The XX Factor: What women really think.

What the Pro-Life Super Bowl Ad Means to Me

The other day our colleague Will Saletan, whose writings on abortion I greatly admire and share with my pro-life friends, wrote a piece on the Tebow ad called “The Invisible Dead” about Tebow’s mother and the dangers of carrying a pregnancy after being diagnosed with placental abruption. While it was a typically excellent Saletan piece, it was the headline that grabbed me, and not for any reason that Will likely intended ... (Read the rest of this article here.)

Planned Parenthood's Super Bowl Strategy

Last Sunday, Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman broke ranks with the feminists who have been denouncing CBS for running Tim Tebow's TV ad during the Super Bowl. Read their op-ed in the Washington Post. It's a fascinating history of canny, well-crafted advertising by pro-life groups, and Kissling and Michelman argue that the pro-choice movement has often lagged in response. Tebow's ad, of course, celebrates his mother's decision to give birth to him despite a placental abruption, a premature separation of the placenta from the uterine wall that can be life-threatening for the mother and is often associated with stillbirth ... (Read the rest of this post here.)

Fishy Story From Former Director of Planned Parenthood

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

I'm sorry, Rachael, but this story you linked about Abby Johnson's sudden conversion from a Planned Parenthood director to an anti-choice fanatic has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese after being used for target practice. Johnson's story fits way too neatly into a bunch of easily disproven anti-choice myths, the main one being that all it takes is one glance at an ultrasound to cause someone to "realize" that hey! abortion removes a fetus from your uterus. Pro-choicers already know that. Johnson seems to be selling a story that's a tad too pat, too close to what anti-choicers want to hear.

After all, your average person in the United States has seen probably hundreds of sonograms in their lives, and most of them show a fetus at gestational age well beyond the point that most women get elective abortions. If you compare the ultrasound taken prior to an elective abortion, the feeling is actually one of being underwhelmed, because there's not much there compared to the ones we're used to seeing. The anti-choice sentimental devices rely therefore on ignorance more than illumination—their own mistaken understanding of what goes on in an abortion clinic ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).