In Salon, Mary Ann Sorrentino writes that Angie Jackson’s live-tweeted abortion makes a mockery of the right to choose—fought with tears and placards—and finally won under the 14th Amendment’s “right to privacy.” Here at DoubleX, Amanda Marcotte skewered Sorrentino's "I'm pro-choice, but ..." argument, which attempts to shame Jackson for broadcasting her reproductive tumult. As Marcotte writes, Sorrentino's piece falls into the conventional shame-speak, which paints abortion as a necessary evil—a traumatic decision that is quietly and embarrassingly endured.

Abortion, however, can be a positive good. I learned this lesson two years ago, when Aliza Shvarts repeatedly inseminated herself for nine months with a syringe, took herbal abortifacients, filmed her induced miscarriages on a VHS camcorder, and collected the blood for her Yale senior art project.

Shvarts planned to project the footage onto a large suspended cube wrapped in hundreds of feet of plastic wrap with her blood sealed in its layers. “I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies,” Shvarts said, “not just a commodity.”

The world was unhappy with Shvarts. Radical pro-lifers sent bomb threats. Yale College Dean Peter Salovey, in an act of public-relations desperation, called Shvarts’ entire project a piece of fictional performance art. Pro-choice activists condemned Shvarts for abusing her right to choose, trivializing abortion, and fuelling anti-choice sentiments. People painted Shvarts as a deranged baby-killer or morally bereft attention-hound, stripping her uterus for kicks. By campus consensus, whatever Shvarts was doing, it was unethical.

But once I got over the initial visceral discomfort, I couldn't agree. Like many pro-choicers, I don't believe an embryo is a human life for the same reason I don't believe a sperm or an egg is. Potential life, in my definition, is not life. The point at which life begins is at a much later stage of gestation, which should be decided by obstetricians, gynecologists, and philosophers.

Abortion also isn’t simply justified by its legal protection of “right to privacy.” Denying a woman her right to choose is sex discrimination: Burdening women with unplanned pregnancies leads to systemic economic, social and psychological gender inequalities.

Shvarts’ project, as gruesome as it may be, was a celebration, not an insult, of the right to choose. Jackson’s micro-blogged bleeding also broke through the secrecy and shame that cloaks abortion rhetoric. Public abortions force pro-choicers to clarify their positions on the right they often unthinkingly defend. Aliza Shvarts exhibited a different piece at London’s Tate Modern after she graduated, and Jackson might score a book deal. May these women continue to challenge the silence of women’s reproductive issues, so we never rest on the murky philosophizing of "I'm pro-choice, but ..."

Tags: abortion, abortion rights, angie jackson, twitter

A fairly horrific portrait is beginning to emerge of the New Jersey man on trial for allegedly raping five of his daughters, impregnating three of them, and systematically terrorizing his family for years. The 51-year-old man, whose name media outlets aren’t publishing in order to protect his victims, is being compared to famed Austrian dungeon master Josef Fritzl, who fathered seven children with the daughter he kept captive for 24 years.

That level of depravity is difficult to illustrate, as demonstrated by CBSNews.com. The site used this stock photograph—of a man forcibly holding down the wrist of a woman who’s clearly struggling to escape—to accompany an Associated Press article.

Unable to run a mug shot, the CBS art department apparently decided it was just as helpful to give readers a bird’s-eye view of a rape in progress. Pure prurience is nothing new on the Web, but I would expect more discretion from the first network news division to have a woman as its public face. It’s obviously time to lower my expectations. How does the image, which a colleague called “rape clip-art,” add anything to the story? It doesn’t enhance the piece. It’s more likely to enrage a reader (if that reader is me, apparently) than enlighten her.

Tags: Rape, sad state of the media, sexual assault

The obsession with the spawn of celebrities is now so acceptably mainstream that there are entire Web sites and sections of tabloids devoted to their exploits. The logical apex of this obsession is to fantasize about what our own offspring with vaunted stars would look like. Enter makemebabies.com, the Web site that allows you to upload your photo and cross-pollinate it with the photo of a celebrity to create a fictional baby. At right is the apple of my eye, Bonkers Grose-Beckham (my baby with David Beckham, sorry Posh!). Click here to see little L'il Snoop Rosin-Dogg, the child of Hanna Rosin and Snoop Dogg. Feel free to paste your own creepy celebrity babies in the comments below.

Tags: celebrity babies, david beckham, makemebabies.com

If you've ever yearned for the sexy patriarchy ethos of the Mad Men era over a gimlet, you're in luck: Mattel is launching a line of Mad Men dolls, based on four of the AMC show's characters—Roger Sterling, Don Draper, Betty Draper, and Joan Harris (nee Holloway). (Apparently leading ad-lady Peggy wasn't sexy enough for dollification.) What kinds of fun playtimes can you have with the Mad Men cast? Well, the Betty doll can sit at the kitchen table for eight hours chain-smoking and ignoring the kids. Gingerly place a Manhattan in the plastic hand of the Don Draper doll and let his depressive mind wander until the perfect blob of genius ad-copy emerges. If you're craving more action than a usual episode of Mad Men affords, maybe you can arrange some flirtatious banter between Roger and Joan in the office hallway. But if the Don doll wants to cheat, he's going to have to jump some decades and hop in a Malibu with Skipper.

The dolls are retailing for $74.95 each as part of Mattel's collectors' series. A price that will require some rationalizing, for sure. Picture a dark room, with Don softly speaking: "You're on a carousel."

Tags: barbie, mad men, mattel

A couple of days ago the New York Times' sports section reported on the fascinating saga of Dorothy Jane Mills, who, for several decades beginning around 1950, assisted her husband, the historian Harold Seymour, in writing a three-volume scholarly history of baseball. More than assisted: She co-wrote it, but received little recognition at the time and, it would seem, precious little thanks from her husband.

Seymour, according to the Times, initially was Mills' American history professor; as his student she typed up his lectures, got in the habit of critiquing them, fell in love, married him, and helped research his dissertation. According to the Times' account, when Oxford University Press arranged to publish it, Mills "conducted research, devised outlines and rewrote sections" but "kept quiet when she received no credit on the cover and barely even in the acknowledgments in the first volume and its sequel, published in 1972."

By the third book, Seymour was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and so Mills wrote most of it. When she asked her husband (whom she always addressed by his last name) for co-author credit, she says, he refused. Asked why she didn't go ahead and put her name on the cover, she said, "I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t change things. No. He felt they were his books. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t alter that.”

Seymour is now dead, and Mills—who remarried, continued writing under her own byline, and, at 81, is working on a novel—continued to resent her lack of credit. She began talking and writing about her contributions after he died, and subsequent reporters confirmed the work she did. This month, when the Society for American Baseball Research chose to honor Seymour and his series with an award, she fumed and so, apparently, did female members of SABR. After a bit of a kerfluffle, she, too, was honored. “ 'Everyone assumed that he had done all that work by himself—that’s what he wanted them to assume, but we were equal partners,' ” Mills is quoted saying. “'He just couldn’t share credit. And I didn’t say anything at the time, because at the time, wives just didn’t do that.' ”

The Times suggests that what may have been going on was "intellectual spousal abuse," an interesting concept and one I had not heard of before. The term introduces the possibility that even when a wife—or, I guess, a husband—agrees to contribute work to a spouse's project and have it go uncredited, it may not be truly consensual. Or wasn't, back then. Her speaking up after the fact reminds me of situations in which a woman goes public about alleged sexual harassment that occurred in the past. I have always thought the dynamics of those situations easy to understand. There are lots of factors that can mitigate against speaking up at the time, but at a certain point—often when the alleged harasser is about to get a major promotion involving public glory, supervision of lots more women, or, say, a major judgeship—it becomes harder to stay quiet.

More to the point, reading the piece, I also thought of recent instances where a wife contributes significantly to work published under her husband's byline. A year or so again there was much discussion of the fact that writer Dan Baum acknowledged that his wife, Margaret Knox, does a great deal of editing and organizing on his bylined work. We blogged about it, and the American Prospect published a thoughtful post that received a number of comments including some suggesting that whatever consenting adult writers consent to is their business. Others found the arrangement troubling, given the history of women typing their husbands' theses and not getting credit. More recently, Jezebel meditated on a profile of Paul Krugman that shows his wife, the economist Robin Wells, has done a fair amount of editing of his work. Jezebel writes that "it's hard not to see their relationship in the context of a larger pattern of famous male writers and their devoted, semi-invisible wives."

Marriage is such a complex arrangement, involving competition, support, synergy, compromise, cheerleading, constructive criticism, unconstructive criticism, etc. How much help is OK? How much uncredited help is OK? If you'd credit a research assistant, shouldn't you credit a spouse? How do we think about these things in the era of companionate marriage and wives with degrees and accomplishments? If the husband cheerfully acknowledges the help—as Seymour clearly did not, back then—is it OK? If the wife is OK with providing the help uncredited—as Mills, apparently, really wasn't, even back then—is it OK? The Mills case is a useful reminder that what a person agrees to at the time sometimes rankles, later, under altered circumstances. But then, that's true of many things in marriage. One wonders if spousal co-writing will ever factor into a divorce settlement and if so, how that will be untangled.

Then again, in this case technology, or maybe just technological glitches, can also mete out a peculiar justice: Looking for Seymour's books on Amazon, I noted that Mills (who also wrote under the name Dorothy Z. Seymour) is credited as an author in the blurbs advertising the paperback versions of the baseball history (though her name is not on the cover, as far as I can tell). And in some cases, thanks to computer truncating or something, Dorothy Seymour is named in the blurb as the sole author of the book. So, at least in that way, she gets the last laugh.

Tags: books, Dan Baum, Dorothy Jane Mills, Harold Seymour, spouses, wives, writing

—Despite the increasing popularity of baby slings, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has declared them a suffocation hazard. [New York Times]

—Rep. Eric Massa’s chief of staff gave Nancy Pelosi advance warning about his scandalous behavior. [Washington Post]

—Even pro-choice pioneers question the value of Angie Jackson’s abortion tweet. [Salon]

—“Jihad Jane” led a troubled life before turning to radical Islam. [Washington Post]

—New evidence emerges in the investigation of John Ensign, the embattled Nevada senator who tried to steer lobbying work to his mistress’ spouse. [New York Times]

—Howard Stern feigns concern for Gabourey Sidibe’s health. [Gawker]

Tags: abortion, angie jackson, baby slings, congress, Eric Massa, howard stern, JihadJane, John Ensign, Nancy Pelosi, parenting, precious, weight

Baby slings and carriers have become ubiquitous everywhere from the streets of Brooklyn to the pages of People magazine, with two predictable results: an imminent Consumer Product Safety commission warning and a front-page appearance in the NYT Style section. In spite of a few scaremongering headlines, baby slings and soft carriers appear to be safe if properly used, which puts them one up on strollers and cribs (both of which have been involved in injuries and even deaths that appeared to be utterly out of a parents' control). The risk is that a very small infant, curled up at the bottom of a sling, might suffocate. It's a horrible thought, but there's something to be said for providing the new parent with something manageable to worry about. Most parents might want to be considering a more distant danger: that in eight years, they'll be wandering the house, old and spent, bent over and clutching their backs.

I wore four kids all over in my sling. I loved it. As a New Yorker, losing the stroller was ideal—far easier on the subway and in store after downtown store with no ramp. I didn't lose it once we moved—I hiked with a 2-year-old in it while seven months pregnant and used it to bond (and restrain) my newly adopted 3-year-old last summer in China. I say sling, singular, but I had them all, from the mei tai to the Moby wrap (someone warn the woman in the NYT pictures that it takes a village to tie one of those things) to the Ergo. And now I am paying the price. Years of yoga may yet save my posture, but if you're currently a baby-wearing parent, don't shun the stroller. Your back needs a break. Soon enough, you'll be hauling a sleeping third-grader up the stairs. And mothers might want to consider another aspect—despite all those photos of Brad Pitt sporting one of his sprouts, the majority of people still strapped to their young are women. If you are the one wearing the trendy, adorable, patterned carrier, you will also be the one left carrying the baby.

Photograph of a baby in a sling by Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

Tags: baby slings