from Talk to Action

From last Saturday's New York Times:

Kiss-and-Tell No More

A federal judge in Kansas has dealt another blow to the crusade by the state's attorney general, Phill Kline, to restrict abortions under the phony banner of combating child abuse.

In February, the Kansas Supreme Court blocked Mr. Kline from invading the medical privacy of 90 women and girls who were treated at two abortion clinics. This week, a federal trial judge in Wichita killed Mr. Kline's daft idea to require doctors, school counselors and psychotherapists, among others, to report all sexual activity by people under 16, from kissing to sexual intercourse.
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It seems too much to hope that this will end the matter, since Mr. Kline is likely to appeal, and anti-abortion groups are eager to expand the use of child-abuse reporting laws. But for the moment, the thoughtful new ruling gives supporters of medical privacy and reproductive freedom a victory.

Just about no one in Kansas would expect Phill Kline to give up now '

I have stayed out of the Duke Lacrosse rape story. I have no capacity for journalistic dispassion on this issue for reasons that should become clear as of this writing. My associate the Blogging Curmudgeon emailed me this CNN story this morning and I found myself staring at the smug visage of Reade Seligmann for several uncomfortable moments: handsome, entitled, determined, all-American, boy-next-door. Suddenly, I was hurled back in time to my own high school days; days I prefer to think of as long ago and far away.

from Talk to Action

We all have heard South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli's description of a woman who might qualify for an abortion under the rigid strictures of South Dakota's draconian abortion law '

from Talk to Action

While the Bible that many South Dakotans are substituting for the Constitution these days maintains that "her price is far above rubies," those same people have decreed that the worth of any woman, no matter how virtuous, plummets at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." From that moment forward, not only her body, her hopes and her dreams, but sometimes -- despite the hollow promise of a tacked-on provision allowing "a medical procedure designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant mother" '

from Talk to Action

One can almost hear Mark Twain snorting in disgust.

(Image by Kafka/AP)
This week Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota finally ended the suspense. After a prolonged, tantalizing and agonizing period of presumably sober deliberation, Rounds signed the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act. The law protects human life beginning at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." Unless, of course, the live human in question is a woman who wants an abortion '