Formed originally to repeal abortion bans before Roe, NARAL is now most closely associated with lobbying on the federal and state level, and for its close ties to the Democratic Party. Keenan's departure after eight years follows an election cycle when Democrats didn't apologize for being pro-choice -- and won.

This last election year also featured unprecedented public mobilization, across generations, on issues around abortion, birth control and rape. Two men, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, most closely associated with a total abortion ban lost Senate bids they'd seemed poised to win. Akin, too, came from a House of Representatives where antiabortion and anti-family planning legislating had seemed like a full-time job, but whose actual legislative victories have been few.

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McCorvey wasn't interviewed for Joshua Prager's profile. "I almost forgot i have a one thousand dollar fee," she texted him when he requested to speak to her. And when he declined to pay, she replied, "Then we wont speak." Why should she, when being Jane Roe has been her job? It's a job that has exasperated pro-choice activists and been exploited by the far right. Just last summer, "legitimate rape" expert Todd Akin erroneously cited her example as "false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade."

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In Michigan, Rick Snyder signed a bill passed by the lame-duck Senate -- the same one whose anti-union legislating dominated headlines in recent weeks -- requiring clinics that perform more than 120 abortions a year to become surgical outpatient facilities, a level of licensing intended to be onerous and put clinics out of business. He also approved a bill that purports to screen for women being coerced into abortions.

Snyder did veto another bill limiting insurance coverage in private employee plans, which would have required purchase of a separate abortion rider. He objected to that on the grounds that rape victims would have to pay out of pocket if they didn't buy the rider, and because, "As a practical matter, I believe this type of policy is an overreach of government into the private market." Overreach of government into other realms, of course, is another matter entirely. (According to Michigan resident Emily Magner, one legislator interrupted her to cry, "THIS ISN’T ABOUT WOMEN! THIS IS ABOUT PROTECTING FETUSES!”)

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During the year, 19 states enacted 43 provisions to restrict access to abortion services, whether mandating invasive ultrasounds, blocking health insurance coverage, shuttering women's health clinics or limiting access to the morning-after pill and contraception. The record for most restrictions was set in 2011 with 92.

The worst offenders? Arizona ranked No. 1, enacting seven antiabortion restrictions, and Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin followed close behind with at least three restrictions each.

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First, Pope Benedict XVI used his annual holiday message to the Vatican to denounce gay and lesbian progress as a "manipulation of nature" and an "attack" on the family. Now, Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of all Ireland, has used the galvanizing death of a pregnant woman in a Galway hospital as an excuse to double down on anti-abortion rhetoric. Guys, maybe next year you could ask Santa for a sense of timing and a pair of ears that aren't tone-deaf.

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Feinstein has not released all of her proposed bill’s specifics but in her short, remarkable press release it appears closely modeled on the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 until 2004. Feinstein finds “A Justice Department study found the Assault Weapons Ban was responsible for a 6.7 percent decline in total gun murders. However, since the 2004 expiration of the bill, assault weapons have been used in at least 459 incidents, resulting in 385 deaths and 455 injuries.” In other words, after a national trauma that supposedly changed the debate, an anti-gun Senator can only argue for a bill that might reduce gun murders by 6.7 percent.

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Anti-abortion activists and legislators can’t enact an outright ban on abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486). Instead, they have sought to force doctors to strictly adhere to U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines that appear to be significantly out of step with the current scientific understanding of how the medications should be used.

Lawmakers have passed abortion drug restrictions in Arizona and Ohio, overcoming legal challenges. The Oklahoma Supreme Court recently ruled that similar legislation in that state was unconstitutional. A North Dakota bill is currently tied up in litigation.

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Blame Obamacare and abortion. We heard, early out of the gate, from Mike Huckabee, who didn’t wait for the funerals to start blaming the liberal banishment of God from schools and government, including “tax-funded abortion pills,” by which the Personhood proponent meant birth control. “We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.”

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Via Right Wing Watch, Dobson said:

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Right now, if you’re a woman in the military, which has startlingly high rates of sexual assault, and you get raped, you face the added insult of having to pay for an abortion out of your own pocket. That’s because the military's health insurance plan is the only one in the federal government that does not cover abortion in the case of rape or incest. It'll only cover the procedure if the woman's life is in danger

Democrats in the Senate have tried to change this, but House Republicans have so far resisted, thus producing two different bills -- one with the change and one without. Yesterday, the House named its representatives to a bicameral committee that will hammer out the differences between the two bills, including this provision. While killing the amendment could reignite the explosive abortion and rape debate of the summer, Republicans generally oppose the expansion of reproductive rights, even for raped female soldiers.

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That case had the benefit of a vocal and angry person to speak on the dead woman's behalf -- her husband, Praveen. He has said she requested a termination that may have saved her life -- but was told, "This is a Catholic country." (An official inquiry by the hospital has yet to be released, and Praveen Halapannavar is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.) But for every Savita, there are thousands of women whose names we don't know, women who aren't even counted.

The most commonly cited statistic suggests that complications from unsafe abortions led to approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide. That's a World Health Organization figure first arrived at in 2000, which hasn't been re-evaluated. Every year, when WHO says how many women have died from unsafe abortions, they're simply taking the same percentage of the global maternal mortality figure -- 56,000 in 2003, or 47,000 in 2008. But one epidemiologist, Caitlin Gerdts, wondered if that number wasn't a potentially vast understatement.

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From the Detroit Free-Press:

One bill passed the Senate, 27-10, and calls for more stringent licensing of abortion clinics; the other, passed out of the House insurance committee into the full House, would allow health care providers to refuse service based on moral objections, religious reasons or matters of conscience.

Both must be voted on by the full House.

Two bills already on Snyder’s desk would limit abortion coverage on policies sold on a statewide health insurance exchange unless consumers purchase it as an add-on. The exchange is a Web-based marketplace where consumers will be able to buy insurance as health care reform takes full effect in 2014.

“Those three issues were our top issues: conscience, insurance and regulation and reform,” Ed Rivet, a spokesman for Michigan Right to Life, told the Free-Press. “That we’re doing them all simultaneously is pretty remarkable."

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On last night’s “American Horror Story,” in an episode titled “The Coat Hanger,” Sarah Paulson’s character, Lana Winters, a lesbian journalist wrongfully trapped in an insane asylum who had been raped by Dr. Threadson (Zachary Quinto), a serial killer who likes to skin people alive, found out she was pregnant. She tried to give herself an abortion with a coat hanger after the Catholic asylum staff forbade her from having a medically supervised one. Her attempt was bloody and unsuccessful —  but the devil might have had something to do with that. When the show jumped in time to the future, it was revealed that Lana and Dr. Threadson’s child grew up to be just like his daddy, a skin-flaying murderer.

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In a press conference Tuesday, organized by Texas Right to Life, Perry said that he wants to eliminate all abortion: "While Roe v. Wade prevents us from taking that step, it does allow states to do some things to protect life if they can show there is a compelling state interest. I don’t think there is any issue that better fits the definition of 'compelling state interest' than preventing the suffering of our state’s unborn."

Laura Bassett of HuffPo reports:

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U.S. District Judge James C. Fox wrote in his ruling that "The State's offering a Choose Life license plate in the absence of a pro-choice alternative constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment."

Reuters reports:

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in September 2011 after state legislators approved the "Choose Life" plate but refused to authorize voluntary license plates with abortion rights slogans such as "Respect Choice."

The anti-abortion plate was one of approximately 70 new specialty plates approved by the Republican-led legislature and signed into law by Democratic Governor Bev Perdue in June 2011.

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John Podhoretz and Matt Lewis made the cases for the "just politics" camp in the context of the "fiscal cliff" debate. Democrats, they argue, have deftly outmaneuvered Republicans into spending all their time defending unpopular things that are peripheral to core conservative values. Podhoretz writes in the New York Post that even though Republicans have the superior policy on the Bush tax cuts and the need to cut entitlements, they have the inferior “messaging” and have ended up the “the eat-your-vegetables-and-shut-up party” -- noble and responsible, but doomed.

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MCGUIRK: The war on Christmas is very, very real, and if you ask me, in addition to some grouchy misanthropic heathen atheists it has to do — at the root of it — it has to do with two things — abortion and the gay rights agenda, because Christianity is against those things. It’s subtle but that’s why it’s so pronounced in recent years, in my opinion.

O’REILLY: Hundred percent agree. I absolutely agree 100 percent that it's the diminishment of Christianity is the target and Christmas is the vehicle because the secularists know the opposition to their agenda -- legalized drugs is in there as well -- comes primarily from the Judeo-Christian traditionalist people.

Watch:

Via ThinkProgress/Towleroad.

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Douthat calls for an end to our modern, feminist ways, which he calls "decadent." But I would like to offer a better, more humane solution to the problem of a declining future workforce: Instead of simply flooding the market with babies to buoy the economy, why not invest—with public funds, as a community—in the ones we have to get the same results?

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