Rachael, All right, you caught me on my own overheated rhetoric (see what I get for posting at 6 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend? I had a great time at Boston's beautiful fireworks, by the way—hope you had a fab weekend too!). No, I do not believe that being willing to perform abortions should be a requirement for getting and ...

EJ, I hope you had a great holiday weekend. I don't want to wade into general disagreement territory, either—I suppose most of us have our heels dug in deeply enough that we're not going to change one another's minds. But I wanted to address a few points that you made. If indeed the ''harsh rhetoric'' has made abortion less accessible, isn't ...

This abortion ruling strikes me as a lot like the religious culture-war debates, where we spend a lot of time fighting about symbolics and very little about things that matter (a creche vs. faith based funding, abortion language vs. actual access)  The language suggested by the South Dakota law seems wholly beside the point. For one thing, ...

As if Emily's article hadn't left me appalled enough about South Dakota's Orwellian new abortion ''disclosure'' law, I actually clicked over to read the 8th Circuit's appalling decision. Fortunately, no one else was in the office—everyone's sensibly headed out for the Fourth of July holiday—so they couldn't hear the astonished and foul language ...

Dana, Even though we sit on opposite sides of the abortion debate, I am also uneasy with South Dakota's law compelling abortion doctors to tell women that they are terminating the ''the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.'' There are a million and one better ways to reduce the number of abortions, from better sex education and ...

But the point, Melinda, of my hypothetical story about the pregnant woman in South Dakota is that neither she nor her doctors necessarily hold the belief that abortion is the taking of a life. The doctors who require her to sign aren't ''pointing out'' that there's ''a person in there'' (or ''a human being,'' in the carefully parsed words of the ...

Emily’s piece about the new abortion bill set to go into effect in South Dakota has me madder and sadder than anything I’ve read in some time. (Actually, the last thing that got me into this state was also in Slate: In Steven Greenhouse’s story about the scarcity of vacation time in America, he mentions that the United States is one of ...

With all the ''will she or won’t she'' speculation about Hillary Clinton dropping out, a lot of people seem to forget that nobody knows how tonight’s elections will turn out. (This lack of interest may have something to do with the low stakes—Clinton’s done either way.) Stoking the drama, such as it is, is a recent ARG poll that shows Clinton ...