At press time Ashcroft’s office had no plans to meet with the groups.

Thursday, a second wave of anthrax threats were sent by Federal Express to nearly 200 abortion clinics and organizations. Last month, abortion clinics received more than 100 letters claiming to be laced with anthrax — all of which tested negative for the deadly bacteria. While there is no apparent link between them and the real anthrax letters sent to political and media offices around the country, the appearance of the new anthrax threat resurrected a theory that has been floated by the media for weeks — that the real anthrax letters sent in September were the work of domestic terrorists.

The FBI investigation into the anthrax letters sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, the New York Post, NBC and others last month has made no clear progress. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge told reporters Friday the FBI was “still no closer to identifying specifically the origin of the anthrax or the perpetrators.”

A new speculative profile of the anthrax attacker, released by the FBI Friday, claims the person is probably male, “a non-confrontational person, at least in his public life. He lacks the personal skills necessary to confront others. He chooses to confront his problems long distance and not face-to face,” it added. The man may have “chosen to anonymously harass other individuals or entities that he perceived as having wronged him” and “prefers being by himself more often than not. If he is involved in a personal relationship it will likely be of a self-serving nature.”

The FBI profile did not speculate whether the person was U.S.-born or not, but a report from CBS News revived some dormant speculation that the anthrax attacks were the work of a domestic terrorist or terrorists. CBS quotes former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary as saying the bureau has not discounted the possibility that members of al-Qaida may be linked to the attacks, but they are “also looking at the possibility of a homegrown individual, maybe the loner-paranoid type of individual as well who may be doing this.”

But interestingly, the group that has perhaps done the most work monitoring domestic hate groups does not believe it was a domestic threat. “We have tended to lean away from a domestic group explanation. It’s much more likely that it was a foreign or foreign-run group, or it was a domestic madman with a microbiology degree,” says Mark Potok, who heads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s KlanWatch. “The Daschle letter went out on Sept. 18. That means whoever sent that anthrax had to have it before the 11th. Do these domestic groups sit around stockpiling anthrax? We have not seen a shred of evidence that domestic radical groups either have anthrax or are capable of refining it to the level of the Daschle letter substance. One of the arguments I heard was well, Daschle’s a liberal, must be the militias. I find that ridiculous.”

While Potok plays down the likelihood that the real anthrax spores were sent by domestic radical groups, speculation about who sent the bogus anthrax threats to abortion groups has focused on antiabortion activists at home. Several of the letters were signed by the Army of God, a group that has openly called for the murder of abortion doctors.

The threat of anthrax attacks may be new to the country, but abortion groups have been dealing with them for years. While there has never been any actual anthrax sent to an abortion clinic, Planned Parenthood clinics have been dealing with anthrax threats since 1998.

Ashcroft’s failure to make a statement about the current anthrax-threat letters sent to them irks abortion-rights groups, but they have a longstanding adversarial relationship with Ashcroft. In arguing against his confirmation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Gloria Feldt told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “The best way to predict how John Ashcroft would act as U.S. attorney general is to look at his performance in Missouri when he held office there. During the time that John Ashcroft was attorney general and then governor of Missouri, he failed to respond to the increase in anti-choice intimidation, harassment, and violence at Missouri reproductive health clinics … Despite our best efforts to find a single public statement from him at that time, it appears that he said absolutely nothing.”

Abortion rights supporters aggressively fought against Ashcroft’s confirmation, in part because of his support of a Missouri law known as the Infant’s Protection Act. The bill’s author, Louis DeFeo of the Missouri Catholic Conference, conceded that the bill allowed deadly force against abortion providers. “I think that’s justifiable in protecting a person.” The late Gov. Mel Carnahan vetoed the bill, a move Ashcroft called “tragic.”

While Ashcroft has not met face to face with abortion rights leaders, many of their concerns and requests have been heard by the department. After Dr. George Tiller was shot outside his abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, the DOJ granted abortion groups’ requests for U.S. Marshall protection for Tiller. When self-avowed antiabortion terrorist Clayton Waagner escaped from a county jail in Clinton, Ill., in February, the FBI responded to requests to offer a federal reward for his capture, and placed Waagner on their Ten Most Wanted list.

Complaints about Ashcroft’s silence regarding threats of violence or bioterrorism against abortion providers continue amid the current national anthrax hysteria. Hoping to capitalize on public awareness about the threat of anthrax, advocates say now is the time for a strong rebuke from the attorney general.

“This is the largest single orchestrated anthrax threat against any type of organization. And it seems to us that he sometimes goes out of his way not to mention the fact,” says Vicki Saporta, executive director of the National Abortion Federation. “He needs to be very clear and send a very clear message to these anti-choice extremists.”

As of Friday, there was no sign that abortion rights defenders would get either the meeting or public statement they seek. Calls by Salon to the Department of Justice went unreturned, but a member of the DOJ press office said the office had not put out any statement regarding the latest anthrax threats to abortion clinics.

Some have criticized abortion rights groups for trying to cash in on the anthrax threat, and for unfairly trying to tar Ashcroft. Responding to a New York Times column by Frank Rich which claimed Ashcroft had “gone so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons,” conservative writer Ross Douthat lashed out in the National Review. “So let’s get this straight — with everything that’s going on, Ashcroft is to be faulted because he hasn’t tapped into Planned Parenthood’s intelligence network?” Douthat writes. “What’s next — a story on the ACLU’s underutilized Green Berets?”

But Saporta says her group’s concerns are about much more than trying to score political points against Ashcroft. She says the attorney general’s continued silence is jeopardizing the safety of abortion workers around the country. “We wanted a public statement before we had the second round of these letters. As we continue to have more rounds of these letters, there could be an increased likelihood that some of them could in fact contain anthrax, and then we’re dealing with a very different situation,” she says.

In their reactions to the new anthrax scare, abortion rights groups have also included Tom Ridge in the list of people they would like to meet with. Ridge, a pro-choice former governor of Pennsylvania, has a very different approach to and view of abortion than Ashcroft, and groups are optimistic that Ridge may ultimately give them a public meeting, or come out with a strongly worded statement specifically condemning the attacks on abortion clinics and abortion-rights organizations.

“Well, this is the first time we’ve asked for a meeting with Tom Ridge, and we think it could be more likely that he would meet with us,” Saporta said. “Because these anthrax threat letters are part of what’s going on nationally, we really do think it is important that we meet with either Tom Ridge or the attorney general or both. Because they have to be as interested as we are in stopping what’s happening and apprehending the people who are responsible.”

And while leaders of the abortion rights movement are frustrated by the attorney general’s refusal to meet with them, they all praise the work law enforcement and the FBI have done on this latest anthrax case.

In a statement Thursday, Feldt said her organization was “pleased with the cooperation we have received from the FBI following the first round of letters we received last month. That cooperation is continuing today,” Feldt said. “We are hopeful that the perpetrators will be identified, captured, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Unlike the investigation into the letters that actually contained anthrax — a case that continues to confound law enforcement and intelligence officials — Saporta says there are “good leads” concerning the letters received Thursday. “We’re hopeful they’ll be able to apprehend these individuals. They were signed from the Army of God. They said, ‘You didn’t take us seriously last time, this time it’s real. This is high quality anthrax.’ So I mean there are certainly people who are visibly associated with the Army of God, and it’s important not only that they’re questioned, but that they tell law enforcement officials what they know about who’s responsible, because they do know who’s responsible for this.”

A more direct – and less theocratic – answer would be that this one got through because of the nature of the ban, which allows Republicans in an election year to once again accuse Democrats of waging the real war on women. Or, as the National Right to Life Committee put it, “Members who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting they are resisting a ‘war on women’ must reflect on whether they wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls.” In other words, this is about making Democrats squirm – not unlike what’s happening in reverse in the Senate.

Franks previously tried to attach his bill to the Violence Against Women Act, which has turned into another political cudgel. He made another concession when he dropped the “racial discrimination” provisions of the bill, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank aptly described as “the latest attempt to protect racial minorities from themselves.” Under the rules through which it was introduced, Franks’s Prenatal Non-Discriminational Act (PRENDA) needs two-thirds of the House to pass, meaning it needs roughly 50 votes from Democrats.

Today happens to be the third anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who provided abortions in the most difficult cases amid actual violence, the daily threat of such violence, and politicized law enforcement tactics. PRENDA would ask the already besieged physicians still alive to police their patients’ decisions – especially their Asian-American patients, who would be singled out for disparate care – and to subject doctors to a fine or a up to a year in prison, or both. It’s utterly unconstitutional of course. Unless you’re in a state where later abortions are limited to special circumstances like threat to life, the United States doesn’t interfere, and rightly so, with a woman’s reason for having an abortion.

In the U.S., this is a “solution” in search of a problem. Even in immigrant communities that show very limited evidence of more boys being born than girls later in the birth order, abortion is far from the only mechanism available to sort for sex. Half of American fertility clinics offer some possibility of sorting by sex before a pregnancy. But if you ask people who actually work on this issue in Asia, where skewed sex ratios – whether achieved through IVF, abortion or even infanticide — can be socially destabilizing, they’ll tell you that limiting reproductive freedom isn’t the answer. The only mechanism that has changed anything (the go-to example is South Korea, where abortion is technically illegal but widely tolerated) is moving toward a more gender-equitable society where life as a woman is less of a burden. Part of that equitable society includes women making the decision when and if to be mothers. Seeking to chip away at that right is the true hypocrisy.

UPDATE: While a majority of the House voted in favor of PRENDA Thursday, 247-168, it did not pass since Republicans called it up under rules requiring a two-thirds majority.

What spurred such rage? Nothing so incendiary as transvaginal ultrasounds or birth control — just the Paycheck Fairness Act, which passed the Democratic House in 2009 but fell to a filibuster by two votes in the Senate in 2010. It modifies the 1963 Equal Pay Act, strengthening enforcement and creating better mechanisms for wage transparency, and authorizes new research on the pay gap and a grant program to teach negotiation skills to women and girls. And while it probably doesn’t have a prayer in the House — if it can even pass this Senate — it manages to bring feminist-friendly legislation back on the table while doubling as a political tool to force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner.

Better yet, it gets to the subject Republicans have intermittently accused Democrats of obfuscating: the economy. As Sen. Patty Murray taunted in a press conference, “To those Republicans who claim to be so concerned about the economy, now is your chance to sign on, When women are not paid what they deserve, middle-class families and communities pay the price.”

Whatever happens with the Paycheck Fairness Act (likely nothing) or the dueling versions of the Violence Against Women Act, this week also saw a bill move that, if it makes it into law, would represent a rare, if tiny, expansion of abortion access on the federal level. That would be the Shaheen Amendment, named for another female Democratic senator, which allows female servicemembers — who suffer disproportionate levels of sexual assault — insurance coverage for abortion in cases of rape and incest. (Currently, the Department of Defense offers coverage only if the woman’s life is in danger, a much more limited policy than that of other federal employees.)

The amendment passed in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, with three Republican votes — Sens. John McCain, Scott Brown and Susan Collins. (Democrat Ben Nelson voted against it). Of course, if it manages to get through the full Senate, it has the anti-choice House to contend with. That it would be incredibly narrow says a lot about the state of reproductive rights in this country — after all, rape and abortion exceptions are a compromise that, while reflecting American public opinion, truly jibe with neither side’s actual worldview. But you have to start somewhere, and a time of heated political rhetoric about women’s rights is as good as any other.

“He said that the congresswoman could, if she desired, sit on the dais of the hearing, but she would not be allowed to speak,” Norton told Salon after the hearing. She declined an offer she said “no self-respecting member” would accept.

“I certainly didn’t give them that optic,” she said drily.

Franks was technically within his rights – per the rules, the Democratic minority was granted one witness, D.C. resident Christy Zinks, who had an abortion at almost 22 weeks after the detection of a severe fetal abnormality. Still, as Norton pointed out, “there is a long tradition that goes back more than a century of allowing members to testify on a bill that may touch upon the district.” Nancy Pelosi also condemned the move.

In the testimony she wasn’t allowed to give, Norton says the so-called Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act “is the first bill ever introduced in Congress that would deny constitutional rights to the citizens of only one jurisdiction in the United States, and it is the first bill ever introduced in Congress that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.” Last year, House Republicans managed to strike a budget deal that would deny the District of Columbia the right to use its own Medicaid funds to pay for abortions — another byproduct of the fact that D.C. is ultimately under congressional oversight and has only partial self-governance.

Seven states have followed Nebraska in passing manifestly unconstitutional bans on later abortions without health exceptions, on the scientifically suspect notion that a fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks. So far, pro-choice organizations have declined to mount a legal challenge, for complicated reasons.

Norton called it a “stalking horse” for the overturning of Roe. “We understand we’re the vehicle, we know we’re not the object of affection,” she said. “What they want from the Congress is a federal imprimatur to continue their march in the states, to say, even the Congress has voted for a bill to limit abortion to 20 weeks.”

The National Right to Life Committee has called the bill its “top congressional priority for 2012,” and will score members based on their votes, even though it likely has no chance of getting past the Senate – or the president. “They are serious about this bill,” Norton told Salon. “They’re not playing.”

That said, she thinks that despite Franks’ zeal, other House Republicans have lost their zeal for fighting what’s still being called the war on women. An earlier Franks bill, seeking to limit race- and sex-selective abortions, didn’t make it to the floor. And on the House version of the Violence Against Women Act, fiercely opposed by the White House and women’s groups, “They keep saying that they’re working on a way to reach an accommodation, and for them, that is unusual to say,” Norton said.

“They didn’t anticipate the way the war on women, as it is called, has boiled up to the surface,” Norton said. “And they’re trying to quell it somewhat.”

“Our concern is for the privacy of these women and for their health and safety, for which Central Family Planning has shown very little regard,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman – while posting photographs of the documents, partially redacted in black marker, online.

Antiabortion activists want to create the impression that one way or another, a woman’s decision to have an abortion will be discovered and exposed. The Central Family Medical incident is only the latest skirmish in a decades-long effort to undermine the privacy of abortion patients and harass doctors. In the early ’90s, for example, at least one group of clinic protesters printed on their signs the names of women seeking abortions that day, alongside “don’t kill your baby.” Such actions, while failing to make abortion illegal, have nevertheless managed to cloak it in a stigma that belies the fact that one in three women will have an abortion before the age of 45. Now, activists are seeking new ways to shame women who seek abortions, from requiring them to hand over personal information to actually hacking into their medical records.

Kansas has been ground zero for this: Last year, the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys recommended that former Attorney General Phill Kline, a hero to Operation Rescue, have his legal license suspended indefinitely for mishandling the records from murdered abortion provider George Tiller’s clinic. (The Kansas Supreme Court will make the final call.) But the zeal to keep, and sometimes steal, abortion records casts a wide net.

In Texas, the state Department of Health is trying to implement a failed legislative measure that would require abortion clinics to report far more information about their patients to the state. In Florida, voters will weigh in on a ballot measure that would exempt abortion from the privacy clause in the state constitution, with the short-term aim being to strip minors of a right to privacy that would preclude parental consent. The U.K. recently jailed a hacker who stole and intended to publish the records of 10,000 women who visited the country’s largest abortion provider.

“It promotes the idea that abortion – or your privacy, if you have any – is not safe,” says Katie Stack, a graduate student and activist who spoke out about her abortion on an MTV special, “No Easy Decision.” That put her in close contact with the “online ministry” – the name antiabortion activists have given their efforts to reach women considering abortions through the Internet.

This has been the unstated goal of many activists in the antiabortion movement — and, sometimes, the stated one. “This might sound a little strange,” said antiabortion activist Lila Rose at the Value Voters Summit in 2009, but “if I could insist, as long as they are legal in our nation, abortions would be done in the public square, until we were so sick and tired of seeing them that we would do away with the injustice altogether … maybe then we might hear angels singing when we ponder the glory of conception.”

Rose won’t get her wish any time soon, but antiabortion activists are trying to use the Internet to have a similar effect. Rose was recently on a panel at the International Pro-Life Youth Conference about social media and pro-life activism, where topics included targeting women who are seeking information about abortion online, whether through Yahoo Answers or YouTube commenters – including figuring out where they live and recommending a crisis pregnancy center nearby.

“Privacy is very important to women who have abortions,” says Kate Cockrill, program director of the Social and Emotional Aspects of Abortion project, at the University of California, San Francisco. She points out that abortion is traditionally underreported even in confidential surveys, “which is a good indication that women don’t want to be associated with abortion experience in the eyes of someone who’s gathering data, even if it’s anonymous.”

Cockrill recently conducted a survey, as yet unpublished, that seeks to measure the impact of social stigma on women who’ve had abortions. It asked 641 women who had had abortions about 61 items, including questions about the fear people would gossip about you, judge you or hurt you, or the fear that you would lose an important relationship.

So far, she’s found that the women who experienced the most stigma were worried about being judged more than they were about being hurt or harmed, that they feared loss of social status and the ruining of their public identity, that they felt isolated and guilty, and that they feared community condemnation.

But as with other abortion restrictions, which create extra burdens in the supposed service of changing women’s minds, it’s not clear that anyone’s mind is being changed.

“Lots of women who feel a lot of stigma about abortions have abortion anyway,” Cockrill says. “If it’s not doing what antiabortion people want it to do, which is reducing the number of abortions, is it doing something on the other end, [after the fact]?”

Cockrill and her team are going to be using their scale in a study next year to look at the relationship between stigma and poor coping after abortion. Given that antiabortion activists have added to their obsessions the alleged harm abortion causes to women, there’s reason to believe that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Women who have abortions, Cockrill says, “have a huge range of political views.” In fact, in her survey, only 62 percent of the women identified as pro-choice. (Seven percent identified as prolife, and 18 percent described their position as “mixed or neither.”)

“A lot of women don’t experience their abortions as a political act,” Cockrill says, partly an extension of the fact that they don’t see it as constitutive of their identity.

Whether it’s political rhetoric or individual ambivalence, these women are highly sensitive about whom they tell they had abortions. Sixty-four percent of the women in the study said they’d “withheld information about my abortion to someone I’m close to,” and 45 percent said they’d “lied to someone I’m close to about my abortion.”

They may not see it as political, but that silence functions as a vicious circle that antiabortion activists happily seize upon and promote. Cockrill says, “Some people say, ‘We need to have more people come out about their abortions.’ But it’s impossible to get more women to talk about their abortions if they don’t feel supported. And it needs to be on women’s own terms.”

On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge didn’t buy the state’s legislation defunding Planned Parenthood, putting a temporary stay on the enforcement of the law. But within a day, there was another judge who found the argument persuasive: Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, last seen obnoxiously demanding that a female Justice Department lawyer ”submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.” (Kevin Drum memorably compared it to “a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before,” and you wouldn’t have to look hard to find the sexist condescension.)

The District Court judge had written 24 pages on the constitutional merits, focusing on Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights of association. Smith issued two sentences two hours after the state’s petition, undoing that, and apparently buying the state of Texas’ argument that Planned Parenthood’s alleged “abortion promoting” mission justified discriminating against a qualified provider of healthcare.  (The clinics receiving WHP funding don’t even provide abortions, but other Planned Parenthood clinics do.)

In an election year, these posturings take on new meaning; by today, Planned Parenthood was proclaiming in a news release, “What would Mitt Romney’s America look like for women’s health care?  We need look no further than Texas,” and highlighting the policy similarities of Romney and Perry on women’s health. Romney, of course, has pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, which during the primaries became a consensus Republican issue. The last federal attempt to do so, last year’s Pence Amendment, nearly shut down the entire government, though Obama held the line — as he pointed out in a recent campaign video supporting the organization.

The presidential policies matter, but as we can see from Texas, the judiciary, prompted by state legislatures that are coming off a wave of abortion restrictions, is currently wielding the most power when it comes to women’s everyday lives, and the 5th Circuit in particular has been unrepentantly hostile to reproductive rights. When they failed with Pence, right-to-lifers turned to the states, primed by the 2010 election of even more anti-choice legislators and governors. In Texas, the conservative 5th Circuit has become a brick wall, previously allowing enforcement of the most extreme ultrasound law in the country, one that requires a woman to listen to the results.

Smith is a Reagan appointee, as is his fellow 5th Circuit conservative gadfly Edith Jones, who wrote the opinion in the ultrasound case, though if they’re feeling particularly emboldened lately, you can’t really blame them. After all, the Obama administration has shown little interest in prioritizing the judiciary, even after Bush’s ambitious effort to fill federal appellate courts with movement conservatives. A January Brookings Institution report showed that Obama has nominated fewer federal trial judges than his predecessors, even as a wave of judges retires. (Unprecedented Senate intransigence is a major factor in confirmations, but doesn’t explain the nominations.)  And Dahlia Lithwick has argued that “Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has selected lower court judges more notable for their racial and gender diversity than their hard-left judicial orientation.”

All of this is to say that as long as states like Texas keep passing laws that punish women and stretch the boundaries of constitutional interpretation, to put it mildly, the buck is likelier than ever to stop at a judge like Jerry Smith.