The XX Factor: What women really think.

Choose Life, Choose Ultrasounds

Hanna, I can't get too hot and bothered about the Choose Life license plates in Virginia either. There's a confusing legal fight over whether these plates like these violate the First Amendment right to free speech, which as Dahlia explained way back in 2003, comes down to this:

To understand the free speech issue, it's important to clarify whether specialty license plates represent government speech or private citizens' speech. Why? Because there is no question that the government may speak in a partisan manner without violating the Constitution. The First Amendment applies only to government efforts to restrict private speech; it doesn't apply back to the state itself. This is why the state is perfectly free to tell you to stay in school, or drive sober, without having to broadcast the opposing viewpoint. States may have preferences for all sorts of messages. But if, on the other hand, the government opens a forum for private speakers—if it creates a park or builds a street where you and I are free to talk—it cannot be in the business of censoring some viewpoints while permitting others. This is the core of the First Amendment.

Lesson: If you don't like the Choose Life message, come up with a pro-choice one of your own to propose to Gov. Kaine and the Virginia legislature. If they nix it, then maybe you have grounds to sue. There's something odd about a government-issued Choose Life plate, but then there's something odd about zipping around with OPNWDE on the back of your car too, as the guys on You Look Nice Today have pointed out.

About the Kansas ultrasound law: It sounds like this one merely requires abortion providers to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound before the procedure. If so, ok. Most clinics do ultrasounds before an abortion anyway, to make sure they know how many weeks along the pregnancy is. Ten other states, by my count, have laws like this one in Kansas, and as Will Saletan has argued in Slate, why should women be shielded from accurate scientific information, which is what an ultrasound is?

But there's another kind of ultrasound law that's quite different in my mind. Under this sort of statute, which is the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the state requires women to review the results of an ultrasound even when the patients expressly say they do not want to. This is creepy and invasive paternalism. The Oklahoma statute went so far as to provide that a woman could avert her eyes from the image on the screen. A law that has to grant such permission doth protest too much. More here.