Barack Obama isn't the only person in Washington whose schedule has been all discombobulated by healthcare reform. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, planned on staging a "pray-in" at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office on Wednesday, but he's rethinking that now. Apparently the efficacy of a prayer is determined by its proximity to an event; Mahoney said "it wouldn't make any sense to be there all day praying if the vote isn't going to be this week." (He also admitted that there is a "chance that there may be some arrests" at a speaker's-office pray-in, and he didn't seem to want to put his group through that more than once.)

But even though the events most likely to get their participants arrested have been postponed, the delay hasn't stopped activists from making their presence felt. Dozens of blue T-shirted pro-life protesters flooded the Capitol today, praying and lobbying in the halls. The team led by Randall Terry and Norma McCorvey ("Roe" of Roe v. Wade) presented a Pelosi aide with a DVD that showed mangled aborted fetuses that had been dug out of a Dumpster behind a Michigan abortion clinic. While reporters snapped pictures of a "coffin" full of bloody baby dolls that the group carts around (it made an appearance at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings two weeks ago), protesters announced their intention to stop paying taxes if a healthcare bill that includes funding for abortions is passed. "Abortion is not healthcare," Monica Migliorino Miller said. "We will not pay for the destruction of innocent human life."

As she prepared to leave the Hill for the day, McCorvey made time to lecture Slate V intern Lindsay O'Neal and me about what we need to do if we find ourselves pregnant: "Don't have an abortion. Go to your mama, go to your daddy, go to God. Tell them you did wrong. But don't get an abortion. You have that baby, and you give it up for adoption. But you will regret it if you kill that child."

Video still of Norma McCorvey by Lindsay O'Neal.

Tags: roe v. wade

Nina, I’m glad you brought up Grady Hendrix’s complaint that vampires aren’t doing enough blood sucking these days, because I have a bone to pick, too. Hendrix overlooks what I think is the best addition to the vampire cannon since Buffy (and this coming from a girl who can’t get enough of True Blood): last year’s Swedish Let The Right One In. That film’s mousy, smelly, yet powerfully alluring lady vamp has a blood-smeared face in nearly every scene. It’s a beautiful thing, watching her ravage the neck of a grown man, then skulk around her apartment without deigning to wipe her mouth. And I love when, in a move suitably grandma-esque for a 200-year-old, she lays a smacker on Oskar with those blood-soaked lips. He, more smitten, I dare say, than I ever was with my over-lipsticked Grammy, doesn’t even need to wipe off the stain.

Photograph of Lina Leandersson as Eli in Let the Right One In courtesy of EFTI.

Tags: buffy, let the right one in, true blood, vampires

Or so argues Grady Hendrix in Slate today. Hendrix hates emo-boy vampires, with their all-swoon, no-suck brand of human relations. Latoya Peterson argued here in Double X that Twilight and True Blood are bad for women because they're all about pigeonholing female characters into a virgin/slut binary. Hendrix thinks that the sensitive vamps of the last 15 years—descended from Buffy's valiant, tortured Angel—give young women a whole 'nother kind of mixed message.

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

Remember, though, that when Angel famously went from "sensitive" and "emotionally available" to loutish, blood-sucking cad—a change triggered by a steamy "sleepover"—Buffy was shocked, but then she ended up impaling him on a sword and shoving him into a hell vortex. Just saying.

Photograph of Robert Pattison, who plays Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: angel, buffy, grady hendrix, sex, Slate, twilight, vampires

What is television good for? Curbing population growth, of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making. (India’s population of over one billion is expected to exceed China’s sometime in the next 20 years. The nation is currently home to 17 percent of humanity, despite taking up less than 3 percent of the Earth’s landmass.) “If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children,” Azad said. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.” Funny to think that anyone would rather watch Jay Leno than have sex, but then, again, there's something so obviously prophylactic about Letterman. Maybe India can borrow him?

Tags: india, sex, TV

Emily and Will, I completely agree with you that it’s time to get serious about cell phone use while driving—and I think there’s an interesting generational angle to consider as a crusade, I hope, gets under way. Texting is an ideal impetus for real action: It’s so hair-raisingly obvious why you shouldn’t be doing that at the wheel, plus it’s kids who text more than adults. We tend to like liberty-curtailing crusades better when they focus on youth.

But as the experts will all tell you, it really helps if adults walk the talk—or, in this case, forgo the talk while in the car. And because plain old phoning is not so self-evidently dangerous—after all, no one’s proposing that chatting in the car be prohibited, or that radios and CD players be banned—generating a sense of urgency for the broader prohibition is going to be much harder. We should beware of expecting a lot of high dudgeon about delinquent young texters to do the job—and of letting it blind us to the thornier challenge of getting grownup yakkers to set a stringently good example.

Tags: adults, kids, texting while driving

In last Sunday’s New York Times Modern Love column, author Joyce Maynard wrote about trespassing into the e-mail account of her 22-year-old daughter, Audrey. The daughter had temporarily relocated to the Dominican Republic when her communications home were abruptly and, to Maynard, ominously silenced. From reading the purloined correspondence, Maynard learned that her daughter was embroiled in a personal dilemma—one that she apparently needed to resolve without involving her mother. After justifying the invasion of her daughter's privacy ("I dreamed my daughter was running ... her face a mask of grief"), Maynard goes on to tell Modern Love readers the details of her daughter's very emotional crisis, including results of her HIV tests.

Maynard has, apparently, always had difficulty with boundaries. In 1972, when she was 18, the writer published a confessional essay in the Times about her generational perspective (sample: “Marijuana and the class of '71 moved through high school together”) that brought her national attention. She was later criticized about her 1999 memoir that excruciatingly detailed her teenage affair with then 53-year-old novelist J.D. Salinger. Maynard also auctioned off her love letters from the reclusive author.

Even had Maynard not been notoriously boundary-challenged, however, I completely understand how she felt. Having access to private electronic mail was too tempting, especially for a parent who is genuinely terrified her child is in trouble and needs to believe that she can rescue her. When my son first moved away to college a couple years ago, he and I briefly shared an e-mail account. Months after I had legitimate reason to monitor, I had a bad feeling he was hiding something important. I peeked at the hotmail and saw his college dean was writing him about academic probation. I immediately confessed (losing whatever moral authority I could muster over the suspension). He asked me never to use his account again, and I never have. But I wish I didn’t know how to.

Coincidentally, I also see the matter from Maynard's daughter’s perspective. When I was about her age, I went silent for about a month just after arriving alone in Mexico (I had my reasons). Neither e-mail nor cell phones had been invented yet, but my mother called every U.S. consulate along the Pacific Coast and talked each one into pasting this sign in their storefront window: "BONNIE GOLDSTEIN CALL YOUR MOTHER." I saw the one in Mazatlan and went inside. They let me use their phone.

Tags: joyce maynard; modern love; the new york times; parenting

Did Katherine Heigl shoot herself in the foot, artistically speaking, by leaving the small screen for the big one? LA Times movie critic Mary McNamara has an intriguing essay about how female characters on television have it way better than their sisters in the movies—better plot lines, more ass-kicking, less humiliation.

One prevailing rom-com formula dictates that uptight, careerist shrews get their hearts (and their dignities) handed to them by men who are boorish and/or immature but nonetheless understand Love better than our heroines. It's a set-up as old as Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, as McNamara notes, even if the pummeling is less blatant these days.

Things are different on television, though:

While Heigl and other stars are stuck in narrow, nasty movie roles, women get to do just about anything on TV.

They can chase down aliens ("Fringe"), converse with angels ("Saving Grace"), race through jungles and time continuums ("Lost"), catch serial killers while wearing hats and high heels ("The Closer") and play both sides of the legal field with the likes of William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden ("Damages).

And when it comes to romance, they don't all get bullied into submission:

Look at Tina Fey's Liz Lemon, as neurotic and controlling as it gets, but she's not about to change for any darn man, not even one played by Jon Hamm.

On television, the battle of the sexes may rage on, but the playing field is decidedly post-Title IX.

Part of what makes TV more hospitable to strong, layered, female characters is the nature of the narrative—long, episodic stories allow for more character development, more twists and turns. It makes for better characters period, both male and female. And because resolution isn't always the point of a television show—resolution can kill them, in fact; witness the cautionary fable of Moonlighting—they're not forced to wrap up romances neatly and inauthentically, the way a 90-minute, self-contained film often is.

Most of McNamara's evidence is drawn from dramas. What I want to know is, does this rosy picture extend to sitcoms besides 30 Rock?

Tags: actresses, katherine heigl, movies, Television

Want to feel humbled? Read Katharine Mieszkowski's interview in Salon with Vicki Forman, who gave birth to twins far too early, at 23 weeks, asked her doctors not to resuscitate them, and then loved her children to her utmost when her wishes were ignored. "When I learned they were coming so early and so fragile, I had only one wish: to let them go," Forman writes in her new book, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood. Her doctors said that California law required resuscitation because the twins were born with signs of life.

Forman's daughter Ellie lived for only four days. Her son Evan lived until he was 8, when a sudden abdominal obstruction killed him unexpectedly. Evan was blind, and he couldn't talk or really eat. Forman knew up front, she says, that 90 percent of babies born at such an early gestational age have some kind of permanent disability. She also says that 80 percent of couples with disabled children divorce. In other words, she is extremely clear-eyed. But she is also full of love. "Kids in preschool have to stand up and put their little name on the felt board and say: 'I'm here,'" she relates of Evan's special-ed preschool. "And he would stand up, and put his name up. Then he had this assistive technology, a button he could push that said, 'I'm here.' And he would laugh, and think that was just so great." I also loved this, in conclusion:

I think that I understand better now that you can feel more than one way at a time about something ... I could want not to resuscitate my twins, and I could love them. I could be my son's mother, and I could understand how to be the parent of a disabled child, and I could feel joy again.

Forman's account of dealing with her twins' neonatologists brought me back to my own awful week in the NICU with a very sick baby: "When your child is born this early, and they're in the hospital, it's really not your baby. The baby somehow belongs to the doctors and the team." My son was full-term, and he recovered. But in those last hours before he was discharged, I couldn't really believe they would let us out of the hospital with him. It felt like too great a privilege to hope for.

Tags: premature babies

The New York Times has another well-reported piece in what I hope becomes a crusade on the unbelievably terrifying and widespread new habit of texting while driving. (And I hope Slate's own Will Saletan continues his writing on this issue.) Texting while driving! I understand where you should all meet for pizza is a crucially important piece of information, but how much carnage to we have to endure before we treat this insanity as as serious a violation as drunk driving? Studies have shown people reading and sending texts while behind the wheel are often more dangerous than drunks, yet the laws are lax and law enforcement weak. We need public service campaigns similar to those which have helped drive down rates of smoking, so that people understand the utter devastation that's caused by going 60 miles an hour while paying no attention whatsoever to the road. So Double Xers, have you ever texted while driving? And what would it take to get you to vow to never do it again?

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: texting while driving

For those of us not involved in television or movies, the reigning stereotype of the Hollywood pitch meeting is of a striving young writer scoring a one-on-one with a producer and launching into “It’s X meets Y.” Lifetime TV’s new “comedic drama” series Drop Dead Diva is a veritable JDate of collisions: Heaven Can Wait meets Legally Blonde meets Shallow Hal meets Brother From Another Planet. With all those ingredients (and more!), the show could've been a murky goop; instead, it's a refreshing summer cocktail.

The plot seems ridiculously convoluted, but thanks to good writing, the conceit was established early, and by Episode 3, which aired this weekend, viewers have no problem accepting that Deb Dobson, a self-centered and air-headed aspiring model, ploughed her zippy red sports car into a fruit truck, and after a disagreement at heaven's gate, ended up in the body of Jane Bingum, a selfless, zaftig lawyer. Jane kept her intelligence—and, more or less, her grasp on the rules of evidence—but Deb's consciousness is very much alive.

The combination of Jane's big heart and smarts and Deb's style and sassiness adds up to an entertaining courtroom drama of the kind not seen since L.A. Law went off the air. (Yes, yes, Boston Legal tried to go there, but it was far too full of annoying tics and tricks.) Drop Dead Diva is also sweetly poignant: Jane moves in with Deb's best friend, Stacy, another blonde model, but they can't do the things they once enjoyed: Plus-sized Jane would never get into the clubs where they used to party, and besides, she's got a lot of lawyering to do. (When Stacy asks why Jane has to work so much, it's hard to come up with a good answer.) And by an only-on-television coincidence, Deb's grieving fiance Grayson just got a job at Jane's law firm, which leads to all kinds of lingering looks across the conference table. Oh, and Kim, Jane's rival at the firm, also appears to be gunning for Grayson.

Of course, it wouldn't have been quite so amusing if the show's big issue—the way that big women are desexualized, taken for granted, and generally treated shoddily—were mishandled. But so far, at least, it hasn't been. Overall, the tone is light and fluffy, but Episode 2's subplot about a woman fired from a Hooters-type bar after she put on 50 pounds tackled fatophobia head on, and winningly so. (Less convincing was the notion that the woman would want her job back, rather than a hefty settlement and the chance to yell "screw you" at her boss.) And perhaps it's my imagination, but it seems like the casting director has hired more full-figured bit players than is typical for television.

The show's success is mostly down to the actress playing Jane: Broadway veteran Brooke Elliott. (Many of the cast have stage experience—is an all-singing, all-dancing episode too much to ask for?) Elliott has her own winning formula: charm meets vulnerability meets clever meets cute.

(You can watch full episodes of Drop Dead Diva at Lifetime's website.)

Photograph of Brooke Ellison as Deb Dobson courtesty of Lifetime.

Tags: body issues, brooke elliott, drop dead diva, fatophobia, Lifetime TV, Television