"The surrogate mother’s rights over the fetus she is carrying are greatly curtailed and she loses all rights to the baby she delivers."

Wrote Gloria Steinem, quoted by Kathryn Jean Lopez in "Gloria Steinem, a Voice Against Commercial Surrogacy" (National Review).

In 2019, when Andrew Cuomo sought to legalize commercial surrogacy, Steinem wrote:

A state that medicalizes and rents out female bodies — with third party profit as a motive and little or no regulation of risk to the women egg donors and surrogate wombs — jeopardizes a woman’s fundamental right to health and freedom and puts profit ahead of the long-term welfare of the fetus.

The use of the word "medicalizes" made me wonder what Steinem thought about hormone and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Grok pointed me to her 1977 essay, "If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot," where she expressed dismay that some people "surgically mutilate their own bodies" when what we need to change our ideas about sex roles.

"Why didn’t Ellington consider his music jazz?"

Kathryn Jean Lopez asks Terry Teachout, who says:

His problem was specifically with the word “jazz,” which for his generation (he was born in 1899) still had strongly sexual connotations. Ellington believed that such ostensibly vulgar labels would prevent jazz from ever being taken seriously by artists, critics, and scholars, so he tried to come up with a different way of referring to the music. At one point, the label he preferred was “Negro folk music.” Needless to say, it never caught on.

Here's Teachout's new book "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," which contains the sentence — Teachout's second favorite of his sentences, he says — “He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself.”

"Justice was served to Kermit Gosnell today and he will pay the price for the atrocities he committed."

"Anti-choice politicians, and their unrelenting efforts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion care, will only drive more women to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell."

The Naral spin on the Gosnell verdict, quoted in a NYT report, which I arrived at via National Reviews Kathryn Jean Lopez, whose blog post is "Fetus. Fetus. Fetus. Fetus. Fetus. Fetus." ("The New York Times piece on the Gosnell verdict screams euphemisms over the trial results.")

I'm not quite getting Lopez. Did the NYT rewrite its piece? What I'm seeing at the NYT begins (boldface added): "A doctor who was responsible for cutting the spines of babies after botched abortions was convicted Monday of three counts of first-degree murder in a case that became a sharp rallying cry for anti-abortion activists."

ADDED: Apparently, the NYT did rewrite it!

"The Constitution is the rules; politics is the game."

"The alternatives to organized political contention are anarchy or sheep-like passivity."

Richard Brookhiser speaks in one aphorism after another in this dialogue with Kathryn Jean Lopez about his new book about James Madison, "James Madison." (Buy it here. I just did.)

The headline on the interview is "Politics Is Madison," and I was delighted to see, that it wasn't about my crazy little city in the Midwest.

More from the interview:

LOPEZ: What accounts for Madison’s scorn for John Adams and his love for Thomas Jefferson? Does either man’s relationship with Madison provide essential insight into Adams or Jefferson?

BROOKHISER: Madison never spent much time with John Adams, and could not see beyond his obnoxious qualities to the good ones. Thomas Jefferson was the cool older brother Madison never had — brilliant, eloquent, quirky — but at the same time a fellow Virginian and an ideological soul mate....

LOPEZ: What might Madison think about Barack Obama?

BROOKHISER: Jefferson’s vices, without the charm.

K-Lo leaves NRO and TBogg makes an anti-Hispanic joke about it.

That's the way I read this.

***

Gawker speculates that National Review is hurting for cash after the death of William F. Buckley.

***

Sadly, No! goes with the sexist approach to the news.

"We're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him."

"Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

When is the press going to force Joe Biden to explain what the hell he meant by that? And, generally, when is the press going to pay attention to Biden's mistakes? Kirsten Powers would like to know.

The stock answer is: "It's just Biden being Biden." We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it's not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off....

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.

Even those who support Obama -- not all, but some -- are getting nauseated by the press bias. And it's not just the bias. I'm really queasy about that future Biden is foreseeing. He has access to all sorts of reports of threats that we can't be told. It's as if he's taunting us with his inside knowledge. There will be -- what? -- attacks? And is Obama already planning to respond in ways that they know will dismay us? Tell us more. Is it about Israel?

ADDED: Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks maybe Biden means that Obama wants a draft.