Thursday 12 July 2012

A Little Good News

It's always good to celebrate the small victories in life:
A Mississippi judge has kept in place a temporary block on a law that could see the state's only abortion clinic close its doors.
Of course, the idea of there being only one clinic in the whole of Mississippi is hardly to be filed under "good", but at one is better than none.

This article from the Guardian, written before today's ruling, points out that the anti-abortion groups have gotten smarter.  They've more or less realised that outright evil actions---killing doctors, bombing facilities---don't actually win for them.  If they want to succeed in their goal to end women's control over their own bodies, they need to present things with a more reasonably facade.  Hence the law that is trying to shut down Mississippi's last facility claims to be about women's health.  Of course, in a sick sense it is; it's about making it worse.

There's a parallel to another cause celebre of the religious right, creationism.  The wedge strategy is an attempt to push religion into science classes under the fraudulent banner of academic freedom, much as this law pushes religion under the pretence of health.  The only good thing about that comparison is that the attempts to push creationism have failed; I'm not optimistic enough to think the same will happen in Mississippi.

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