I’ve been thinking a lot since yesterday when Ayelet Waldman, in her dialogue here on Double X with Elizabeth Weill, asked, “Is there room to reach out to the less crazy part of the right wing and say, ‘OK, that woman in your imaginings, the one who goes to Wichita to have her third 36th-week abortion just because she keeps hysterically shrieking she has a migraine? Okay, we'll give you that. We'll accept limitations of abortions under certain strictest of circumstances.’ ” Granted, “less crazy” is not exactly how I normally think of myself, but close enough for the sake of conversation.

I’ve been reading the accounts here and elsewhere, in the wake of George Tiller’s murder, from women who’ve had late-term abortions because their unborn children were diagnosed with fatal or life-threatening conditions. The stories are heartbreaking, and I find it hard to get through them without weeping. But the accounts create the perception that women with doomed pregnancies are the only ones seeking late-term abortions, and that it’s only in our imagination that healthy women with healthy babies seek them out.

However, Peggy Jarman, a spokeswoman for Tiller, was quoted years ago in the Kansas City Star (referenced here and other anti-abortion sites, though the original article is not freely available online) as saying that “About three-fourths of Tiller's late-term patients … are teen-agers who have denied to themselves or their families they were pregnant until it was too late to hide it.” Even though the numbers are small, elective late-term abortions are real, and they are a tragedy, too. I admit my judgment is clouded by the fact that I spend a good chunk of my days right now cuddling my newborn, but I look at him and imagine the fate of those children, and that makes me weep, too.

So to answer Waldman’s question: I’d take that trade in a heartbeat. In his excellent article in Slate on Tiller, Will Saletan wrote:

You think you're pro-life. You tell yourself that abortion is murder. Maybe you even say that when a pollster calls. But like most of the other people who say such things in polls, you don't mean it literally. There's you, and then there are the people who lock arms outside the clinics. And then there are the people who bomb them. And at the end of the line, there's the guy who killed George Tiller.

Yes, I’ve always considered myself pro-life, and considered abortion to be, well, if not murder, then at least ending a life. But Saletan is right, I probably don’t mean it literally. I would never want a ban on abortion that DIDN’T have exceptions for rape and incest, and to save the mother’s life. Having had my heart broken by enough stories this week of women terminating pregnancies that they desperately wanted, I can support an exception for pregnancies in which the child wouldn’t survive outside the womb. Though, like Weill and Waldman, I don’t know where I would draw the line. If I may borrow Ayelet’s phrasing, it would probably be less restrictive than many conservatives would tolerate and far more restrictive than some liberals would accept.

To answer Ayelet’s question from earlier today, about abortion opponents who support exceptions, as I do. I can’t speak for others, just myself. I’m not anti-abortion for religious reasons, or because it’s part of the Republican Party platform. I’m against abortion because I value the unborn, and because I don’t know where or how to draw a line between a fertilized egg and a baby. (Though I do agree with Ayelet that passing out condoms to teenagers is a better way to reduce abortions than chaining myself to a clinic.) Yes, it’s a contradiction to be against abortion but support exceptions. Still, it’s a contradiction that would leave us with a lot fewer aborted babies.

Tags: abortion, Ayelet Waldman, George Tiller, late-term abortion, pro-choice, pro-life

Meghan, thanks so much for posting about the importance of female mentorship. I'm no physicist (anymore) but with many friends plus a mom in science, I am especially sensitive to the need for and frequent lack of XX mentorship in these disciplines. We've all heard reports that Americans lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent. Then there are the other, real disadvantages talked about in the Fisman/NBER report.

Some of this, of course, has to do with lifestyle choices (cough, kids) that take female mentors out of the workplace. Some of this has to do with a distinct confidence deficit among junior and mid-level female workers that keep them from being top brass (one former employer told me that the women who interviewed for jobs often had better resumes than the men, but couldn't sell themselves in person, and lost the job). But can't we also blame men in these disciplines who are less willing to mentor young women? Perhaps they are just not that into helping women along; or fearful that accusations of impropriety might fly. But in male-heavy fields, what's wrong with dudes lending a hand?

Enter "Smart Girls At The Party." This may seem like an oblique reference, but somehow, this regular ON Network show—featuring Amy Poehler and friends supporting young women in hilarious, Christopher-Hitchens defying fashion—really speaks to me on the issue of underrepresentation and female mentorship. In this episode, a charmingly gregarious second-grader named Ruby broke it down on friendship, feminism and more, while Poehler and company, veterans of improvisational comedy, provide a real-time example of their craft to the little tot. That is to say they offer an enthusiastic "YES" to her every suggestion—including weeping on demand. Watch:

May Ruby grow up to have a fine career in psychotherapy, or pop stardom.

Tags: feminism, mentors, smart girls at the party, women, women in the workplace

Like you, Anne, I’ve been wondering what kind of big, concrete policy changes will come out of Obama’s Cairo speech yesterday. The specific programs he spoke of—far down near the end of the hour-long address—seemed soft-focus and shallow compared to the gigantic arc of intercultural understanding traced by his rhetoric. But I want to spend a moment here on Obama’s language, which, as always, rewards close reading. This was evidently the 2004 Democratic convention speech for the Muslim world—“there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America,” he said then, and yesterday: “the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.” But what struck me most powerfully was an echo in the section on Israelis and Palestinians of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, an unlikely allusion in the context of previous foreign policy speeches but a fitting one for Obama in speaking of the Holy Land that had such metaphorical value for King. In appealing to Palestinians to model their quest for statehood on the nonviolent struggle for desegregation in the South, Obama internationalized the tropes of America’s Civil Rights movement in a way that I think King would have deeply admired. In August 1963, King said:

I have a dream that ... one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers ... I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

Compare this with Obama’s Cairo riff:

Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

Seeing these two passages side by side, there’s clearly more to the echo than the hope of a future when two peoples divided by hatred, pain, and mistrust will watch their children walk together in peace. There’s also the reach for transcendence that comes, in King’s speech, with a reference to Biblical salvation and, in Obama’s, with an allusion to the 17th sura of the Koran, a story that’s as obscure to most Americans as it is familiar to Muslims. The story of Isra is a dreamlike account of a journey Mohammad takes at night from Mecca to Jerusalem and then to heaven. In Jerusalem, he prays the other prophets (Moses and Jesus). In heaven, he sees them again, and on the way back from his meeting with Allah, he runs into Moses, who tells him to try to get Allah to reduce his people’s prayer commitment from 50 times a day to something more manageable (after much bargaining, Allah finally cuts it to five).

It’s funny to think of the archetypal Jew and the holy prophet of Islam collaborating to prevent Muslims from having to spend an inordinate amount of time praying, especially in the context of current Arab-Israeli relations. But the important thing about Obama’s reference here is the way it displays his penchant for mixing the political and the spiritual in a manner utterly different from that of his predecessor, who used the Biblical rhetoric of good and evil to polarize, not to unite. Obama is the kind of leader who calls unabashedly for God’s help with problems that are too big for men to solve and who speaks openly, as he did in that 2004 convention address, of “a belief in things not seen” as “God’s greatest gift to us.” If nothing else in Obama’s speech resonates with the Muslim world, this impulse to believe in the unseen most certainly will. In voicing it, Obama has brought us closer to a meaningful connection with Muslims than any other leader in my lifetime.

Tags: martin luther king jr, Muslims, Obama's Cairo speech, rhetoric

Samantha, David's dad in the dentist video was his actual dad, so we hold him to the standard of life, not art. I actually found this MGMT video refreshing, as an antidote to the Disney-fied, chock full o' lessons kid fare that's out today. (Hola, Dora!) Once upon a time, fairy tales helped kids make sense of their outsized terrors and emotions. They did not teach them how to wash their hands, or say "recycle" in Spanish. Babies do cry frantically when they are left alone in a crib, as if—and many a parent has said this—there were monsters in there. Or they swear they see monsters in the cracks of the ceiling, or the closet. This kid's pretty, distracted mother does not see the monsters, only he does, which suggests they are not really there. In the narrative of the video, his mother is more interested in her iPhone than her baby, so he, even more than other babies, is left to make sense of his world alone. All those people on the street staring at him, the policeman—they could be angels, or monsters. How could he know?

Now as for that actual child actor, MGMT claims that no live children were harmed in the making of the video. They do not elaborate. Who knows? Maybe they spliced in all those monsters later, or maybe they did make that poor kid walk through the gauntlet of horrors. It's no worse a hell than Max from Where the Wild Things Are dreamed up for himself. But if the kid was screaming with terror and fear, and they kept the cameras rolling, that one is on his real parents, not MGMT.

Tags: exploiting kids, mgmt video

When the David after the dentist video came out, we had a good conversation about whether it was wrong for the father to post this video of his son all drugged up and in pain. Hanna cried foul, but some of us agreed it was funny—and harmless—enough to be worth the potential privacy invasion. Not so with the latest music video from MGMT, in which a baby is tormented by scary monsters who hover over his crib, grab him with their scary monster claws, and follow him and his flighty mother around town. What a relief around the five-minute mark, when the kid morphs into a cartoon version of himself. Torment the cartoon child all you want! But leave the real one alone!

You can watch the video below—feel free to skip the first minute of undulating flames. What do others think? Nina, Susannah, you thought the David video was "charming" and "awesome." But do you agree this one goes too far?

Tags: david after dentist, mgmt, music video

The Wall Street Journal today has a fascinating story about the Chinese phenomenon of runaway brides. These are young women who marry desperate bachelors, pocket the "bride price", then flee. The reason these bachelors are so desperate is that they are the result of China's one-child policy. Since families traditionally favor boys, a whole generation of girls has been aborted or abandoned. People are funny creatures who have a hard time imagining that their present moment won't continue indefinitely. Because of the decisions of millions of couples not to have girls, the Journal notes that a 2005 census found that China had an excess of 32 million males under the age of twenty. Apparently the families never considered if everyone had a boy, it would be hard to have grandchildren, since millions of boys would have no girl to marry. Now that this misogynistic future has come to pass, could it be that girls will become treasured?

Tags: china, desperate bachelors, one-child policy, runaway brides

Over on Slate, there's a really interesting piece by Ray Fisman about the importance of female mentorship. Apparently, a recent working paper from the NBER found a way to measure the effects of female vs. male teachers on students at the Air Force Academy. It can be hard to distinguish among various complicating factors when studying how teachers influence students, but rigid protocols at the Academy apparently make it easier to isolate these factors. As Fisman puts it, the study found that "replacing a male instructor with a female one has such a strong effect on female achievement as to erase the gender gap entirely." That's a pretty powerful finding, and the study is persuasive. Check out the whole piece; lots of interesting stuff in it. Now the $64 million question is: How do we make sure that women encounter the mentors and teachers they need—especially in those fields where women are scarce?

Tags: gender gap, math, Science

Willa, it's amazing that Kate Gosselin—and Kate Gosselin's hair—have graced the cover of US Weekly for the past six weeks. And it's clear that hunger for TomKat news has waned. But I've become increasingly skeptical of economy-driven explanations for shifts in mass culture, and I'm not as sure as you seem to be that this preference for reality-based tabloid fodder is attributable to our downbeat financial forecast. Reading the New York Times style section, you'd think that there was no such thing as a trend before the collapse; we just floated merrily along sporting the same bags and shoes, waiting for a crisis to come along so we could finally change our wardrobes, last updated around 1929 or so. People were awakening to the severity of the crisis back in August; Lehman brothers imploded in September. I am hesitant to ascribe our current taste for bright, flouncy skirts to something AIG did last fall.

Strange as it might sound, I think the taste for uncelebrity reflects a more sophisticated tabloid readership. Brangelina cover stories read like ad copy when they're positive and telenovela plots when they're negative. Profiles of people to whom journalists have so little access tend to be unreadable, even in better magazines. Who wants to be spoon-fed publicist drivel in the age of Youtube? Susan Boyle and Octomom are still media constructs on some level, but their publicity teams are clearly less competent, and that's something.

Tags: Brangelina, Gosselins

Sonia Sotomayor has a lovely smile, and like many Americans she has paid a price for it. According to the questionnaire she completed as part of the Senate confirmation process, she owes approximately $15,000 to her dentist.

Several writers have been boggled by the size of the bill. In fact, it's pretty easy to spend $15,000 on dental treatment. Dental plans generally cover between 50 percent to 80 percent of restorative treatments (crowns, etc.), and most plans have an annual reimbursement cap of around $1,500-$2,000. If you need something more than a cleaning or a filling, you're going to be digging into your own pocket, whatever kind of coverage you have. Just yesterday I was told that treating one problem tooth would cost me around $5,000.

If there's anything surprising here, it's that the dentist allowed Sotomayor to run a tab that big. Most practices would require cash—or credit card—on the nail. Sotomayor is obviously a trusted customer, but after all, if you can't trust a judge (especially one on most people's SCOTUS shortlist), who can you trust?

(I've been working on a series of pieces about American dentistry. Check out Slate in six weeks or so for more on this topic.)

Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: denistry, dentist bill, finances, health-care costs, Sonia Sotomayor

Oh joy! I have discovered another reason why I love Rachel Maddow. The totally original MSNBC news anchor and XX Factor heartthrob twittered a link yesterday to Minnesota Zoo's interactive game highlighting their new Africa exhibit. (Maddow's tweet: "My inner 8 year old will not let me do anything today that does not somehow involve this website: http://whopooped.org/.") The game called "Who Pooped?" features cartoon images of zebras, ostriches, and giraffes eating and then ... yes, pooping, to educate players on how scientists examine wild animal scat in order to study the creatures' consumption habits.

Tags: animal behavior, poop, twitter