Roeder had been convicted in January of first-degree murder for gunning Tiller down in his Wichita, Kan., church last May. The question remaining today was whether Roeder’s mandatory life sentence would carry a minimum of 25 or 50 years before he would be eligible for parole. Prosecutors — citing Roeder’s longtime stalking of Tiller and assault of others in the aftermath of the shooting — argued for the so-called hard 50. Determining that those aggravating factors were not outweighed by factors presented by Roeder and his counsel, the judge gave Roeder the maximum sentence.

Throwing the book at Roeder sends the clearest possible message that nothing — not even his stated belief that his actions prevented the “murder” of millions more — mitigates his crime.

“It’s disturbing that Roeder has no remorse,” said Julie Burkhart, Tiller’s closest associate and top political advisor, who attended the hearing and spoke to Salon shortly after it ended. “The ‘Hard 50′ is the right sentence.”

Yet this is not over. “Roeder spending his life in jail doesn’t stop the continuing acts of terrorism against providers and their staffs,” continued Burkhart, who worked closely with Dr. Tiller as a grass-roots organizer and clinic spokesperson and, after his death, founded  TrustWomenPAC. Indeed, Roeder apologists would have been galvanized by either sentence: the lesser justifies their cause; the maximum makes him a martyr. But it’s not just the extreme violent fringe who stand to be emboldened by Tiller’s murder, and even Roeder’s harsh sentence. It’s also state legislatures. “In addition to creating an environment where violence against physicians and staff members is acceptable, the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that encouraged Scott Roeder also creates a political environment that’s open to more restrictive bills in states across the nation,” says Burkhart.

Look what’s already happened in Kansas. With Tiller’s clinic shuttered, late-term abortions are currently unavailable there. Yet just Tuesday night, the Legislature saw fit to pass a law narrowing existing abortion restrictions in the state. Current law permits abortion after 21 weeks of pregnancy under certain circumstances; the new law would require doctors to report to the state the exact medical diagnosis justifying the procedure after 22 weeks, and would allow a woman or her family to sue the doctor if they had evidence that a late abortion had violated state law. The law passed without the votes it needs to override a possible veto by the Democratic governor, but still: Who’s to say its proponents weren’t capitalizing on Tiller’s death? Even the specter of the law has already had the no doubt intended effect of complicating the plans of Omaha, Neb., late-term abortion provider LeRoy Carhart, M.D., to open a Kansas clinic in Tiller’s place.

Speaking of Nebraska: Senators there yesterday ended the first round of debate on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Prevention Act” (LB1103) which would prohibit most abortions at or after 20 weeks, based not on the question of viability — which is normally determined case by case — but on the assertion, unencumbered by medical consensus, that fetuses at that gestational point feel pain. A more accurate name for the bill might be “The LeRoy Carhart Prevention Act,” as opponents charge that its goal is also to shut down the doctor’s Omaha clinic.

States have already been having a field day with preposterous antiabortion legislation: fetal personhood, public abortion registries, mandatory ultrasounds with narration. The Roeder sentence, just though it was, won’t stop that. It might even, indirectly, help make things worse. After all, the more loony and dangerous “the real crazies” look — and the more we see we can trust the law to lock ‘em up and toss the key — the more reasonable the lawmakers look by comparison. And the more they can capitalize on that.

“Dr. Tiller was a great man: courageous and funny and deeply committed to trusting women to make their own difficult private medical decisions. He gave his patients the care they needed, judgment-free, and always referred to himself as a ‘woman-educated doctor,’” Burkhart recalls. “The walls of his office were covered with thank you notes from the women and families who were grateful to him for treating them with dignity and respect at one of the most difficult times in their lives.” Lawmakers who find themselves emboldened in some way by the Scott Roeder saga, let’s just say, won’t be getting those notes.

This month, another child has died: 7-year-old Lydia Schatz, an apparent victim of repeated beating with — as it turns out — quarter-inch plumbing supply line. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of Paradise, Calif., who reportedly called 911 to report that she was not breathing, stand charged with her murder. They are expected to enter a plea on Thursday. According to the authorities, forceful and numerous whippings, apparently with plumbing line, may have caused tissue breakdown so massive that Lydia’s vital organs could no longer function. The Schatzes also face torture and abuse charges for significant injuries sustained by Lydia’s also-adopted sister Zariah, 11, who was hospitalized in critical condition, as well as for extensive bruising on a 10-year-old biological son. (The Schatzes have six biological children and three adopted from Liberia.) Though the remaining children showed no visible signs of abuse, they told police they’d been “disciplined” with the tubing as well. Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey told Salon that the Schatzes had explicitly described to police their adherence to the Pearls’ philosophy, which, as one of many horrified anti-Pearl bloggers within the conservative Christian community observes – recalling precisely what prompted the Schatzes’ call to 911 — includes the admonition that a proper spanking leaves a child “without breath to complain.”

It’s one thing for those of us outside the fundamentalist Christian/Christian home-schooling world to point fingers at the Pearls and voice outrage at their methods. What really matters, and what stands to have actual impact, is the outrage inside the Pearls’ world. And right now, more than ever, an anti-Pearl movement within the conservative Christian community is rising up in heated, if sometimes whispered, fury. Some say — even pray — that Lydia Schatz’s death will bring Michael and Debi Pearl exactly the kind of attention they deserve.

“I think many in the Christian and/or home-school community wanted to see Sean Paddock as an ‘extreme’ example. Lynn Paddock was ‘just’ a foster mom. She already had issues. Whatever someone could use to rationalize away the influence of Michael and Debi Pearl, they would. Because they did not want to admit that a ‘normal’ home-schooling mom could abuse her child to death, they did not want to admit that a book that has been normalized in home-schooling circles was a factor in the death, they did not want to admit their own vulnerability to being deceived or hurting their child,” says Alexandra Bush, 35, a “home-schooling mom and theologically conservative Christian” in Sarasota, Fla., who grew up with Pearl-style teaching around her (though not in her family) and who is an oft-heard anti-Pearl voice online. “Now, with Lydia Schatz, it is harder to explain away. I have seen a stronger response than before to her death and her sister’s hospitalization. The defensiveness has cracked a bit. This is the logical outcome of the spank-until-submissive teachings of the Pearls. People are no longer able to see it as just an ‘exception.’”

In a statement issued in response to the Schatz arrest, Michael Pearl said, “We do not teach ‘corporal punishment’ nor ‘hitting’ children. We teach parents how to train their children, which sometimes requires the limited and controlled application of a spanking instrument to hold the child’s attention on admonition … No Greater Joy does not advocate spanking to the point of serious injury. If indeed these parents were abusive, and that has not yet been proven by the courts, it is regretful that our teachings were not able to turn them from their predisposition to abusive habits.”

Many critics of “biblical chastisement” — notably, those close to the controversy, and even to the Schatz family — might say that Pearl has it backward. They suggest that his teachings, with all the weight of their godly imprimatur, could exacerbate, or even create, the impulse to abuse. Paul Mathers, 32, a used bookstore owner in Chico, Calif., knows the Schatzes well, or thought he did. They attended his church for about eight months. He and his wife, Laurie — who wrote in a wrenching blog post about her special bond with “little Lydia” – have had dinner at the Schatzes’ house; the Schatzes, remembering that the Matherses needed a bookcase, dropped off an extra just to be nice. “There is nothing about the Schatzes that would ever have made us think abuse of any kind was going on,” Mathers says. “They are the dearest, sweetest people. This is completely unimaginable.” Could the Pearls’ principles have triggered abusive tendencies out of nowhere? Obviously, Mathers — who says he finds the Pearls’ “chastisement” philosophy “morally repugnant” — can only speculate. “But one of the things the Pearls suggest is to have the piece of piping in every room and possibly even hang around your neck as you go around the house to keep the child in line,” he says. “If you’re going around wearing an instrument with which you hit things many times a day — I could imagine that does do something to people.”

As Laurie Mathers wrote on her blog: “The Pearls’ system does not just mold children, it molds well-meaning parents into the kind of people who think they can and should expect perfect obedience and perfect behavior from imperfect and defenseless little creatures. In fact, it teaches them that if they don’t succeed in this, they are not fit to be parents at all.”

Or take Meggan Judge, interviewed by the Raleigh News & Observer and then by Salon in 2006, who found that her postpartum depression and the Pearls’ principles were such a toxic combination that she had to lock herself in a separate room for fear she would “beat [her son] senseless.”

“Obviously, I don’t think Mr. Pearl stood over Lydia’s body with plumbing line in hand,” says Rebecca Diamond, a Bible Belt-born observant Christian and home-schooler in eastern Canada whose blog is critical of the Pearls. “But when he uses phrases such as continuing to whip until the crying turns into a ‘wounded, submissive whimper’ or ‘without breath to complain,’ I’m not sure how he doesn’t bear moral guilt for this. Legally, I don’t know if he can be charged. But morally? I believe that absolutely, anyone who advocates treating children like that bears responsibility.”

It’s not just about parents who lose it or children who die. A Pearl spokesperson says that more than 1,400,000 copies of their book “To Train Up a Child” are in print worldwide, distributed at conferences, in church-member welcome baskets, and to military families. What about the kids who live with this “discipline” every day? Diamond, for example, recalls hearing a mother talk about hitting her 6-month-old with a glue stick because the child “cooed and wriggled during a two-hour-long church service, and she wanted to ‘train’ the child to be silent.”

“My wife and I are Christians and the Pearl system is one of the most anti-Christian systems I’ve ever heard of,” says Mathers. “Part of what unnerves me is how many Christians I’ve encountered in the past week who either follow the Pearl system or step around it, saying, ‘They may be a little extreme, but there’s some good principles in there.’ It scares me that there are people walking around with such things being acceptable in their heads. It scares me that people who call themselves Christians are willing to be so mean and merciless, or at the very least, that they feel OK condoning people like that.” (Mathers is also not alone in believing that — long hermeneutical story short — the Pearls’ entire ministry is based on flawed, even heretical, theology.)

He adds: “Not to be crass, but you slap the title ‘Christian’ on something, and all of a sudden it’s the ‘Christian’ thing. Sometimes, in my experience, that’s all it takes for Christians to start following something. There’s not a whole lot of discernment.”

There are other, more concrete hypotheses as to why the Pearls’ extreme philosophy — though based on principles that are hardly brand-new –  has taken such hold now. Some see it as another weapon, taken up out of fear, in the ever-escalating conservative Christian vs. “secular” culture wars. Diamond’s theory: “Pearl’s books play on common fears in the subculture of the deeply religious home-schooling family, who is already by their own choice on the fringes of society: the fear that ‘the world’ will steal children away, the fear that somehow the parents will be to blame.”

Also, the particulars of child-training are only one aspect of the Pearls’ ministry. “The focus when their teachings are promoted isn’t on the spanking, but on the ‘tying heartstrings’ and enjoying your kids,” says Alexandra Bush. “It is easy to filter out the harsher teachings, the extremism, when surrounded by word pictures of peaceful, loving, fun families. The Pearls seem to tell parents that they just have to ‘win’ once and make sure their children know who is in charge, and then they will never have to spank again. That’s how parents get sucked in — promises of a fun, peaceful home, minimal confrontation, doing the ‘right thing’ for their children. Basically, the BS detectors are turned off by the pretty promises that are made.”

Bush believes that’s why the Pearls’ teachings hold so much appeal for conservative, home-schooling parents who are, overall, “highly motivated to spend time with their children, love their children, willing to make sacrifices for their children, want the best for their children. They are not, in general, people prone to neglecting their kids or motivated by abuse and anger,” she says. “So when people criticize the Pearls and in the same breath misrepresent parents who use Pearl parenting, those parents easily tune out the criticism.”

And that’s where the Pearls get their relatively “free pass,” she concludes: “People know parents who are amazing and love their kids and don’t abuse them — and recommend the Pearls — and so they have trouble believing the truth about the awful teachings. After all, if your home-school neighbor family looks like they have it all together, has sweet children and a calm mother — and they use the Pearls, and they don’t beat their kids — then obviously it must be the critics who are wrong. Add to that the loyalty home-school parents have to the home-school movement — hard to criticize one’s own. Finally, even if someone can see the problems with the Pearls’ words, they may be unwilling to admit that the Pearls are completely wrong and off their rocker, because that would be admitting that they themselves were susceptible to bad advice and may have harmed their own kids.”

In other words, says Diamond, Pearl devotees are “loving people, people who take joy in their children, in their marriages, who like to participate in the community and do good for others. They aren’t monsters. It would be easier, I think, to speak up loudly if they were.”

Well, with the Schatzes, the anti-Pearl agitators have their monsters. Diamond believes that the already growing criticism of the Pearls within conservative Christianity — which, beyond child-”training,” also involves complex doctrinal differences and quasi-feminist debate over Debi Pearl’s view of “heavenly marriage” — will now continue to gain in volume. It’s already happening, Diamond says: “I know of many women and men who are quietly speaking out. When material from the Pearls is suggested for parenting classes or Bible studies, they are speaking with the pastor, refuting the materials, begging people to really read what is being said. When another parent mentions the material, they politely respond with the reasons why they’d never use or endorse it. And they are often successful.”

Bush reports the same thing. “In my local circles I’ve seen [Lydia Schatz’s death] as a catalyst for people and leaders in the church to speak up,” she says. One church is planning a Sunday school event to focus on abusive parenting, aimed at parents and at grandparents, given that they might also be effective at intervention. In other churches, a mothers’ group director and other lay leaders have vowed to remain silent no more when they hear someone promoting the Pearls. 

Christian and home-schooling bloggers are also voicing increasing anti-Pearl sentiment, and not just the ones who already reject any form of punitive parenting, Bush notes. Timberdoodle, a highly regarded and influential resource for conservative home-schoolers, responded to Lydia Schatz’s death by exhorting its community to speak up: “Read, be informed, and share with your friends. There are many new, well-meaning parents who are looking for instruction and help in parenting. Use your knowledge to help them keep away from this dangerous path.”

But discrediting the Pearls shouldn’t depend on word-of-mouth or the grass roots, Bush argues. “As a Christian, I believe it has been a failing of the evangelical church in the U.S. as a whole for not warning their members about this type of harmful teaching. It is something the church cannot, biblically, ignore,” she says, noting that increasing resistance to the Pearls comes at a time when even those in the most conservative Christian circles are reevaluating, on theological grounds, the evangelical movement’s embrace of the practice of corporal punishment.

Still, Bush doesn’t believe that the Pearls will ever be fully discredited or lose their influence in the Christian home-school community. “But,” she says, “I do believe that their teachings will be more vocally warned against, more critically evaluated.”

At the very least, critics of the Pearls are holding fast to the hope — or, rather, growing evidence — that Lydia’s death will, somehow, not be in vain. “I hope that this will wake up enough people who follow them,” says Rebecca Diamond. “If everyone stopped buying their books and hiring them to speak, they’d be as powerless and voiceless as all the children who have suffered under their teaching.”

Paul Mathers shares that vision. Though unlikely to be fully realized, it’s a pure expression of his and his wife’s grief and rage — for 7-year-old Lydia, for their friends the Schatzes, who had them for dinner, who gave them bookshelves. “If there were a strong enough popular opinion against the Pearls you wouldn’t have a large number of Christians in a system like this, and then you wouldn’t have a small number of Christians who go too far or make a mistake,” he says. “I would love to see the people rise up and say no to the Pearls, that this will not stand. I would love to see the Pearl system become anathema, disgusting, and shunned by the world. I would love to see the Pearls out of a job. Before another child dies.”

Right now, though, that’s not happening. While numerous countries, cities, and villages on other continents have made significant strides toward prohibiting and preventing the procedure — and while it’s been outlawed by U.S. federal law since 1996 and is also illegal in 17 states — its practice by immigrant families here is, by all anecdotal reports, only increasing. Yet there remains practically no way to address it any way other than case by brutal, heartbreaking case. “The silence hasn’t been broken here,” says Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of Equality Now. “It’s an issue that affects thousands of [U.S.] girls, some of whom were born here, and yet no one is really paying attention.”

FGM refers to several different traditional rite-of-passage practices in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that involve the cutting of female genitals — from a ceremonial pinprick to “clitoridectomy” to removal of part or all of the external genitalia — for non-medical reasons such as “to reduce woman’s libido and help her resist ‘illicit’ sexual acts.” Health consequences include severe pain and bleeding, hemorrhaging, chronic infection, infertility, painful intercourse, post-traumatic stress, pregnancy complications possibly fatal to the baby, and death of the victim herself. FGM is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of women and girls, reflecting, as the World Health Organization puts it, a “deep-rooted inequality between the sexes, and [constituting] an extreme form of discrimination against women.” In her recent landmark speech on global reproductive health, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cited an estimated 70 million victims of FGM among the “intolerable” statistics of women’s lives worldwide; the World Health Organization says it’s as high as 150 million. In the U.S., according to Equality Now, 228,000 women and girls are estimated to have undergone or to be at risk for FGM — a old number long said to be on the rise.

Yet only one case has been prosecuted in the United States, ever; the circumstances were so anomalous, however, that some advocates say it doesn’t even really count. (“We always thought the first one would be a girl who bleeds to death, but that hasn’t been the case,” says Bien-Aime.) Most U.S.-based cases of FGM, or its threat, fly way under the radar — especially when its victims travel out of the country. Reporting, even addressing it at all, is stymied by its deep cultural entrenchment and misplaced “sensitivity” by some outsiders. And, of course, the practice affects primarily girls of color, poor ones at that: pretty much as marginalized and bottom-rung as you get.

Consider New York, whose metropolitan area is considered to have the highest number of women and girls potentially affected by cutting. In the past, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services has worked with Sauti Yetu Center for African Women in the Bronx to provide community forums and awareness trainings for ACS staff — but no more. In fact, an ACS spokesperson said that “the issue of FGM has rarely if ever come across our work in New York City.” Today, search for “female genital” at nyc.gov, and you get a bunch of stuff about STDs. New York state law bans FGM of minors, criminalizing both the person who performs the procedure as well as the parent or guardian who OKs it. The law also requires the state Office of Children and Family Services to establish “education, preventive and outreach” activities in communities where FGM is traditionally practiced. According to reports, however, not much of that has happened in a decade; officials confirmed that there is no particular program in place today. Versions of a bill that would require the state to report to the governor annually on its efforts to address FGM has passed the state assembly repeatedly since 1995 but has died a thousand deaths in the Senate. (Re-re-reintroduced in January 2009 by Assemblywoman Barbara Clark of Queens, the bill is currently cooling its heels in the Senate’s Health subcommittee.) Likewise, according to Bien-Aime and others, little is happening at the federal level, where similar laws both criminalize the act and require outreach. (The Office of Women’s Health did not return repeated calls and emails.)

Much of the work of intervention has therefore fallen to advocacy groups like Equality Now, along with community-based and service organizations such as Sauti Yetu and Sanctuary for Families (SFF). Sanctuary for Families does outreach through schools and community groups, trying to educate both girls and the adults they see — teachers, guidance counselors — about the risks and realities of FGM, offering (for one thing) in-school clinics that give girls the opportunity to raise the issue. “We ask if any students would like to meet with lawyers who can answer questions about immigration and then we raise the issue one-on-one if it seems relevant, based on their country of origin,” explains Pyati. “We might learn that they’re afraid, or that they have a classmate who is.” Sanctuary asks guidance counselors to reassure students that any conversation they have with a Sanctuary lawyer will be confidential, and works to “make sure they know that FGM is a very serious form of violence,” says Pyati.

While school officials are mandated reporters of child abuse, possible cases of FGM may give them — and other adults in a position to suspect it — pause. Is it a “cultural” practice that others somehow must respect? Is reporting it anti-Muslim? Will a child be summarily removed from her home — from an otherwise loving family who bears no other threat of violence? Such concern are misplaced, says Pyati. For one thing, FGM is a social custom, not a religious practice. Also, reporting a suspicion of child abuse does not always or automatically result in separation of the family in question. That said, “It’s a mistake to assume that FGM is a stand-alone event,” she says. “FGM, a serious violation of human rights, is performed in a context of discrimination and violence against women. Where a girl’s rights are so compromised that she has to undergo a painful procedure that is potentially life-threatening and carries life-long physical and psychological consequences, it can indicate that other forms of abuse may be ongoing.” Physical and psychological abuse may be used to force a girl to submit to FGM; FGM may be a way of preparing a girl for a marriage against her will, to which she has no right to object. And once she is married, her family may force her to bear children, have sex and endure other gender-related violence.

Says Pyati: “We report child abuse. Why wouldn’t we report a form of violence against a girl that will change her body for the rest of her life?”

The profound, centuries-old ingrainment of the practice — some believe un-”circumcised” women are possessed by the devil, for example — also makes it hard for large groups like Equality Now to form coalitions with local groups in immigrant communities. The people those groups represent “don’t want to talk about it,” Bien-Aime says. “They feel overwhelmed just by being here. They’re struggling with finding jobs and sending their kids to school. They’re like, ‘Are you crazy? That’s at the bottom of the list. Why are you so obsessed with my daughter’s genitals?’”

And at the level of law enforcement, advocates say, bans on the procedure stateside don’t go nearly far enough. There are “circumcisers” who do the job in the U.S., hush-hush, a whole series in one afternoon, says Bien-Aime. But if we’re not catching them, how are we to track those who perform the procedure on U.S. girls in to their home countries? Only Georgia and Nevada’s anti-FGM laws include so-called “vacation provisions,” which criminalize the removal of a child from the state to subject her to FGM. Advocates say such provisions must be universal.

Even then, prosecution, or at least protection, would still be dependent on someone speaking up, someone dropping a dime. In the UK, France, and Belgium, for example, women’s groups who work with refugees will call partner grassroots groups in Senegal or Mali to let them know that one of their families is heading home with their daughter. The local African group will meet that family at the airport, follow them to their village, and warn them that their daughters had better stay “intact” or their papers will be compromised. “We are light years away from that,” says Bien-Aime. “No one says it’s easy or not sensitive but you have to start someplace. We need to raise awareness with campaigns like those we’ve seen for sexual harassment or domestic violence or anti-smoking,” she continues, noting that many immigrant families arrive here after spending years in refugee camps, unaware that their own countries have taken steps to end the practice. “All the relevant providers need to be in touch and know what FGM is and how to protect the girls, and where we punish those who perpetuate it. The law is a deterrent. All you need is one case to start the process.”

Bien-Aime recalls the case of a 15-year-girl in New York City, forcibly married to an older man, who called Equality Now to say she’d overheard that her 9-year-old and 9-month-old cousins were being sent back to Gambia to be cut. “I scrambled to find a social worker from Gambia to go into the house and talk to the family, but I couldn’t,” says Bien-Aime. The 15-year-old finally warned her cousin, who went to a school counselor, who sent someone to try to intervene. That worked — mostly. “The 9-year-old was left behind for that summer vacation, but we have every reason to believe the 9-month-old was cut,” Bien-Aime says. “She was a U.S.-born child. It happens. Her cousin was just lucky.”

Antiabortion forces, Joffe writes, also deploy the psychological weapon of antiabortion stigma, a potent contaminant of conscience and community that has led to, among other things, “a chronic shortage of [abortion] providers” and even antiabortion hospital practices “that put women’s health at unacceptable risk.” (One Onion-esque example: a woman whose deep-vein thrombosis made her too sick for a clinic abortion. She was cleared for a hospital procedure only after much negotiation; there, her OB tried to persuade her to continue her high-risk pregnancy by making her take a tour of the newborn nursery.) Even when we win, we lose, Joffe argues, observing that even preposterous doomed-to-fail “fetal personhood” initiatives, simply by dint of being out in the cultural ether, “reinforce the idea that abortion is a contentious and stigmatizing issue.” And all of this is an important thing to remember, today especially, the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Joffe makes clear that her target is not your average private citizen who votes, or even campaigns, “pro-life.” It’s the antiabortion (and -contraception) movement’s fanatic fringe, whose “violent actions and extremist political positions … have had significant consequences [and] have established the contours of the abortion wars” — at very least, by making the less-loony hard-liners appear reasonable by contrast. Her argument, based on hundreds of interviews with providers and patients — not to mention 30 years of reproductive health research — is unapologetically one-sided.

“I see myself as a war correspondent, embedded with troops on one side of the conflict,” she writes. Her goal? “To show the costs of these wars. They are costly, obviously, for those seeking abortions and those providing them. But I believe these wars have also proved costly for American society as a whole, causing a degradation of our political culture. The abortion wars have not only brought an unprecedented level of violence and terrorism to health care institutions; they have also led to a culture of lies about science and medicine at the highest levels of government. I have come to understand the abortion wars as a brilliant distraction that drains energies and resources away from other social needs, including the adequate provision of services that would allow people to have the intimate and family lives they wish for.”

Ironically, of course, the abortion wars are “counterproductive, leading to more unintended pregnancies and therefore more abortions,” Joffe notes. The savvier fanatics can’t not know that. Maybe, then, that draining distraction was the objective all along. So, in that sense, have we already lost? Salon talked to Joffe about strategies on both sides of the conflict, and about where she does in fact find hope for peace.

You describe one young doctor who’s afraid to “come out” to senior colleagues as having had abortion training and another relocating to the South who asks colleagues how to “discreetly” get in touch with other providers. How pervasive is antiabortion sentiment in the medical community?

What my research has suggested is that most medical professionals are not against abortion. They are against controversy. Even those who want to provide abortions find that they can’t because even their pro-choice colleagues or potential partners “don’t want to get involved.” They also wind up marginalized or even ostracized by peers who succumb to pressure by local antiabortion groups.

One of my great regrets about this book is that it was in production too late to include the Krispy Kreme controversy, where they announced last Jan. 20 that in honor of Obama’s inauguration they’d give every customer a “free doughnut of choice.” The American Life League, one of the real wingnut groups, went crazy, issuing a press release saying Krispy Kreme was endorsing Obama’s support for abortion rights. Krispy Kreme had to immediately issue their own press release saying, “We didn’t mean that at all — just come in and get a doughnut.”

In other words, we live in a culture where potential controversy lurks around every corner. This will inevitably have an impact on health professionals who are sympathetic to the need for abortion but therefore not interested in providing it. Even when they are, it’s hard. I think my most poignant example is the doctor who wondered whom it was “safe” to tell that she’d had abortion training. It’s like a classic coming-out story. This is not normal. This shouldn’t be. Again and again the stigma helps reinforce the idea that abortion care is different from any other part of medicine. If you’re training to be a cardiologist you don’t have to worry if you blurt that to someone by mistake.

Never mind the fact that they could get shot. You write that before Roe, it was sheer illegality that kept doctors from identifying themselves to one another. Now, it’s stigma, and threats to personal safety. What other comparisons can you make between the pre-Roe era and now?

Yes, one major similarity is that culture of secrecy, though now it’s for different reasons. Many providers today are marginalized just as they were before Roe [i.e., pre-Roe, those who performed abortions out of "medical necessity," whether strictly conforming to the legal definition or not]. But as before Roe, when it becomes known who does abortions, your colleagues who normally ignore you, when they have a patient with serious medical issues [requiring abortion], guess who they call: the doctors they don’t invite to their cocktail parties. There’s both this distance from and dependency on abortion providers that’s so striking. I remember the very first time I spoke with George Tiller in 1998, before he’d become so controversial. I asked him about the reactions of his colleagues, and he said to me that some are realizing that the world is not as black-and-white as they’d thought. These were his colleagues in Wichita who thought of themselves as strongly antiabortion until they had a patient with [a baby who had] anencephaly at 26 weeks pregnant. Then they realized they did need Dr. Tiller’s services.

There is also the continued difficulty — even cruelty — faced by women trying to get medically necessary abortions in hospitals, which I really had not been fully aware of. In the book, I compare the experiences of two doctors who had to beg medical officials for a patient to get an abortion. In the first case, the OB had reason to hesitate, given that it was the 1960s and he was afraid he’d get caught. But the second was in 2007, and all the doctor wanted was what should have been routine approval for a patient in a very serious condition. Even though abortion is legal its provision is not something that can be taken for granted, even in a hospital. You have to beg people.

One difference, though, is the change in strategy of the antiabortion movement — at least since the period right after Roe. Then, women who got abortions were demonized as “sluts” and, bizarrely, given that we didn’t have much advanced fertility technology then, “lesbians.” But that couldn’t last, in part because so many women, including those who were ostensibly anti-choice, were getting abortions. Now the focus is on women as victims. “Abortion hurts women” is one of the big messages, and now the providers are the villains.

Why does abortion occupy such a polarizing place in America, as opposed to, say, in European democracies?

This comes up again and again, and I don’t think there’s one answer. It’s not that there’s no antiabortion sentiment in Europe. It’s just that it hasn’t developed into this huge movement against women and providers. One big difference is that there’s no equivalent elsewhere of the theocratic elements that control so much of our culture right now. And those countries for whatever reason do not seem to have the sexual schizophrenia we do here, where we have thongs for girls but “Our Bodies, Our Selves” banned from libraries. We are a society deeply conflicted about sexuality, especially female sexuality.

Also, where you have national healthcare you can get birth control when you want it, and abortions are often delivered through the same system as other services so you can’t actually surround a clinic the way you can here. But more to the point, abortion is part of a healthcare system. And what happens? The rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion are much lower. It’s a model that’s staring us right in the face.

Historically speaking, the abortion issue took on a life of its own here when the then-new right realized that opposition to the first federally funded childcare bill in 1971 had galvanized a major political force. But childcare itself didn’t have good staying power because of the number of women entering the labor force who needed childcare themselves. So the passage of Roe v. Wade turned out to serve as the perfect “battering ram” — I love that image, from the political scientist Rosalind Petchesky — for a whole range of right-wing issues.

There’s much discussion right now about how essential it is for abortion to be covered by health insurance. But you say many women don’t use the coverage they have. Why?

It’s back to the stigma. They don’t want the paper trail. They may not want their husbands or partners or parents to somehow find out. They’re worried their employers will find out … At the same time, I interviewed a woman who had a $17,000 hospital bill relating to a late-term abortion and was not sure her insurance company would pay. She was still negotiating. At the saddest moment in her life she and her husband were facing financial disaster. Among all abortions these constitute a relatively small number, but not as small as we think. One hundred and fifty thousand abortions take place after 20 weeks. These women will also face enormous difficulties if their insurance is taken away.

What will it take to normalize abortion within the larger healthcare setting? Is that even possible?

The healthcare reform discussions have shown us exactly how not to normalize it. I am heartbroken about how abortion has only been further stigmatized by what we’ve seen over the last few months. What it would take, first of all, is a healthcare bill that paid for contraception — we don’t even know if that’s going to be a fight — and to have the Hyde Amendment repealed so that poor women can have access to the full range of reproductive care, and to have medical schools routinely teach abortion. Which, actually, they are doing a better job of now than they were a number of years ago.

OK, so that’s something. Any other cause for cautious hope?

Well, when Dr. Tiller was murdered, I had to go back through the manuscript and write about him in the past. Obviously, that dampened some of my optimism. But I do find cause for optimism in the dogged determination of the provider community, even when — as in the case of Tiller’s staff, whom I’ve interviewed since the book came out — who always had to order their pizza without giving a name and then go pick it up because the place wouldn’t even deliver to them. These are people who in the middle of all the craziness found an imam to come instruct them in the details of burial of ashes [the clinic cremates fetal remains] so that they could fully serve their Muslim patients. I know it sounds schmaltzy, but when there are people like this in the field, I can’t not be optimistic. Just as a powerful abortion rights movement has begun to emerge within American medicine, social movements create other social movements. The very virulence and aggression of the antiabortion movement in many ways makes the provider community that much stronger.

There’s also the example of the Jennifer Boulanger, a clinic director in Allentown who decided to go public — she was on Rachel Maddow — about threats she’d received, and she actually began to get unanticipated support from people in the area who were outraged. Even a local Lutheran pastor developed an informal network that meets periodically to talk about how to bring peace to the community. The message is, “Let us disagree, but peacefully.” That’s really the hope. That what I call the “civilians” in the abortion wars will come forward and stand together to stop the bullies.

Indeed, if aliens landed tomorrow and analyzed the writing staffs of late-night comedy shows — Earth’s daily dose of mainstream humor — they might draw the conclusion that laughter is almost exclusively the domain of the human male. “It pains me,” Scovell wrote, “that almost 20 years [after leaving Letterman], the situation for female writers in late-night-TV hasn’t improved.” And this isn’t so much about political correctness as it is about quality entertainment (to say nothing of simple fairness and equal opportunity). Because let’s face it, if aliens analyzed certain late-night ratings, they might conclude that Earthmen actually aren’t that funny at all. The bottom line here is what makes better comedy. And as Scovell says, “It’s been my experience that a room with a fairer sampling of humanity will always produce funnier material.”

The conversation about women and humor is legendarily fraught — and nearly as old as the one about the chicken and the road. And recently we’ve picked it up again, with a round of articles — even before Scovell’s — taking these shows (and, gently, the Onion) to task, and not for the first time, for their blatant, even bizarre, dude-centricity. “Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing?” asked the New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin not long ago. “Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O’Brien. Come on.” A look at industry statistics bears this out. The 2007 Hollywood Writers Report by the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW), found that not only had women and minorities not made any hiring gains since 2005; in some areas, they had actually moved backward. And the 2009 report found little improvement, with women “stuck” at 28 percent of television employment and 18 percent of film employment. (Also see New York Times critic Manohla Dargis get medieval on the dearth of women in film here.) “These findings are clearly out of step with a nation that elected its first African American president in 2008, a nation in which more than half of the population is female and nearly a third is non-white,” the report states. “America will continue to become increasingly diverse — this much is guaranteed. And reflecting these changes in staffing and stories is just good business.”

But if you ask people who work on late-night shows right now, as well as sitcoms and other comedies (and I asked a lot of them), you’ll find that some writers and producers are getting pretty tired of such charges. It’s not necessarily true that they don’t want to hire women. Truth is, there are far fewer women applicants; that’s in part a problem with late-night’s principal farm team — stand-up comics — who, for reasons that could fill a whole separate article, also heavily skew male. As Bill Carter noted in the New York Times, “The Daily Show” has made an explicit effort to get women to apply for jobs often filled through a guy-heavy grapevine; other writers interviewed for this piece say they “know for a fact” their show is looking for women. Women TV comedy writers generally love their jobs, fart jokes and and all. So if women want to be there, and the shows seem to want them there, what’s going wrong?

Well, speaking of fart jokes, let’s start in the writers’ room. It is the crucible where TV comedy is forged, and, though show cultures vary widely, “late-night writers’ rooms are not fabulous places to be,” says Jonathan Bines, currently a writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “They’re miserable for everyone.” As many writers describe it, what goes on in the room — even for safe-for-prime-time shows — is basically the bullying, trash-talking big brother of what more conventional professions call “brainstorming.” Kinder and gentler exceptions abound, of course. But the basic model is this: Writers pitch ideas like chimps hurl turds; only from that aggressive, competitive — and, most to the point, uncensored — free-for-all, they say, does comedy gold emerge. That’s what makes TV comedy unique — and especially challenging — when it comes to bringing in women. Ladying up any male-dominated industry is a complex process; now try it in a place where “whore” and “cunt” jokes are an accepted part of a normal business day. Accepted by men and women. “My experience at Conan was great,” says Janine Ditullio, who in 1995 became the first woman hired to write for Conan O’Brien (and before that, the first woman to write for the original 1993 “Jon Stewart Show“). “One time we had this sexual harassment guy come in from H.R. and explain what not to do — and it was ludicrous because we were so far beyond the line. He was like, ‘Be careful about complimenting someone on her clothing,’ ‘Don’t make comments about people’s body parts,’ but we were just being lewd and disgusting all the time. A lot of it is just being loose enough to be creative.”

“If you’re not comfortable with sexual humor or with crudeness or with all sorts of people being really honest about certain emotions, then yeah, this job is not for you,” says Daley Haggar, a woman who has written for comedies including “The Big Bang Theory” and “South Park.” “People say all sorts of things that, in a normal corporate environment, would be beyond the pale but in a comedy room are part of the process.” (Even the California Supreme Court agreed, ruling in 2006 — against a female “Friends” staffer — that writers’ room grossness did not add up to sexual harassment.)

So yes, this is a pretty rarefied context. “To call a writers’ room misogynist is sort of misleading,” a (male) late-night writer says. “It’s an environment that thrives on the inappropriate or extreme. At the risk of sounding like a baby to people who break up concrete for a living, I’d say that writing comedy all day, every day, can be mentally exhausting and stressful. The writers’ room tends to function like a shock absorber for that stress. Also when you spend your time working in comedy, you start to take a kind of cold, clinical approach to it. So sometimes the only things left that really make you genuinely laugh anymore are the shocking or absurd. The writers’ room tends to be a forum for that kind of humor. I rarely see it as misogynist (or racist, or homophobic) — it’s just crude. Crude and immature, and tearfully funny.”

Crude we can deal with, women in the business insist. Viciously sexist too, even, in context. “That’s what’s fun. That’s why we get into comedy: to mess around with comedians all day. I’m sure there are lines that get crossed — part of what makes comedy fun is crossing those lines,” says Ali Waller, who has written for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and “The Showbiz Show With David Spade.” We can stand the heat, they say. We like the heat. That’s why we’re here. “It’s a very aggressive medium, and it’s not the medium for fragile flowers,” says the venerable Janis Hirsch, who calls herself the oldest living female sitcom writer. (Two words: “Square Pegs.”) “It’s a job. It’s not a perfect world. Women have to either nut up and get into the spirit of it or not look for a job on a show that’s all about men.”

Still, even some of the most florid trash-talkers — Hirsch included — also said that other lines do get crossed. And that’s where things get tricky. With so many bitch, asshole and cocksucker stories already flying, of course, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly when that happens; that’s the problem. But some women do say they’ve felt it like a sucker punch when everyday chain-yanking makes the leap from “process” to personal. Just one example of many, from an experienced female writer: Once, in the writers’ room, she told a couple of jerky ex-boyfriend stories she thought could be good script fodder. This prompted another writer to start ranting — angrily, not riffing — about how women “always date jerks.” Another narrowed his eyes at her. “A guy acting like an asshole?” he said. “That’s what makes you spread your legs?”

Her observation: “When a guy tells a story about an ex-girlfriend screwing him over, he gets laughs and maybe sympathy. When a girl tells a story about a guy screwing her over, she gets a lecture, or worse. The whole discussion becomes a referendum on women’s sanity,” she says. “I call this ‘nice guy misogyny,’” she goes on. “Overt sexism is easy to deal with. Someone zings you, you zing him back. The real problem comes from the supposedly ‘nice married guys’ who secretly resent women for being on their turf and take it out on them in various subtle ways.” In a place where personal misery becomes professional hilarity, everyone brings a back story of pain — mommy issues, a nasty ex, hatred for the head cheerleader — so perhaps it’s especially easy to become a lightning rod when you’re the only one in the room with two X chromosomes.

Indeed, some women believe that resentment began a whole lot earlier than pilot season. “My theory is that some guys at a very early age don’t feel like they’ll ever get women, so they say, ‘OK, humor is gonna be my thing.’ But they never lose that bitterness toward women. Any woman who could reject them is the enemy,” said one experienced female sitcom writer. “So a lot of what goes on in these rooms is this defense mechanism from fucking middle school.’”

(When I ran this by a few guys, they didn’t entirely disagree. “Men are always afraid of being judged by women,” said one male alum of both Comedy Central and late-night. “I could see an insecure guy at least feeling stifled by a woman in the room even if there was no actual stifling going on.”)

Speaking of stifling, women writers say they rarely holler foul when something sets off their own personal too-far-o-meter. “It’s hard to speak up and say, ‘I’m offended as a lady,’ because the whole point is you’re trying not to be different,” says one female writer for comedy variety shows. (Aside: When she interviewed for one recent job, the executive producers had the following conversation right in front of her: “We already have a woman. Do you think she’ll mind?”) So — perhaps putting to rest some alleged male fears — women may sometimes wind up going along with stuff they wish they hadn’t. As sitcom writer Corinne Marshall put it in an essay on the Huffington Post: “While off-color humor suited my palate just fine, there were times when I felt I was selling out, taking something a little too far just to impress the boys. For example, joking about an actresses’ weight. In my mind, it’s never OK to talk to guys about how fat a girl is and yet I found myself doing just that. Later, I felt really shitty … because I had betrayed a principle just to ‘be down.’”

There is pressure to prove that you’re impossible to offend, women say, which causes some “to overcompensate by being incredibly dirty,” said one female sitcom writer. “It’s like you’re trying to convey to your boss, ‘Hey, don’t worry. I’m not that chick from ‘Friends.’ I won’t sue you for saying the word ‘cunt.””

For related reasons, they sometimes also keep some material to themselves — sometimes even the good stuff. “Even if I thought I had a really great dating joke I think I wouldn’t put it out there because I’d be afraid of being pegged as a little too boys-and-pizza — you know, girls-in-pajamas stuff,” said the comedy variety writer. All of that said, writers and producers, male and female, say that actually — no, really — they do want women in the room. It’s a matter of fairness, yes, but it’s principally about craft. They agree with Scovell: Comedy comes out better that way. As a general rule, if you need to write a woman’s role, women writers come in handy. (“Whenever you see a mother sitting on a couch reading a magazine, you know there are no women writers on that staff,” says Hirsch.) But it’s not just about woman-particular “perspective” — of course, there’s no one such homogeneous thing, anyway. Having women in the room (along with anyone else outside the white Yale male profile) simply gives you “a greater diversity of takes,” says one male head writer. Well, sure. We may never cross the fart barrier, but that doesn’t mean the writing isn’t better with chicks in the room.

For that to really work, though, there have to be chicks, plural. Not just one woman who’s therefore the woman and — as in some cases — diverted from the free-wheeling fart-topia by the demands of constant triangulation: pipe up, shut up, nut up?

“Being the only woman can be lonely, but you get used to it,” says one woman who’s written for several late-night shows. “Then you work with another woman who’s cool, and it’s like, wow, this is great. This is what it’s like to be a male writer, all the time.” But let’s dream even bigger, shall we? “Even more important than stocking any given staff with female writers, women have to make the effort to become show runners who set the tone and create their own projects. That’s where you get real diversity,” says the writer who got called out for dating jerks. (According to the WGA (PDF), women are half as likely as men to be show runners.) “Tina Fey doing what she does, that’s what really changes the landscape.” (Also, hi, Wanda Sykes.)

Tina Fey has changed the landscape. But she can’t do what she does without writers. (As of this Variety article, “30 Rock” had four women and seven men.) Neither can the guy hosts, whose monologues have, for better or worse, the power to help shape the cultural conversation — even the election — of the moment.

“The mystery to me is why any sort of general audience gives a shit about this issue,” said one accomplished (male, woman-writer-friendly) late-night scribe. “We’re talking about a total of like 80 jobs in America.”

But, arguably, late-night does matter. Or, at least, it has mattered. From now on, that’s up to the powers that be.