"Judge Orders Morning-After Pill Available for All Ages."

Federal District Judge Edward R. Kormancalled the Obama administration’s restrictions “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”

“The F.D.A. has engaged in intolerable delays in processing the petition. Indeed, it could accurately be described as an administrative agency filibuster.”...

Scientists, including those at the F.D.A., have been recommending unrestricted access for years, as have major medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2011, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, issued a statement saying that after rigorous study the agency concluded it was safe to sell Plan B One-Step over the counter. But she was overruled by Ms. Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, the first time such a public countermanding had ever occurred.

Am I wrong to assume that Obama and Sebelius are secretly pleased to have the court impose this for them?

"[I]t is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided..."

"... just as I cannot claim infallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’ call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don’t believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe they make me human, limited in my understandings of God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new revelations — whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to abortion."        

Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" (2006)(pages 349-350, Kindle Edition).

Calling a miscarried baby a "fetus" or "fetal corpse."

At a memorial service for their lost child, the Duggar family distributed photographs showing a closeup of a parent's hand holding the tiny feet — "There is no foot too small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world" — and holding the tiny hand. Someone at the service tweeted the photographs. Noted. I have nothing to say about whether any of that is a good idea. I'm only making a blog post to show you  the way 2 prominent websites talked about it. I'm adding boldface. First, TMZ:

The family from TLC's "19 Kids & Counting" chose a unique way to commemorate the life of their 20th child, who passed away this week in a miscarriage -- they took an artsy picture of the fetal corpse ... and distributed it at the memorial.

And Jezebel:

Few among us have never made a judgey comment about the Duggars, however everyone's trying to be sensitive in light of the sad news that Michelle Duggar suffered a miscarriage. But now there's this bit of holy shit: TMZ is running dead fetus photos that the Duggars distributed at Jubilee Shalom Duggar's memorial service today.

They had to say "fetus" (or "fetal corpse"), didn't they? Why? It seems like a strange migration of abortion-rights ideology into a place where it doesn't belong.

I would think that even strong proponents of access to abortion would reject the use of the word "fetus" in the context of a family holding a memorial service and declaring that the deceased being left its mark on the world. Strong supporters of abortion rights accord a woman maximum control over the question of what that entity inside her womb is.

That's why Obama said "That's above my pay grade" and why the Supreme Court said "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Mrs. Duggar obviously believed this was a baby.

Recent Obama gestures in the gay rights and abortion categories.

1. This one's for all you gay people and the people who love them:

[T]he president directed all U.S. agencies to “promote and protect” the rights of gay and lesbian people through diplomatic means, including the allocation of foreign aid. And in a rousing speech before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Hillary Clinton defended the universality of the administration’s cause, saying, “Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct, but in fact they are one and the same.... Being gay is not a Western invention... It is a human reality.”

(Meanwhile, Obama doesn't support same-sex marriage here in the United States, but look over here don't look at that. Unless you don't cotton to gay rights, in which case, please look at that.)

2. And this one's for you folks who care about the rights of unborn human beings:

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius yesterday overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to make Plan-B, the morning-after pill, available without a prescription to any woman of child-bearing age...

Plan B is currently available without a prescription to any woman aged 17 or over. Anyone younger than that needs a prescription. The FDA’s recommendation would have allowed girls as young as 11 to purchase the drug in any drug store without any parental consent or doctor’s prescription....

Women’s advocacy groups were also quick to denounce Sebelius. From this morning’s Washington Post:

“We are outraged that this administration has let politics trump science,” said Kirsten Moore of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. “This administration is unwilling to stand up to any controversy and do the right thing for women’s health. That’s shameful.”

(So abortion-rights supporters must accept a little pain. They know Obama is really on their side. He's just got to establish a little credibility on the other side right now. Harsh criticism from people like Kirsten Moore is exactly what Obama needs, isn't it? A phony wedge between him and the abortion-rights advocates.)

"How bad can he be on abortion if Notre Dame is willing to honor him?"

"It was precisely the message President Obama wanted to send."

Well played, Mr. President, says William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal. In contrast, we see "the poverty of Notre Dame's institutional witness."

In a letter to Notre Dame's Class of 2009, the university's president, the Rev. John Jenkins, stated that the honors for Mr. Obama do not indicate any "ambiguity" about Notre Dame's commitment to Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life. The reality is that it was this ambiguity that the White House was counting on; this ambiguity that was furthered by the adoring reaction to Mr. Obama's visit; and this ambiguity that disheartens those working for an America that respects the dignity of life inside the womb.

And here's the Rush Limbaugh treatment of the topic:

The New York Times in a story today, headline: "At Notre Dame, Obama Calls for Dialogue on Abortion." Now, what exactly has been going on in this country for 40 years? It's no different than the libs saying, "You know what, we need to have that national conversation about race." What have we been doing since the founding of this country but having a conversation about race? What have we been doing the last 40 years but having a dialogue on abortion? And Obama appealed to partisans on each side to find ways to respect one another's basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.... I have often asked, "Where is the middle ground between good and evil? Where do you compromise? Where's the compromise between life and death? Where's the compromise between killing and birth? Where do you compromise on that?"

So the assumption here is, find ways to respect one another's basic decency. Well, what's decent? Language still matters to me. What the hell is decent about abortion? What's decent about it? This is the first time I've ever heard abortion categorized as a form of decency. Even the pro-choice crowd in trying to justify it, has tried to say that pregnancy is a disease, or that pregnancy is a sickness that can threaten the life of the mother, or a fetus is an unviable tissue mass. But I've never heard them say that abortion is decency. But Obama has now just said that both sides of the argument feature people who are advocating decency.

Ambiguity... compromise... You see the point. Obama's side of the debate wins simply by getting people to think that there can be a debate. By allowing Obama to be heard at all on the subject of abortion, Notre Dame loses ground, because the pro-Life position is not debatable, ambiguous or subject to compromise. That's a big political problem for pro-Lifers — their unwillingness to engage with the other side. And Obama is successfully exacerbating it.

Suddenly, more Americans are pro-life than are pro-choice.

Look at the flip from '08 to '09. The shift took place within the GOP, it's important to see. Democrats did not change. But why did the change take place? The big difference between '08 and '09 is that Obama took over the presidency:

With the first pro-choice president in eight years already making changes to the nation's policies on funding abortion overseas, expressing his support for the Freedom of Choice Act, and moving toward rescinding federal job protections for medical workers who refuse to participate in abortion procedures, Americans -- and, in particular, Republicans -- seem to be taking a step back from the pro-choice position. However, the retreat is evident among political moderates as well as conservatives.

It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public's understanding of what it means to be "pro-choice" slightly to the left, politically. While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction.