GRRRRRR

So Obama, in his masculine entitlement wisdom, doesn't think that "mental distress" is a good reason for a late abortion.

And judging by the comments over here, there are intelligent people who see nothing wrong with that. (Don't go troll Ari's and Eric's comment section, please; they're all civilized and shit, and they get it, even if sometimes their commenters don't.)

I just, grrrrrr. I know his voting record on abortion rights is a good one, and blah blah politics, and blah blah I sure as shit ain't voting for John McCain, and blah blah I still suspect he's a better candidate than Clinton would have been, but GRRRRRRRRR.

Senator Obama, do you trust women or do you not? I'd like to know.


Update

Some facts about third-trimester abortions, because I left this in the comment thread at EoTAW and what the hell, I should post it here too.

Third-trimester abortions are exceedingly rare (1% of all abortions). And it’s been shown that reporting errors actually inflate the number of third-trimester abortions in one state, at least, so they may actually be rarer than that.

You can see a breakdown of abortions after the sixteenth week (i.e., four months of pregnancy--early in the *second* trimeester) here. The law, following Roe v. Wade, already requires women seeking late abortions to satisfy their physician that they have a good reason for doing so; third-trimester abortions are not “on-demand” abortions by any means. There are only two clinics in the U.S. that provide them, and those are located in Wichita, KS and Boulder, CO--so that, obviously, the vast majority of women getting a third-trimester abortion have to travel quite a long way to obtain one. One of the (few) doctors in the US who’ll perform them testified that abortions after 26 weeks are due to “maternal risk, rape, incest, psychiatric or pediatric indications” (this is an anti-abortion site I’m linking, btw, and it points out that “pediatric indications” means, not fetal abnormalities, but that the pregnant woman is a child; the implication at the link is that that's not a good reason).

Obviously it’s the “psychiatric indications” that people gloss as “mental distress.” Non-suicidal “mental distress” might include things like: being worried about the effect of another baby on the child or children one already has–perhaps existing children are poor or high-needs or disabled; worries about abuse; having been under pressure from partner or parents not to abort; being in the process of a divorce; etc.

(Or, you know, just fucking freaking out because you haven't been able to get your shit and money together early enough and now your pregnancy is quite advanced and your doctor is telling you that he can't perform an abortion any more and you have to go to Kansas or Colorado to get one and you are sixteen or thirty-five, for god's sake, who cares, and you cannot have a baby right now for whatever reason, but probably your inability to get your shit and money together are good indicators of potential problems with becoming a mommy.)

I’m going to assume that most decent people can recognize that reasons like that aren’t frivolous, and are really best left to the woman in question. Nu?