One of my favorite bloggers, John Cole, takes another one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, to task for this quote:

I am immensely grateful to those readers who have shared such personal, painful experiences with such candor and open hearts. I have to say that I remain somewhat shaken by the emails – many of which we didn’t publish. They reminded me of the human beings behind these tragedies, and forced me to reassess my own certainties and beliefs. I still cannot in good conscience support these abortions; but I can offer my profound gratitude for the readers who have forced this blogger to see things I had not fully grasped so keenly before; and to return to them respect and empathy in the particulars, even while we may disagree in the abstract.

Here’s Cole’s full response, which bears reading in its entirety:

1.) What is wrong with your conscience that you “can’t support” their medical decision in this case? 2.) No one is asking you for your support, anyway. They are just asking that you help stop the people who are bombing the clinics where this is done, shooting the few doctors who provide these procedures, distributing wanted signs with rewards of them, hassling and stalking the people who work there. In other words, they are asking that you treat the people threatening all of these people on a daily basis to be treated as they are- as a terror cell. But your support for their medical decision? Trust me, your moral support is the last damned thing on their mind. 3.) Andrew is wildly against single-payer. It’s socialist. Is he regularly donating to a charity that helps pay the millions of dollars of medical bills that multiple futile heart surgeries or multiple spinal surgeries these babies must endure before they die? Even the rosy scenario he posted yesterday states that only 50% might live in some diminished capacity after multiple surgeries. Or are these poor women supposed to not only give birth to a child that will probably never live a healthy day in its short life, in a risky childbirth that may kill the woman, but they also win hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills for futile procedures? Sorry about your luck, lady, but we have people’s consciences to think about here. Does Andrew think the only people going through this are upper East Side liberals with platinum health insurance and a six figure income and a disdain for human life? Is anyone in the pro-life community funding this for people? Or are they just too busy trading bomb-making tips with Operation Rescue? What this country really needs right now is a serious case of mind your own damned business. We’ve turned into a nation of busybodies and scolds, and people just need to back off. And that goes for the people opposed to and trying to make illegal Andrew’s marriage, for people like Andrew who sound like they want the weight of the law to come down on people making tragic medical decisions that lead to late-term abortions, for the nutjobs who thought they knew better than Michael Schiavo how to handle his horrible situation with his wife, to the lunatics screaming “murder” when we do stem cell research, and so on. I’m really sick of the crap, and I don’t mean to harsh completely on Andrew, because I sense he does struggle with these matters. But if Andrew’s conscience can’t support a late-term abortion, then right now he is sitting pretty, because under our current system, anyone who doesn’t want an abortion doesn’t have to have one. And that really should be the end of that.

I’ve learned a lot about late-term abortion over the last few days. Before the George Tiller assassination, I hadn’t given it much thought.

After tearing away my ignorance, I came to a key realization: Most women who choose to undergo a late-term abortion really wanted to have a baby.

Anti-choice demagogues like to demonize women who have abortions as irresponsible sluts who use abortion as a quick, easy form of birth control.

This kind of bullshit really doesn’t apply to late-term abortions. These are women who have carried the fetus inside their womb for a long time, only to later discover that the fetus has a horrible, crippling abnormality or that delivering the pregnancy would threaten the mother’s life.

Having learned the above, I find it even more important for me to speak out on protecting a woman’s right to choose. Issues as complex, personal and private as these don’t need me (or Sullivan) poking our noses in. We really need to back the fuck off.