Roundup: Pro-Choice Begich Wins Alaska Senate Seat; Tiller Trial Continues

Anti-Choice Sen. Ted Stevens Loses Seat
Anti-choice Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has lost his re-election race to Anchorage mayor Paul Begich, a pro-choice Democrat endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice America. The Democrats are now two seats shy of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Writes Politico, "Begich defeated the Senate giant by a 3,724-vote margin after absentee and early votes were counted, a stunning end to a 40-year Senate career marred by Stevens’ conviction on corruption charges a week before the election."

Anti-Choicers Fighting Roe Marginalized?
Reacting to yesterday's Washington Post story on anti-choicers switching gears to work on programs to support women bringing pregnancies to term rather than overturning Roe, Catholic News Agency worried about tactics employed to "marginalize both pro-lifers who favor outlawing abortion and people who oppose homosexual politics."  The CNA piece extensively covers the work of the Third Way Foundation, a center-left think tank that has produced a memo suggesting politicians say, "“Conservatives want to tear this country apart and throw people in jail. I want to reduce the need for abortions by preventing unintended pregnancies and supporting pregnant women.”

Ross Douthat Says Anti-Choice Movement Should Stop Waging War on Contraception
Conservative commentator Ross Douthat endorses a variety of abortion bans and limitations in a recent blog post at the Atlantic, but says that the right-to-life movement should drop its fight against contraception, acknowledging that the right to use contraception is fundamental to the "post-Sexual Revolution human heart." 

I don't find the argument that either pill should be classified as an abortifacent particularly convincing, and I don't think the pro-life movement is helping its cause by blurring the lines between actual abortifacents, like RU-486, which are taken with the intent to abort an embryo, and contraceptives that are designed to prevent conception, but may have the secondary effect of preventing implantations on rare occasions. (At the moment, moreover, the evidence that this ever actually happens is relatively thin.) I think a pro-life movement that expends a great deal of energy campaigning against the pill is essentially assuming the permanence of Roe and Casey, and placing its hopes in a much broader cultural transformation that seems extremely unlikely at the present pass. It's behaving like a Church, in a sense, rather than a political movement, and I already have a Church: The point of the pro-life movement, as I see it, is to seek discrete and plausible political change, not to seek a revolution in the post-Sexual Revolution human heart.

Tiller's Lawyers Argue that Charges Should Be Dismissed
The trial against Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider charged with misdemeanors based on abortion care provided to women with fetuses viable outside the womb, is underway in Wichita, Kansas.  Tiller's lawyers are trying to convince the judge to throw out the allegations because the case is "based on evidence that Kline collected through abuse of his authority as the state's top law enforcement officer," writes Ron Sylvester in the Wichita Eagle.  Kline gathered evidence by conducting an investigation to determine whether abortion providers like Tiller were properly reporting sexual abuse among teens.  He later announced that his definition of indications of sexual abuse included any sex among underage patients, including consensual sex among teens of similar ages. Writes Sylvester, "The broad ruling so outraged health care providers and social workers that a group sued Kline in federal court and won." (Sylvester is also Twittering the case.)