Unintended consequences

By Libby

I didn't get around to posting this earlier but in case you missed it, there's good news for pro-choicers. Via Scott Lemieux , it appears that the blowback on the illogical and insulting Gonzales v. Carhart SCOTUS decision has caused a pretty big splinter in the hard core anti-choice ranks while pro-choice groups have seen a big bump in suppport. Even more delicious is that Jimmy Dobson's hateful little empire is the target of the discontent.

I'm not that surprised to see it happen. I don't think many people took the idea of overturning Roe seriously until the SCOTUS decision and it motivated them to get involved. But it turns out the scope of the decision is much narrower than I initially thought. All it really did was ban the safest choice. And you have to love the Dobson party line on why this is good.

Doctors adopted the late-term procedure "out of convenience," Minnery added. "The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling."

What a steaming crock. It couldn't be clearer that Dobson doesn't give a damn about unborn babies. All this really means that insurance rates will go up and riskier procedures will be used so Bush could deliver a phony victory to his anti-choice base. The trouble is, the "nutcases," as the White House is fond of calling them, have finally figured out they've been had. It's the "incrementalists who support piecemeal restrictions" against the "purists who seek a wholesale prohibition on abortions." And it ain't pretty. Here's one critic.

"Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars" for major antiabortion groups, "but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that," he said. "That's why we call it the pro-life industry."

And another

"What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they're really a wing of the Republican Party, and they're not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child -- they're geared to getting Republicans elected," he said. "So we're seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we're deceived about what they really do."

Nothing short of an overturn of Roe will satisfy the theocratic conservatives of course, but now that they realized hypocrites like Dobson are just using them, perhaps we'll see these quasi-GOP PACs that have been exploiting their concerns simply for political power shut down. However you feel the abortion issue, the downfall of Dobson could only be a good thing for everyone.