"Woke" Democrats are about to destroy America — the State of the Blog, Year Nine

      My 10th year of writing Every Goddamn Day begins Friday, and this is my annual pause to review the blogical year now past. I've looked back at the form, and these annual reports seem to have become occasions for public whining about fatigue and carping about obscurity. The good news is that I'm not doing that this year. At least I'll try to keep it to a bare minimum. EGD is not a burden, it's a benefit, not a flaw, but a feature of my life, a valued feature. I'm glad for the chance to do it. It's an oar in the water, a dog in the race, albeit a very small, very slow dog loping along far behind the bounding pack.

     Whoops, it's so easy to slip. But that's just candor. I can't pretend this is rattling the windows. That isn't my brand. I honestly think existing under the radar is a good thing, as illustrated by the single post this year that achieved what I consider a hint of the social media shock waves enjoyed by the big dogs: June 8's constitutional analysis, and that got notice only because the headline mentions child porn, and that caught the attention of toxic screamers, who excited their groundlings. When I first noticed the tweet had 120 comments I reflexively cried out, "Oh no!" Within hours it reached 10,000 comments.  I was steely-eyed, determined, locked in; I didn't read one, which took resolve, but was smart strategy, as I will explain. Keep the poison out. Besides, certain plants grow best in the dark, and I'm one of them. Or so I tell myself.
     The big news of the past year is that in May I finally finished the book that this blog inspired, "Every Goddamn Day: A Highly Selective, Definitely Opinionated, and Alternatingly Humorous and Heartbreaking Historical Tour of Chicago" (yes, I know. I think it's a search engine optimization thing, or a Victorian exuberance which crops up now and then in publishing. The title originally was even longer, but I implored them to chop a little.)
     When I turned the manuscript in to the University of Chicago Press, I told my editor, sincerely, that the book was so much fun to research, so interesting to write, that I didn't care whether they publish it or not. That might sound strange, but it was sincere. I'm at a point in my career when whatever eyebrow twitch or stifled yawn my work extracts from the public can't be the reward. The reward has to be the doing. You rarely hear a writer say he likes to write, and it might be a sign of hackdom, but so be it. It's true. 
     Well, except for copyediting and proofreading the galleys, which was an exhausting grind. And terrifying, given the errors I managed to pluck out at the last moment. I hope that I don't spend its publication in October in a kind of miserable crouch, waiting for the assorted typos and factual errors to come pelting down on my back, like hot ash from Mount Vesuvius. I won't be surprised though.
     But that's ahead. In the past year, EGD has gone to some interesting places, and I appreciate you tagging along. The monthly highlights:

Edith Renfrow Smith

   In July, 2021, we met Edith Renfrow Smith in advance of her 107th birthday. A reminder of the importance of just going. I had no idea of her history, and was merely tagging along with a reader who invited me to meet a really old friend. Then she started talking about being the first Black graduate of Grinnell College and Herbie Hancock teaching her daughter to play "Chopsticks' (it also was a reminder to do your homework, which I hadn't).  I was pleased that Hancock not only gave me a quote, but called Smith on her birthday.
    In August we popped in on S. Rosen's to watch them make buns, and learned about how COVID affected even the production of bready hot dog wrappings.
    All year of course I kept pouring water on the Trump flare-ups still threatening to burn down democracy. In September, I reminded everyone that for all the grimness associated with "1984," from the perspective of today, George Orwell was an optimist. Nothing seemed to diminish the monstrosity, but that doesn't free any of us from the obligation of trying.

     In October, I challenged myself to find a fresh take on that hoary chestnut of Chicago history, the Great Chicago Fire, to mark its 150th anniversary, and believe I succeeded, starting with Mary Todd Lincoln, the president's widow, who was living in Chicago at the time of the fire.
    In November, we paused after a Trump stalking horse won in Virginia to savor the ululations of his minions in "A word from Scut Farkus and friends."
     In December, we looked to the past, as preview of the social disaster that was indeed coming when the Supreme Court would reverse Roe v. Wade half a year later in "Pro-Choice Priests and Suicide Girls."

Peanut butter

     January kicked off 2022 with photographer Ashlee Rezin and me in the COVID intensive care unit at Roseland Community Hospital, tracking the front line medical battle against the Omicron variant. While some commentators indulged in false hope, on Feb. 15, nine days before the tanks rolled across the border, we explained "Why Russia is about to invade Ukraine." In March, I accompanied Thresholds as they treated the mentally ill on the streets of Chicago. April saw a farewell to my friend Lee Flaherty, founder of the Chicago Marathon. May saw one of my patented attempts to praise a product, in this case, why Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter tastes so good, turn into a far funnier study of corporate incompetence. 
    Which leads us to the month now ending. I can't overlook my Neenah manhole cover story, which took years to set up, and got solid reaction and big front page treatment. Then there was the headline that blew up on Twitter, "Why restrict child porn but not guns?" If you read the piece, you see it's a sober legal juxtaposing the 1st and 2nd Amendments. But the Twitter mob doesn't read the actual articles, that would delay their simply melting into bubbling pools of indignant hysteria. But I refused to feed the trolls, and was rewarded by the entire kerfuffle utterly vanishing in about three days, a valuable lesson to others who find themselves being raked by a Twitter enfilade. Keep your head down and just wait. Nobody really thinks you're a pedophile. Nobody is actually going to come and kill you. You can also restrict who can comment on your tweets, and I've now been doing that routinely. The post became my second most popular, with over 23,000 hits. A good thing, I guess, though I'd trade that for 2,300 people reading the column and thinking about it. No? How about 230?
     Which leads us to the all-important numbers. The blog didn't seem to have the randomly generated spiderbot spikes of past years. So with 800,876 clicks for the year, that translates into an average of 66,739 readers a month, or almost 2,200 a day. Not the big leagues, but consistent. Seven months were in the 60s, two in the 50s, two in the 70s and one in the 80s. 

     Look, if a scoutmaster finds himself with an audience of six 7-year-olds around a campfire, he still tries to tell a good story, the best he can, and doesn't pause to shake his fist at the sky because he's not telling it to 100,000 scouts gathered at a jamboree in Soldier Field. I can do no less. 
     What else? The Chicago Sun-Times was purchased, for the traditional dollar, by WBEZ, the local National Public Radio outlet, and that was considered a good thing, both for the improbable lion-and-the-lamb union, and for the $60 million plus in charitable dollars doing so magically unlocked. We announced Wednesday that we're moving our downtown newsroom from Racine Avenue to the Old Post Office, which is exciting. I marked my 35th anniversary on staff in March, an astounding figure, and wrote myself onto the front page with sufficient consistency for me to entertain hopes that I won't be sacked in the coming year, the way most of the established columnists over at the Tribune have been. This was the year that writing a newspaper column felt as if it had sunk into the mock heroic, like wearing spats or being a professional luthier. It is still a job category — people write columns, just as they make violins — but not precisely a growth field. Nothing would be more encouraging than to spot a sharp young columnist making waves, but there isn't one that I can detect, either because no one wants to try, or because there are no jobs to be had if anyone did. No one seems to care, and I'm trying not to either. One day at a time.
     EGD's North Shore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey, hit her mark 52 weeks in a row, providing an alternate voice to mine, an amuse bouche of caring, engaged, active, joyful enthusiasm offering a valuable counterpoint to my more languid, inert, doleful contemplation. 
      Marc Schulman, of Eli's Cheesecake, ran his traditional series of holiday ads, nudging EGD from a pure hobby into the realm of commercial enterprises, and for that I am truly grateful. For the ads, and for the cheesecake, which is in my freezer right now, and should be in yours. You can and should purchase some Eli's cheesecake here. 
    Comments after the post seemed to have dwindled, and I'm not sure why. People just don't react as much as they did. Maybe I've lost some readers to senescence. I've considered just shutting down the comments, as not worth the bother. But between half a dozen and a dozen loyal readers seem to really like commenting regularly, and I see no reason to shut them out. Not yet anyway. Thank you for your thoughtful contributions to the blog, and for the corrections.
     The headline on today's post, by the way, is taken verbatim from the first line of a Charlie Kirk fundraising letter, the far right fountain of fascism suggesting that being sensitive to history and to the lives of others is somehow fatal to America — and I suppose, to his America, it is. Let's hope so. I have no illusion that the past year, or all nine years, of curious centrist exploration of Chicago and the world around us will ever resonate beyond we happy few. But you can't say I didn't try, and I appreciate you hanging around to read it. 

Why bother voting?

     The gym at Greenbriar School is large, cool, dim, new. And nearly empty Tuesday morning, Election Day for a midterm — known for low turnout — primary, which are historically even lower. Two election judges, one a teenager too young to vote but who wants to be involved. Hope for the future.
     Of course, I’m here, at the Northbrook elementary my kids attended. I never miss an election. Demographics help explain why.
     I’m in the sweet spot of people who benefit most from our system: white, older, in the top 10% of household income, barely. I fly the flag, stand for the pledge and believe in the promise of America no matter how many times that promise is revealed as a lie.
     So why bother voting?
     That was the traditional question long before Donald Trump spent years taking a pickax to public trust in elections. Millions of Americans — a block equal in size to voters in either party — vote by not voting, a silent shrug that says, “What does it matter, Democrat or Republican?”
     Voting sure mattered in 2016, when a few swing states sent us crashing into the abyss of Trumpism triumphant. Voting also mattered in 2020, maybe. Depending on whether our brush with autocracy was thwarted or merely delayed.
     Voting matters now in Illinois, a blue island in a sea of red states. A state where women enjoy safe reproductive freedom, while Indiana and Missouri and Iowa drag them kicking and screaming back to the dark ages.
     As important as the 2020 presidential election was, only 66.9% of those eligible cast ballots. With a plague raging and a sociopath in the White House, a third of America yawned, shrugged and couldn’t be bothered.

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Flashback 1987: Abortion counseling can differ

Barbara Kruger (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Last week, the New York Times ran a story on its front page about Christian zealots who disguise themselves as abortion counseling services to lure in unsuspecting women who fear they might be pregnant so they can harangue them about keeping their babies.

     This loathsome practice particularly resonated with me because I wrote about the exact situation more than 35 years ago. We've been fighting this battle so long ... 

      The odd thing about this story is, I was less than a month on the job, still worked for the features section, on the staff of the Adviser, the weekly insert giving readers tips on cleaning their garages and keeping Japanese beetles off their lawns.

     What I remember most, besides the shamefully anodyne headline my timid editor gave it, is that Scott Powers, then the features editor, hauled me in his office afterward and dressed me down — I had done some reporting by visiting the sham centers, accompanied by a staffer from the organization posing as my girlfriend. This is exactly the sort of thing that caused us to lose the Pulitzer over the Mirage Tavern, he said. Of course, doing the story is what made us even considered. I was unmoved and felt, then and now, it was not bad initiative for a 26-year-old a few weeks after being hired.  A short time later I moved to cityside.

     Late last July, Cathy Berndtson thought she was pregnant. She went to the Women's Center on Lawrence Avenue for a free pregnancy test.
     "I wanted to be pregnant," she said. "I wanted this free test because I was too impatient to wait two weeks for my next hospital appointment to find out."
     Berndtson gave a urine sample, and was told it would take a half hour for the results to be ready. While she waited, she was asked to see a film.
     "They didn't say what kind of film it was," she said. The film turned out to be about abortion, with graphic photos of bloody fetuses in white plastic pails. It stressed the physical danger and moral criminality of abortion, how it can lead to sterility and suicide.
     "I was appalled — it was pretty disgusting," Berndtson said. "I watched out of curiosity. They didn't have any facilities for children, so my daughter, who was 2 1/2 at the time, was with me. I tried to keep her from watching it."
     Berndtson had stumbled into one of eight bogus abortion counseling centers in the city, according to Women Organized for Reproductive Choice, a women's group that monitors abortion centers.
     The clinics are listed in the Yellow Pages alongside regular abortion counseling centers, but their purpose is to promote the pro-life philosophies of the Christian groups that run them, using the lure of free pregnancy tests to draw women in.their anti-abortion stance ("Someday your child will thank you for giving him (or her) the gift of life," a Birthright ad reads).
     "We don't oppose groups that are upfront about it," she said. "What we are opposed to are groups that advertise themselves as abortion counselors — that implies they will give you information about the full range of services, not coerce the woman into continuing her pregnancy."
     The eight centers — the Women's Centers at 5116 N. Cicero and 2334 W. Lawrence; Aid for Women centers at 8 S. Michigan and 730 Waukegan, Deerfield; Crisis Pregnancy Center, 6416 N. Western; Uptown Crisis Pregnancy, 939 W. Wilson; Loop Crisis Pregnancy Center, 185 N. Wabash; Southside Crisis Pregnancy Center, 7905 S. Cicero, and Crisis Pregnancy Services of DuPage County, 890 E. Roosevelt, Lombard — were all visited by WORC investigators.
     The WORC investigation found that all eight centers misrepresent the time it takes for the test, which can be purchased in any drugstore and costs $6 at Planned Parenthood. Results are usually provided in two to three minutes, but the clinics all claimed the test took up to an hour, to provide an excuse for showing women a film or slide show.
     All the clinics are listed in the phone book under "Birth Control Information" although none of them gives information about birth control. One center offered a WORC investigator the loan of baby clothes and a crib, while the Crisis Prevention Center in Berwyn presented a tiny baby jacket as a parting gift.
     When a couple asked about forms of contraception, a counselor at the Women's Center on Cicero displayed a chart that showed the medical risks of all forms of contraception, including condoms, as well as their cost projected over a 30-year period. She then asked them to think seriously about chastity.
     "It's basically emotional abuse," said Catherine Christeller of WORC. "They want women to feel pain, they want women to be upset. A very young woman who doesn't have a lot of information on abortion is upset enough about being pregnant. This could be very disturbing. Even if she isn't pregnant, none of these places provide birth control counseling, including prevention of AIDS, because these people feel the woman should not be having sex, period."
     Besides emotional stress, Christeller said, the clinics act to delay a decision that women already tend to put off, making the abortion process more dangerous and expensive.
     The ads for such clinics usually emphasize free pregnancy testing. Although phrases such as "low-cost plans" or "excellent safety record" might be included to throw people off, WORC said, the ads will not list specific medical practices, such as "gynecological services," or "tubal ligations."
     Both WORC and Planned Parenthood suggested the following strategy: When making an appointment on the phone, ask directly if the clinic provides contraceptives, or if it will refer you to an abortion clinic. If the answer is evasive — "We provide contraception information," or "We will give you information about abortion services" — then be wary. Finally, ask how long the test will take. If the answer is anything longer than five minutes, you should suspect it's a bogus clinic.
     "I felt I was led there under false pretenses," said Berndtson, who is about to have her second child. "I just wanted the free test — I could have been a teenager, already traumatized thinking I was pregnant, only to have someone show me this terrible film. I would have rather waited the two weeks and paid for it."
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times April 19, 1987

How many fetuses can dance on a pin?

     There is an old joke: The French national railroad did a safety study and, after discovering that most accidents involve the last car on a train, removed all the cabooses.
     If that doesn’t register, see, there’s always a last car on a train, and taking off the caboose merely shifts which car is last.
     That works for first place, too. Thus Ken Griffin, Illinois’ richest man, relocating to Miami doesn’t deprive Illinois of a richest man, merely transfers the honorific to ... Neil Bluhm, the casino magnate.
     Friday I contacted Bluhm through Walton Street Capital, but they didn’t think he’d reply.
     “I doubt it (I know that I would not!),” wrote one of his partners. “But I have forwarded your note to him in the unlikely event that he does.”
     Figuring I could do better, I phoned a mutual friend, someone who’d flown aboard Bluhm’s jet — quite the brag in the early 2000s.
     At that moment, word broke the U.S. Supreme Court has made obstetrics the hot issue in American politics for the next decade.
     Suddenly, the new richest man in Illinois didn’t seem interesting anymore. My friend had something else on his mind.
     Those coat hangers, he said, they’re just a symbol. Nobody ever really died from trying to give themselves an abortion with a coat hanger.
     I believe they have, I replied, my fingers already on the keyboard. Countless.
     He didn’t think so. I called up a 2001 interview with Dr. Quentin Young, who in 1948 was a resident at Cook County Hospital’s so-called septic OB ward.
     “A euphemism for women who had been damaged in self-induced or criminal abortions,” he told me then. “Of course, all abortions were criminal then.”

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Flashback 2004: How many people are gay?

   

Louvre Museum

     Today is the Pride Parade. I'll be staying home — crowds. But I've written many pieces to mark the occasion over the years, including this one, from 2004, when I ask the seemingly simple question: How many LGBTQ people are there? 

     Gay people are everywhere. An Urban Institute study of data from the 2000 U.S. census found same-sex couples living in 99.3 percent of the counties nationwide. In Illinois, all 102 counties have gay couples living in them, as do 636 of the largest 688 Illinois cities, towns and villages. And while gays are thought of as being concentrated in Chicago's Halsted Street Boys Town, the fact is they live in every neighborhood of the city, practically on every street.
     They show up in concentrations you might not expect: For instance, 9 percent of Chicago Public Schools high school students said they were gay in a survey this year.
     Perhaps. The actual number could be less — or more. A reliable approximation of the number of homosexuals in society has long bedeviled researchers, who come up with statistics ranging from half of 1 percent — the number of couples living together who tell the census they are of the same sex — to 21 percent, the share of the population Harvard researchers found who reported having homosexual urges or experiences after the age of 15.
     "Estimating the size of the gay population is an incredibly difficult number [to find]," said Gary J. Gates, a researcher at the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, who conducted the census study.
     These numbers are not the stuff of dry sociology. With the issue of gay marriage being hotly debated nationwide, numbers are seen as important political allies. The 350,000 or so people expected to march in or watch Sunday's Pride Parade are an indication of societal strength and acceptance, as are presence in businesses and on voter registration lists.
     Thus, not only are the numbers affected by who is being considered, but by who is doing the considering. Gay activists, for instance, tend to embrace a figure of 10 percent — the number put forward by the landmark Kinsey studies of human sexuality in the 1940s.
     Social conservatives tend to find fault with those numbers — Kinsey's methodology was later criticized as flawed — and they support subsequent researchers who found a figure closer to 3 percent. A comprehensive 1994 University of Chicago study found that 2.8 percent of American adults are gay. And Gates' study, which uses census data, concluded the nationwide figure is between 2.8 percent and 3.5 percent, depending on what percentage of gays conceal their identity.
     That becomes a particularly important issue when dealing with students — how many are too intimidated to even truthfully answer a confidential survey — or how many are uncertain or even joking.

"Les Baigneuses," Renoir (Musee d'Orsay)

     The 9 percent number for the CPS comes from a survey funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Every other year since 1991, the survey has asked high school students 87 questions about "risky" behaviors, such as alcohol and drug use. This year, for the first time, students were asked two questions about sexuality. One was whether they had had sexual intercourse — 55.1 percent said yes — and the other was: "Which of the following best describes you a) heterosexual (straight) b. gay or lesbian, c) bisexual and d) not sure.

     Almost one in 10 answered b, c or d. And while that figure might seem high, it doesn't to educators.
     "I wasn't surprised," said schools CEO Arne Duncan. "That was my sense, 9 or 10 percent."
     "It could be more," said Shannon Kenney, consultant to the Coalition for Education on Sexual Orientation and project director for the Mental Health Association of Illinois. "Being gay is such a stigma that not everyone self-identifies."
     The truth is that we just don't know how many people are gay.
      "We know that this is very, very underreported because a lot of people aren't going to report that they're in a same-sex household," said Rick Garcia, a longtime gay activist here. "You're not tapping into African-American couples, you're not tapping into Latino couples, you're not tapping into Asian couples. They're not going to tell governmental bodies much of anything."
     A few other trends are worth noting. There seem to be twice as many homosexual men as women. And as with any major city, Chicago has a higher concentration of gays than the nation as a whole — perhaps two or three times the national average, drawn to the city for its vibrant gay community and the anonymity a city offers.
     Gates said what was most important in his study was not the percentage of the population that is gay but how widely distributed gays are and how, for instance, one quarter of gay couples are raising children and those couples tend to live, not in gay communities, but in communities where there are other families.
     While gay people have been increasingly accepted into mainstream society, the struggle for rights is bound to be connected to their prevalence in society.
     "If the question is of discrimination and civil rights, it is not important for a group to be numerically large if you believe in fairness," Gates said. "It shouldn't matter in the end how many people are being discriminated against. It should matter that discrimination is wrong."
              — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 27, 2004

North Shore Notes: Abortion

Photo by Caren Jeskey

   Friday was a grim day for Americans who care about freedom. Personally, I took comfort in the belief that going back into the past is not indeed possible, no matter how passionately fundamentalists try. That most people do not want to live in a theocracy where their most intimate life choices are dictated by religious fanatics. And that, as always, those with totalitarian impulses overplay their hand. Yes, this will not stand. But that reversal is years away, and I felt glad I wasn't obligated to sit down and write something.

     North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey was, however, and in her typical reliability and professionalism did not disappoint. Her report is understandably brief and blunt, reflecting a numb day that was a shock though not a surprise.

By Caren Jeskey 

     "Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.” — Jeanne Gang

     A friend lives on Randolph near the lake, and I am lucky to be enjoying her home (and adorable, tiny pooch named Holly after Mrs. Golightly) while she takes a long weekend away. Jeanne Gang’s Vista Tower fills the window in front of me, and her Aqua Tower also adorns the picturesque frame. Whenever I see Gang's buildings I marvel at the empowered woman who made them happen. A modern day superhero. Aqua Tower was the tallest woman-designed building in the world at the time it was constructed in 2007. Her buildings blend in perfectly with Chicago's skyline, and though they are taller than the other buildings around here, they are elegantly understated and delightful to behold. Her structures are eco-friendly with recycled materials and rooftop prairies and gardens. Gang's Harvard trained eye is a great gift to our city.  

     At the same time that women's power is being supported in many ways, today we face the day after Roe v. Wade was overturned despite the fact that “Gallup polls show Americans’ support for abortion in all or most cases at 80% in May 2021, only sightly higher than in 1975 (76%), and the Pew Research Center finds 59% of adults believe abortion should be legal.” I called a friend yesterday afternoon and she greeted me in tears. “Did you hear?" Yes, I’ve heard. Lately I’ve been feeling like I do not have the bandwidth to deal with the larger issues our country is facing, then I recall that I have to conjure up the will to care.
     When we were in our late teens, or perhaps early 20's, another friend and I were invited to a Thanksgiving gala hosted by an important person. I can’t say who it was, since I have to be mindful about legal repercussions, so I'll suffice it to say that we were at a party that only a privileged few Illinoisans were invited to. During the dinner and subsequent party, a prominent young man became enamored with my friend, and she with him. They found a way to “see” each other- this word conjures up puritanical suppression of sexuality à la the play Spring Awakening (my first COVID play) that I saw this past Spring at Porchlight. In this heavy and tragic performance, secrecy, shame, and denial killed 2 young people and traumatized others.
     After one long date, my friend became impregnated with her suitor's child. She really liked him but at that point he was done with her. Before she could even catch her breath, he had arranged for an abortion. He was a monied financier, she was a nothing in comparison at that time, as far as privilege was concerned. She felt she had no choice. After the mandated abortion she was dropped off at my parent's house where I was living. She came up to my bed and passed out from exhaustion. She slept off the physically and emotionally taxing removal of the embryo from her womb. It was not yet a fetus, which happens at eight weeks.
     I wonder what her life would look like today, had this person been truly interested in the gem of a woman she is — stunning, brilliant, and now very successful- and they had developed more of a relationship?
     Now we can all be worried about the women who are going to be harmed during back-alley abortions on top of everything else this decade has cursed us with. It's time to help in any way we can. Vote, march, donate money to help women get to Illinois and other safe havens when they need it. And try to stay out of the line of fire of the armed haters.

After your abortion, grandma might sue you

 

"Government Bureau," by George Tooker (Guggenheim Museum)

     Now that the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a shoe that's been expected to drop since early May when a draft opinion spiking the 1973 decision was leaked, let’s have a brief pop quiz:
     Question: What’s the really bad part about reversing Roe v. Wade?
     If you answered something like, “denying American women the right to make their own reproductive decisions, a freedom enjoyed for the past 50 years and one extended to most women around the globe,” I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.
     That’s just the bad part.
     The really bad part, in my estimation — and, yes, I am a man, so my view might be skewed — is the police state that will be quickly set up to punish not only doctors who provide abortions but anybody who facilitates an abortion — with one notable exception.
     But don’t take my word for it.
     Take a look at the model law prepared by the National Right to Life Committee. Banning abortion is only the start.
     “Current realities require a much more robust enforcement regime than just reliance on criminal penalties,” the draft notes. Waiting to snag offenders isn’t enough. States need “RICO-style laws” that turn whisking Molly across the border into Illinois to fix her “little problem” into a criminal conspiracy.
     Where to begin? The fact that a girl is 11 years old doesn’t matter. (That’s not a random number. It’s the age of a girl who became pregnant after being raped in Brazil, where abortion is illegal. She’s now confined by a judge so she can’t have an abortion.) Otherwise: ”We recommend prohibiting abortion except to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”
     They’re talking about physical peril, period.
     “Psychological or emotional conditions” are deliberately excluded because, well, suck it up, sister, we’re not falling for that touchy-feely gobbledygook.
     The law recommends an abortion be a Level 2 felony. In Indiana, where the firm drafting the law is based, that’s on par with voluntary manslaughter, child sex trafficking and kidnapping, with prison sentences of from 10 to 30 years.

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