Australian woman deported from US says border agency told her questions about abortion were policy | Australia news | The Guardian
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Good news for eastern Missouri:
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Ross Douthat has a decent opinion piece in the NYT:
What Do the Physical Costs of Pregnancy Mean for the Abortion Debate?
Free-to-all archived link:
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Jewish women in Florida, Indiana, and now Kentucky are fighting back:
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Someone will try to play this into an anti-Semitic trope. Just watch. Also, this:
Plaintiff’s religious beliefs demand that they have more children through IVF
just feels yucky.
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I have chosen to believe that they are using hyperbole to make their point. There are Jewish equivalents of the Quiverful movement, yes, but my guess is that a good lawyer would know to choose the best all-around representatives in a class action suit, and Jewish extremism won’t play in, well…waves hands wildly in all directions.
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And then there is this:
The U.S. has one of the highest teen birth rates among developed nations, even after three decades of improvement. And Arkansas, roughly tied with Mississippi, has the highest teen birth rate in the country.
And conservative states largely have the highest rates: Arkansas (27.8), Mississippi (27.9), Louisiana (25.7), Oklahoma (25), Alabama (24.8), Kentucky (23.8), Tennessee (23.3), West Virginia (22.5), Texas (22.4), New Mexico (21.9).
Those numbers are stunning.
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JFC, those poor children 
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Go to Your Womb
by Deborah Hauser
The best defense against rape is to contain your delight.
If you think you have been raped
please contact your congressman or senator
to determine if your rape
(yours—you own it) was legitimateBy legitimate we mean forcible
as opposed to unenforceable
we do not enforce or endorse rape
but we will force you to bear your rapist’s child
the child must not be punished
the child must have a womb of its ownShould it be verified that you have experienced legitimate rape
you may be relieved to know that the chances of this attack
resulting in pregnancy are very low according to pseudo-scienceWhen has so much attention ever been paid to the womb
& efforts to delight it
usually a woman is responsible for delighting her own wombA delighted womb does not wander
This womb is too easily delighted
This womb is too difficult to delight
This womb is legitimately delighted
The wombat rarely exhibits delight
Goldilocks’ womb is just rightIf you are pregnant there is a high probability that your womb
has been delighted
your womb may be delighted right now
if you do not know whether or not your womb is delighted
please consult the nearest male politician.
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It’s a sad read, but it’s kind of hard for me to feel too much sympathy for her. She was pro-life until her circumstances suddenly changed. Why did she think it would be different for her?
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Bayes’ Theorem Practically Applied to Policy Discourse.
People keep saying that in a rational argument, ad hominem is a logical no-op at best, a self-refutation at worst. That is: you’re supposed to consider the argument on its own merits, not the source of the argument.
In pure logic and rhetoric terms, this is correct. Sometimes a biased or bad faith source can make a good and correct argument.
In public debate, it’s dangerous bullshit. Even if someone was going through, argument by argument, marking each as supported or rejected, then as far as the audience is concerned it’s too late. And there is no non-biased agency which is doing that, or at least, as soon as any given agency starts disagreeing with a bad-faith disputant then they will just claim that that agency is biased and should be ignored, and if all the agencies agree then they’re all biased and there’s probably a conspiracy.
And in any case, most people aren’t doing that sort of analysis because they simply don’t have time, inclination, or training to do so. Everyone does their first pass analysis using cognitive shortcuts, even the experts. What makes experts experts is their willingness to apply the Second Thought (as Tiffany Aching would put it) and wonder if they might be wrong.
Rhetorical fallacies work. And one of the big ones is ad hominem. And one of the biggest ad hominem shortcuts is “Yes, but they would say that, wouldn’t they.” Of course a Pro-Choice person is going to argue that Abortion Bans are bad, that’s what they do! Bayes’ Theorem says that such a statement from such a source has little information, and so most people will not consider the argument itself: they’ll either accept it without thinking about it because it’s coming from their side, or reject it wholesale because it’s coming from the other side.
But when a “Pro Life” person makes that same argument, Bayes’ Theorem says that has more information. It is not expected, it is surprising, and it will make people push past that “they would say that wouldn’t they” reflex, because this “they” wouldn’t be expected to say that, and so you can move on to the actual argument.
Of course, whether it’s coming from Planned Parenthood or the person noted above, the argument is the same: “Banning pregnancy terminations (directly through straight outlawing or indirectly by making providers too scared to perform the procedure) will kill women, including women who did not want to abort but may die if they don’t.”
Planned Parenthood and all the Pro-Choice advocates have been screaming this from the rooftops for decades, but, well, “they would say that, wouldn’t they.”
When an avowed Pro-Life woman says the same thing, maybe that will push through a few layers of cognitive shortcuts and make people actually consider the argument on its merits.
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I hope so, but my guess is that pro-lifers will continue to discredit these arguments as left-wing BS. 
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Today I learned that if I vote yes on Proposal 3 in Michigan I am legalizing abortions up to 28 days after the baby is born.
I read the proposal several times today in case I missed something because killing one month old babies would be murder but nope, it’s not in there.
I also learned that a yes vote allows nine year olds to get sterilized without their parent or guardian’s consent.
Read it again just in case but nope, that’s not in there either.
I wonder if they got different ballots with a different proposal.
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I’m not an expert in rhetoric or logic [pause to allow the laughing to die down] but I think that fails to capture the situation where one side has a decided advantage in terms of information.
For example, vaccine proponents vs anti-vaxxers. One side has all the science, the other has all the bullshit. There’s no real point for a vaccine proponent to debate an anti-vaxxer. There’s zero exchange of information there. And it’s kinda where Bayes’ Theorem falls apart a little bit, if I might say so, on the raggedy extreme edge. An anti-vaxxer stating a pro-vaccine point doesn’t add information. It’s just a “duh!” moment.
Add to all that, debating against “bullshit” is pretty pointless. When someone doesn’t just lie (which can be disproven positively), but just makes up all the parameters of their argument, there’s no point to attack with logic and data; it just gives and sticks and stinks up anything and anyone it touches.
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