The XX Factor: What women really think.

Yesterday, the Texas state Senate debated a bill that would require doctors to perform an ultrasound before performing an abortion, but that would give the woman the choice whether or not to see the findings. The underlying motive behind the bill is to give the pregnant woman as much information as possible to make her decision.

The ACLU is fighting back, claiming that the bill assumes that women aren't well-informed already, or that it opens the door for women to be pressured and intimidated into not having an abortion. But this seems like a shallow argument to me—and one that misses the point. For one thing, there may actually be women who aren't all that well-informed about how close a fetus is to human form. Juno captured that perfectly when our uninformed protagonist was swayed by the reality that "... your baby has fingernails!" After all, the women most likely to have abortions are young and less educated. Also, the pro-choice movement has been adopting a line of moral responsibility over the years, starting with Bill Clinton's safe, legal, and rare. Why not take this to its logical conclusion, and let women absorb the full knowledge of what they're doing when they're having an abortion?