Some time ago, probably while cooking up the oxymoron "compassionate conservatism" in the propaganda dungeons of the right, it occurred to anti-choice forces that their image was suffering from the (correct) perception that they want to curtail women's rights because they don't have very warm feelings for women.  Clearly, they needed to put some lipstick on that pig and convince the public that, all evidence to the contrary, they do give a damn about women.  It was a momentous task indeed.  After all, women themselves--with their paychecks, right to vote, and modern ideas about controlling their own lives--were the problem.  

The solution, as it has been throughout history, was to construct a mythological Good Girl to defend against all those Bad Girls, with their sex-having, paycheck-drawing ways.  The Good Girl is sweet, submissive, religious, maternal, and self-sacrificing.  She doesn't like sex and doesn't want to be in that scary world of work.  But she does love marriage and babies, and is willing to tolerate sex to get the marriage and babies.  Bad Girls like sex, and want to have it even if they can't get pregnant.  Bad Girls think about other things besides marriage and babies, even if they do want to get married and have a baby or two.   

The clever contribution anti-choicers made to this millennia-old Madonna/whore dichotomy was the theory that all women are, deep down inside, baby-loving, sex-reluctant, marriage-crazed Good Girls.  Bad Girls only exist because they've been broken by feminism and legal abortion.  Bad Girls are mentally ill, and just need to be forced into motherhood by losing access to abortion and contraception to turn them into Good Girls, who may not be happy, but are well -- in the sense of functioning properly.    

Because this is a silly theory, there's been a long-standing hope that science would come in and save the day, by proving once and for all that women who have rights and use them are broken, especially if they use their right to abortion.  Anti-choicers concocted a fake mental illness called "Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome," and hoped that the psychological establishment would one day validate it, and their beliefs. The idea was that Bad Girls who do the most Bad thing you can do -- get an abortion -- would be more likely to be mentally ill than other women, demonstrating that having rights is damaging to women. 

Well, anti-choice activists, who are well-stocked with science-wary fundamentalist Christians, will be telling themselves that they should have known those liberal college science types were never on their side, because the American Psychological Association has once again determined that abortion poses no risk to women's mental health.  The reality of the Madonna/whore dichotomy was not discussed in the report, but it was implicitly debunked.  It turns out that women are actually not stupid or crazy as a rule, but perfectly capable of making their own decisions.  Like men.  Like citizens. 

It was clear to me that if the APA had found anything for anti-choicers to cling to, they would have immediately moved on to creating a mental illness to describe women who use contraception.  Artificial Infertility Disorder, maybe?  Symptoms: Sleeping through the night, a bank account of an unseemly size for a woman, a stunning lack of shotgun weddings, an unfeminine enjoyment of her sex life, and a really unfeminine loss of stress in her sexual relationships with men.   

It's hard to celebrate this news, though, because the idea that women are, as a class, less competent than men and unable to make important decisions about child-bearing without threatening their especially fragile mental health has taken off in the mainstream discourse even as the APA finds it scientifically unsound.  Women-as-fragile-incompetents instead of as citizens has been enshrined in the Supreme Court decision Gonzales v Carhart.  

Even, distressingly, pro-choice politicians are beginning to feel they have to pay lip service to the idea that women are especially incompetent and that our rights have to be considered in that light. Linda Hirshman counted out the ways. 

The Hyde Amendment pulled Medicaid financing for the poorest and most desperate women. In 1992, the Clinton campaign reframed abortion as an unpleasant last resort. Last term, the Supreme Court finally broke, affirming the criminalization of certain late-term abortions. And Democratic candidate Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, compared women's regrets over their past abortions to white people's regrets about past bigotry. This Clintonian compromise--that abortion was a necessary moral evil--had become the most progressives could hope for. 

Every time a pro-choicer tries to appeal to the "mushy middle" with these tactics, they reaffirm the idea that there are Good Girls who have lots of children and not lots of sex, and Bad Girls who are just Good Girls who've lost their way.  It might win votes--no one could accuse Barack Obama at this point of having a poor political compass--but it ultimately comes at the cost of undercutting abortion rights.  Because if abortion is always wrong, always the bad choice, always a regretful action--that is, if there are so many broken Bad Girls out there--then it becomes impossible to really defend women's rights. 

How?  Well, Good Girls are fundamentally defined as those women who realize that they are powerless to run their own lives and have to submit to men and to their traditional, submissive roles in order to hold their fragile female selves together.  Bad Girls are hot messes, who didn't submit and therefore are falling apart.  What they have in common is that they, being women, can't make their own decisions, and only do well when controlled by others.