I was going to write about Kathleen Parker's enormously stupid and disingenuous column about Wendy Davis and abortion but then along came Melinda Henneberger to be even more stupid and disingenuous, so here we go.

Both Parker and Henneberger are part of an emerging and alarming consensus that a ban on abortions after 20 weeks is the new "centrist" position on the subject. This, of course, is not only nonsense, but represents yet another attempt by pathetic people to find "common ground" with a movement that stalks nurses, vandalizes clinics, sets off bombs, and murders doctors in their kitchen. (Sorry, but if Parker can call people child murderers for exercising their freedom to choose, then I can point out some of the more effective tactics that have been employed by her side of the debate.) Henneberger is one of these pathetic people.

Still, I have to stand with the cheaters on this one.

(That may be the most singularly pathetic sentence ever written in an American newspaper.)

Because no matter how many thousands of times abortion rights supporters repeat that the bill's ban on abortions after 20 weeks is anti-woman - hateful in effect and by design - that's just the opposite of the way I see it. And it isn't how a majority of Americans, or American women, see it, either:In a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, Americans saidthey favor a bill like the Texas measure, 48 percent to 44 percent. More than half of politically unaffiliated Americans - 53 percent - backed such a bill. And 50 percent of women said they were in favor compared to 46 percent of men.

Well, if you've decided that the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population should be at the mercy of peckerwood legislative shenanigans, making those privacy rights subject to an artificial public-opinion plebiscite is a piece of cake.

The Texas law is not unlike legislation on the books all over Western Europe, where late-term abortions are rightly considered barbaric - except, of course, in cases of rape, incest, or health risk to the mother.

Jesus, you can get dumber just reading this. First of all, 20 weeks is not "late term" by the only constitutional standard that still applies. Second, Marco Rubio just announced he would introduce a piece of national legislation that makes no exceptions. And, third, in western Europe, abortion is still easily obtainable, and they're not fighting over birth control, and they're not blowing up clinics and shooting doctors. The cultural context and history have to count for something.

The Texas bill also imposed new regulations on clinics, and its opponents claim that requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion facility would force the closure of 37 of the state's 42 clinics. Clearly, the case of abortion doctor - and now convicted murderer - Kermit Gosnell changed nothing in America, where it's commonly accepted that the "woman's right to choose" should extend even beyond birth.

(The fk does this even mean? Henneberger links to a YouTube video famous among the fetus-fetishists in which a representative of Planned Parenthood says that, if a baby were to survive an abortion, a ridiculous hypothetical that proves Henneberger will believe practically anything, "We believe that any decision that's made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician." The anti-choice people have been birthing bovines over this for months.)

Neither do allegations against the Houston abortion doctor Douglas Karpen seem to have changed hearts and minds on the most intractable issue in American politics. Karpen runs three clinics where ex-employees said they'd witnessed him doing what Gosnell did, killing babies who had been born alive. In Delaware recently, nurses testified that their former employer, Planned Parenthood of Delaware, routinely put women's health at risk by rushing procedures to maximize profits, using untrained staff, and neglecting medical standards. Yet any desire to regulate this industry can only come from some deep hatred of womankind?

Why, yes, it can. Because that's been the consistent theme for almost 50 years now. Why do you ask? You have to be an awfully big bag of hammers to think Rick Fking Perry, who's also busy denying thousands of poor Texans basic medical care through the Affordable Care Act, is pushing this through because of his deep concern for women's health.

I stubbornly persist in believing that those who disagree with me on abortion also care deeply about women, though those of us who see risks to both women and their unborn children are all but never accorded that same presumption.

And aren't you special? Still, I have to stand with the people who don't murder doctors.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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