead and deceive pregnant women in crisis! Won’t someone think of the Catholic Church?!

87% of counties in the U.S. lack an abortion provider. Legal abortion means nothing without access. Thank you to the health professionals who go out of their way to bring safe abortion care to areas without providers. Thank you for risking harassment–and worse–every day in order to give women access to their right to choose.

Mischiefmanager: I started volunteering as a clinic escort almost 20 years ago. I was a stay-at-home mom with two young kids and I wanted to get out of the house and do something useful. There had been a series of violent and destructive attacks on clinics here, so I signed up to escort.

Baraqiel: I got into escorting through my wonderful and courageous mother, MM, who’s been escorting for as long as I can remember. I didn’t start until I got into college, because she didn’t think it was safe for me as a young teenager. At the time, I didn’t believe her — now I do.

MM: I’m so proud of her!

The purpose of escorting is to provide patients and their companions safe passage into the clinic. This is different from clinic defense, which is protection of the actual physical premises of the clinic itself. Here in Pittsburgh, we’ve never done that, believing that it’s the job of the police to see that the clinics are safe. I’ve done it once or twice, but I much prefer escorting.

Escorts walk with patients and companions from sidewalks, parking lots or garages to the entrance to the clinic. In doing so, we endeavor to keep the patient moving briskly towards the door. Generally there are at least two escorts for every patient, so that we can help her feel safe and protected from antis whose goal is to prevent her entry into the building. Every clinic is different in its physical location and layout, so the actual process of escorting will change to reflect those factors.

Baraqiel: Escorting takes place on Saturday mornings because that’s when a lot of abortions are actually performed, although of course the clinic provides other services and is open all week. Normally I escort at a private clinic although I might start going to the Planned Parenthood close by once a month. The private clinic has a very smooth protesting situation. We have about 6-8 cops who come every week and get there before we do (which is impressive since we’re supposed to start around 6:30 am) and they set up a line of sawhorses to keep the antis under control. This is very helpful, but their presence also means that we can’t be very aggressive with the antis when they get too feisty.

By contrast, I went to escort at the local Planned Parenthood once last semester on an emergency call and it was a total madhouse. There were only two cops, one of whom was sitting in a car doing nothing. The antis were free to harass the patients as much as they wanted, which of course was a lot, and the other escorts were being much too timid about stopping them, so the patients had to fight their own way through the protesters. It was very upsetting.

MM: I used to escort both at a private clinic and at a PP one; now I only escort at the private one, since I decided I had earned a few Saturdays off a month after all this time. We rarely have cops on site unless someone calls them. They don’t even drive by, although they should. A good cop can be hugely helpful; a bad one is infuriating. Generally women are more helpful than men. Pittsburgh is a very Catholic city and it’s clear that some of the male cops are not comfortable with the clinic.

Antis come in three flavors, all disgusting. The least troublesome are the pray-ers. These are people who come to pray (no surprise there). They generally stay well away from the clinic door and go through their ritual without interacting with us or the patients at all. They can be Catholic or Protestant, although here they’re mostly the former. We get groups from local universities and church groups, and there are usually priests in full regalia with the pray-ers. They’re annoying in principle – it’s not their business – but they don’t bother anyone directly and often the patients don’t even notice them. They get on our nerves after a while – as a Jew, it does not make me proud that I can recite large chunks of the rosary.

The second kind is the sign-and-literature people. They will stand up and down the sidewalks that lead to the clinic door. They either hold signs or try to give away literature to patients and passersby. The signs can be either gory and disgusting (and fake) or cutesy-Gerber baby pics, traditionally of white babies but lately including some babies of color, as it seems only recently to have occurred to the antis that black women get abortions. Often these signs are huge-3-4 feet tall and 2-3 feet wide. They are frequently used to block the sidewalk.

The lit people will do anything they can to get their propaganda into the hands of patients, including throwing it into car windows and sneaking it into pockets or purses. No clinic that I know of allows this stuff in the clinic, so escorts remind patients that they are free to decline it. We will also take it from patients before they go into the clinic, letting them know that they are free to come out and read it if they’d like, but that it’s not allowed inside. Never once have I had someone ask to keep it or come back outside to read it. In fact, most patients who end up with some anti propaganda are only too happy to get rid of it. We used to rip it up and throw it away, then I started taking it home to recycle, but now we put the date on the pamphlets and keep a file. This is because our clinics have been the subject of an ongoing lawsuit which, among other things, claims that we are interfering with the First Amendment rights of antis by stopping them from getting their lit to the patients. The First Amendment rights of the patients never enter their heads.

Finally we come to the sidewalk harassers, who have given themselves the comforting-sounding but entirely specious name of “sidewalk counselors.” These are the people who are trouble. Their goal is to stop the patient before she gets to the sidewalk and do or say whatever they can to turn that patient around. They will push, shove, stand in front of patients, surround them, grab them-you name it. They’ll scream the most vile things you can imagine, from the basic “don’t kill your baby!” to “I’ll take your baby!” (as if), to “you are a whore/slut/lesbian,” “you’ll get AIDS/breast cancer/you’ll be infertile/you’ll die in there,” to “the doctors have AIDS” and “you’ll burn in hell.” All this stuff they then claim to be doing out of love. But it’s about power, pure and simple – the sight of women controlling their own bodies enrages them. It’s their worst nightmare.

At our clinics, antis fall into several demographic groups. There are the long-time regulars, who are older, white and strange. We call them “the goon squad”. Then we get college kids. At the private clinic, vanloads of kids come from a Franciscan “university” an hour or so out of town. These kids get college credit for sidewalk harassing. The women tend to have that Stepford wife demeanor – smiling and saying “Hi!” when they arrive and “Have a great day!” when they leave, as though we’re all sharing a fun outing. The guys tend to be pushy and preoccupied with manliness issues. Then there are always a few random ones, some of whom are women who want to tell everyone that they “regret [their] abortion,” some of whom are religious crazies and some of whom don’t seem to know why they’re there.

The response of patients and companions runs the entire spectrum, from terror to outright contempt. I’ve had patients who break down in hysterics and freeze on the street, which is the saddest response. It’s like red meat (if you will) to the antis – they see fear and weakness and jump all over it. When that happens, we generally make a circle around the patient, get her attention (the mom voice works brilliantly for this) and tell her clearly and calmly that we’re going to get her inside now, and that we won’t let anyone hurt her or get in her way. Then we do it.

Then we have patients who think the antis are ridiculous and simply laugh at them, which is our favorite response. Some are just indifferent and walk by them without interacting. Many say no to their offers of literature or “counseling” and just keep walking. A few get angry, but it’s more often companions who lose their tempers. We frequently have to stop boyfriends and parents from laying antis out. It’s not surprising, since the antis know very well how to push their buttons: “Be a man! Don’t let her kill your baby!” to the boyfriends, “Grandma/Grandpa, don’t let her kill your grandchild” to the parents.

And the stories…antis tend not to be too smart, and they do all kinds of stupid, crazy, laughable things in addition to the cruel and ugly behavior which is their forte. There was the guy who tried to exorcise a manhole cover, the one who sprinkled holy water on the sidewalk on a frigid day, then knelt and kissed the spot and his lips froze to the pavement, the ones who threw a fit when someone came and handed out condoms one day, the one who claims that “birth control is for fags” and that women wearing trousers causes abortion…It goes on and on.

Baraqiel: The worst thing I ever saw at the clinic was on my first really busy day. A couple pulled up in a very expensive sports car. The woman was sobbing her eyes out, absolutely hysterical, and the antis went right up to the car and started shouting at her and wouldn’t let her get out of the car. We eventually got enough escorts over to help her to the door, but this poor woman was clearly terrified and the antis were more excited about her than they had been about any patient all morning. It was sickening – like watching a pack of wild animals smelling fear.

I wasn’t present for this, but my clinic got blockaded during the second year I was escorting, over Thanksgiving weekend (so I was home for break). This was before the police had started with the sawhorses. Something like 150-200 protesters completely blocked the door, 3-4 people deep in front of the building. The police decided to let them stay there for an hour, when there were patients who were coming back for the second part of a 2-day procedure. The escorts couldn’t do anything about it. It was in clear violation of the FACE Act but if the cops won’t enforce it, there’s nothing we can do.

On the anniversary of this event, last year, someone sprayed foam insulation into the cracks between all the doors and into the keypad that locks the door in an effort to block entrance to the clinic. We just used a back door, and the stuff wasn’t difficult to get off (although the keypad was ruined – the landlord wasn’t happy), but what really got me is that they had tried to seal a fire door, too. The building that the clinic is in also happens to house a daycare center – and they tried to seal the fire door! The concern for the children is really staggering.

Oftentimes, though, we get patients that are much more assertive with the antis than we’re allowed to be. We basically cheer whenever we get a patient who straight-up tells them to fuck off and just struts in the door. This can turn sour, though; a lot of the patients come with their husbands or boyfriends and it’s not unheard of to have to restrain the boyfriend from punching the antis. Usually the cops do this for us.

And these are some of the things antis have shouted at me:

• “If you want to kill babies, why don’t you go to Iraq and kill Iraqi babies?!”

• “Have a nice day…LESBIANS.”

• “Watch your back” (this being in a market several blocks away from the clinic, about half an hour after escorting ended)

• “Oh, are you going to kill your babies too?” (this being after my boyfriend, who I got into escorting, and I exchanged a smooch)

And, during the a World Series that this city’s team was in (note that we didn’t figure out this guy was an anti until halfway through the conversation):

Anti: So…you guys been watching the games? You [team] fans?

Escorts: Yeah…sort of, I guess…

Anti: You know why there are no more black baseball players?
Escorts: (silence)

Anti: You know, there used to be a ton of great black baseball players and now there are almost none, and I’ll tell you why…it’s because they were all murdered at a place like this.

Me: Actually, the number of black basketball players has only increased, and I think basketball pays more, so they probably just started going into a different sport.

Anti:…………you just, you just go back to school and, and you think about that. :storms away:

MM: Finally, I want to say something about antis and children. Antis not infrequently bring their kids to demonstrate. The kids range from infants to teenagers. The indifference, not to say abusive behavior, they show to these kids tells you everything you need to know about how they really feel about children – the ones who are born, that is. I’ve seen the kids out in frigid winter days without adequate clothing, in the rain and snow and bitter river winds, and in the summer heat without any shade or anything to eat or drink for hours. I’ve seen kids running around on city sidewalks unsupervised. The antis let their kids get in the way of patients and pedestrians trying to make their way up the sidewalk.

Baraqiel: I’ve found this to be the case as well. It’s not uncommon for antis to show up with babies in strollers and stop in front of us just to say, “Don’t hurt the baby, okay? Stick to the ones in the womb.” It’s clear the child is just a prop for them to make a point.
Ultimately escorting is a pretty surreal experience a lot of the time. It can be fun to talk to other escorts and heartbreaking or hope – inspiring to see the patients but mostly it’s just scary interacting with the antis who are clearly so hateful. It’s a very rewarding way to volunteer, though, and if you can deal with the early mornings and the winter cold, I highly, highly recommend it. The difference for the patients is enormous. What makes it worth it is the grateful look when someone who was scared to even step out of her car gets in the door safely. Some patients don’t need us, but for the ones that do, it’s so important that escorts are there helping her access her rights, since a right you can’t access is no right at all.

MM: If you’re not sure if escorting is for you, give your local clinic a call and arrange to observe. You may think that you wouldn’t be able to keep your temper, but seeing how grateful the patients are, knowing that they might not get the services they need if you weren’t there-that makes it very bearable. I especially encourage younger women to get involved. Even one Saturday a month is an enormous help. Your moms and grandmothers secured these rights-now it’s up to you to keep them.

Anti-abortion groups Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation have partnered to erect 65 billboards like this one across Georgia, and plan to put up 15 more. The billboard features a black baby’s face and copy that reads “Black children are an endangered species.” Their website says “abortion is the tool [racists] use to stealthily target blacks for extermination.”

Contrary to federal data proving otherwise, Catherine Davis of Georgia Right to Life claims that “[The] impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact our fertility rate.” While the abortion rate is indeed higher among black women than white and Hispanic women, the birth rate for black women is higher than the national average. You can view the data in a number of formats here.

The campaign’s sponsors claim they are trying to expose the “abortion industry” that allegedly preys on the black community (or “species”). Loretta Ross, of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, says “The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ’20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them… Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works.”

Racism plays a factor in black women’s high abortion rate, all right. Black women earn less than white and Asian women. More than one in five black individuals is uninsured. Black women’s unintended pregnancy rates are the highest of all racial groups in the U.S. But you won’t see these anti-choice groups calling for better access to health care for black women or advocating comprehensive sex education and reliable contraceptive methods. Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation are not trying to get to the root of what they claim they see as the problem (high abortion rate among black women). If they actually cared about black babies and oh-so-gullible black women, they could ask black women what they need to prevent unwanted pregnancy and what support would make raising their babies more feasible.

“He claims justification,” Kim Parker, a prosecutor said, calling on jurors here to uphold the law, not Mr. Roeder’s views of abortion, which, she said, he had proudly trumpeted on the witness stand. “These are not the acts of a justified man. These acts are cowardly.”

Roeder, who was also convicted of two counts of aggravated assault, will now face life in prison.

Via Proggie @ Flickr.

This guest-post comes from Australian harpy Mackey. It was written in the spirit of the cross-border conversations that happen at the Pursuit of Harpyness, and the sharing of experiences.

In Australia, there is no federal case like Roe v Wade that establishes legalised abortion. Around the same time as Roe v Wade, there was major case law establishing when abortion is considered legal and would not be prosecuted under the respective criminal codes/statutes of the states and territories that make up the federation that is Australia. But there was no legislation, in the 1960s and 1970s that legalised abortion.

The case law itself put maternal health, in part, at the centre of the determining whether a legal abortion could be performed (this is not to trivialise cases where women with disabilities, Indigenous women, and minority women were deleteriously affected by doctors’ decisions). Maternal health broadly considered the life, mental health, and economic and social conditions that could adversely affect the woman concerned.

Instead feminists and pro-choice activists are still campaigning for the majority states and the Northern Territory to take abortion out of their respective criminal codes/statutes. The Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have already done so (and massive feminist shout outs to the women and pro-choice campaigners who worked to achieve that momentous legislative decision). With that said, the legislative and social environment (federally and in the states and territories) seems markedly different to that of the United States.

Today about 2/3 of Australians support the right of women to access surgical/medical abortions. Local, state and federal elections are not fought solely on the issue of a candidate’s stance on abortion. This is possibly due to the following –abortion and its accessibility is determined in different jurisdictions, Australia’s federalism means that different types of decisions on similar issues reside with the different state/territory and the federal jurisdictions, with broad community support it no longer is a divisive issue, and the Australian system of compulsory voting in elections.

The most recent community discussion, in 2006, about the issue of abortion was the availability of the abortion drug RU486. The previous federal government, the conservative Liberal Party, used its majority in both houses of federal parliament to vote to allow the Federal Health Minister to make a determination about whether “restricted drugs”, like abortifacients, could be assessed by the Therapeutic Drugs Administration for community use. This decision politicised the issue of abortion, allowing the personal views of the federal health minister to determine if a “restricted drug” could be examined by the Therapeutic Drugs Administration.

The general idea of the function of the Therapeutic Drugs Administration is that it does not take a moral stance on what the function of a particular drug is; instead the medical and scientific experts of this body assess the drug on its efficacy to determine if it will be available for community use. The then Federal Health Minister, Tony Abbot (now Federal Opposition Leader) was explicitly against RU486 and continues to be against any form of abortion, thus was not going to allow RU486 to be assessed by the Therapeutic Drugs Administration.

The determination of the Federal Health Minister to allow “restricted drugs” to be assessed by the Therapeutic Drugs Administration has since been overturned. This is in no small part to pro-choice groups, and the cross party workings a group of pro-choice women senators and lower house representatives. A group of 4 cross party senators, representing the formal political parties of the day, the conservative Liberal Party, the Labor Party, the Democrats, and the National Party, sponsored a private members bill to change the legislation.

Whilst the Australian context may seem pro-choice, there have been particular instances that illustrate how precarious the situation can be where there isn’t established case law/decriminalisation of abortion giving legal force for the full range of family planning options.

- In 2006 in New South Wales, a doctor was convicted of two counts of performing an illegal abortion as she failed to establish as to whether a lawful reason for performing the abortion existed.

- In 2007, there was a debate in the Federal Senate about the truth in advertising for organisations providing crisis pregnancy counselling services. Crisis pregnancy centres were not required to indicate whether they were all-options counselling services. When women called anti-choice services that were not advertised as such, when abortion was mentioned as a possible option by anxious women, false and misleading information was sometimes provided.

- There has been as recent as 2008 a proposal to remove Medicare (Australia’s public health care system) funding for second trimester abortions. It wouldn’t matter if the foetus has died, a diagnosis of gross foetal abnormality is made, and/or the woman has a life threatening illness, there would be no provision under Medicare for the surgical abortion to be performed.

For these reasons and more, feminists and pro-choice campaigners in Australia remain vigilant.

Want. Via productionapparel on www.Etsy.com.

I am feeling more disheartened than usual after reading this New Yorker piece about American attitudes about abortion in light of the Stupak amendment. Jennifer Senior’s thorough, thoughtful essay explores how public opinion and public policy have changed since abortion was legalized in 1973.

According to a Gallup poll from July, 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be either illegal or “legal only in a few circumstances.” Only seventeen states pay for the procedure for poor women beyond the standards of the 1977 Hyde Amendment—meaning if the woman’s life is in danger or she’s been the victim of rape or incest. Just two months before the health-care bill’s passage in the House, a Rasmussen poll found that 48 percent of the public didn’t want abortion covered in any government-subsidized health plan, while just 13 percent did.

And:

The youngest generation of voters—those between the ages of 18 and 29, and therefore most likely to need an abortion—is the most pro-life to come along since the generation born during the Great Depression, according to Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover, who got granular data on the subject from Pew Research Center.

I think Amanda Marcotte may be onto something when she wonders whether Generation Y’s relatively anti-choice stance is partly the result of the over-parenting and rigid scheduling many of us grew up with.  Unfortunately, parents have become more and more risk-averse in the past couple decades, and they’ve tried hard to make sure the bubbles protecting their snowflakes never burst. Life isn’t supposed to be messy.

Mistakes are unacceptable; therefore, when a person woman is “careless” enough to experience an unplanned pregnancy, she must pay for it by giving birth. Nevermind that abortion is one way to fix the mistake of an unplanned pregnancy. It’s seen as taking the easy way out, because people women should have to suffer the consequences of their mistakes for life. They should never have made the mistake in the first place.

Obviously, as Senior points out, other factors have been more influential in shaping young people’s views on abortion. The under-30 set never saw women die from back-alley abortions. They weren’t alive during the second wave. The religious right has had much more influence on the political landscape than the women’s lib movement has during their lifetime. I am not sure what we in the pro-choice movement can do to turn things around.