When Sen. Joan Bray spoke to the Bonhomme Township Democrats, the subject of the coerced abortion bill came up, and Rep. Jill Schupp, sitting at the head table, described a hearing she had attended in the House:

Schupp:We had someone who testified she had an abortion when she was sixteen, who was …. She had a boyfriend, but she had, she became pregnant by someone else. She later in life married the boyfriend. He’s her husband. He sat by her while she testified. She said that her mom had convinced her that she should have an abortion, and she said that if she could, she would have her mom put in jail for forcing her at the age of sixteen to have an abortion from a boy who was not her boyfriend. Anyway, these are the kinds of things that are going on. I mean, for someone to say–and I specifically said to her, that you would have liked to have seen your mother go to jail? And she said, “Absolutely.”

These are the kinds of hearings that we’re having. And had the Senate, had Joan not worked so hard and, to, to, to take some of the edge off of that horrible bill, it would have passed in the House. Instead, the House didn’t even bring it back up.

Bray: Yeah it was made so unacceptable because it wasn’t horrible enough. I will tell you, I’ve had it up to here with these folks [inaudible]. And I am, you know, [applause] I’ve been there seventeen years that we’ve had these issues, seventeen years, it’s always been  what … how to put barriers up, how to put barriers, how to put barriers up. Never ONCE has it ever been acknowledged that a man has anything to do with an unwanted pregnancy. It’s: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” And so it’s just a re-e-al irrational … [someone adds: “ridiculous”] [Garbled] There is no acknowledgement that there’s any, any problem outside of a woman’s problem.

Audience member: Joan.

Bray: And it’s not just a woman’s problem. It’s our society’s problem.

Audience member: Joan, has anybody proposed an amendment to the bill that says you have to have informed consent to carry through with the pregnancy? That a doctor has to ….

Bray: We talked, we talked about that. You know, we talked about that. I brought that up. Yeah [nodding vigorously].

Audience member: And how about coercing your teenage daughter against an abortion? And make her donate her body [garbled]

I can imagine an anti-abortionist watching Senator Bray’s facial expression when she mocks the anti-abortionists’ attitude: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” Such a person might think it fair to dismiss her altogether because she stooped to such a mean spirited caricature. But Bray is dead on in her characterization. Granted, few anti-abortionists would allow such facial contortions to show when they speak in the legislature or in most public forums, but make no mistake, Bray caught the souls of those judgmental folk. Consider that bills to prevent unplanned pregnancies languished in the last session of the Republican controlled House.  Consider that the representatives tried to pass House Bills 226 and 533, which would have allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Consider that in past sessions, Republicans have worked to deny poor women access to free contraception (how dare they enjoy sex without having to pay a penalty!).

Anti-abortionists oppose more than abortion. They want women to bear children–without discovering that sex in and of itself is kinda fun. And Joan Bray is rightly fed up to here with seventeen years of watching their nonsense.

Furthermore, some of them, when they don’t get their way, “water the radius around them with their vitriol” and [poke] dangerous lone wolfs with sticks” so that a young woman winds up wanting her mother put in jail and Dr. Tiller winds up dead.

Let me understate the case: theirs is not a healthy outlook.

Two weeks ago, of course, nobody knew that this year’s anti-abortion joke of a bill would get shot down in the House. So last week, pro-choice senators had to be thinking, some option that was they were being offered: agree to a law that forces medical professionals to lie to patients seeking abortions or stand by and watch a much worse law passed.

And by “much worse law”, I’m not even referring to that godawful grotesquerie the House sent over containing a provision making it a felony to coerce a woman to have an abortion. As I’ve pointed out before:

When “Honey, I think you should have an abortion” becomes a felony, we might as well move to Afghanistan.

Republican senators, being, on the whole, less wild eyed than their House counterparts, knew that the “Freedom of speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ freedom of speech” coercion provision wasn’t going to fly. They’d have needed 18 votes to move the previous question (that is, force a vote) and shove it by the Democrats. But even with 23 Rs to 11 Ds in the Senate, the votes weren’t there.

So Democrats in the Senate knew the coercion provision was off the table. Even if it hadn’t faced a Nixon veto, the Supreme Court would have deep sixed it. No, the choice Democrats faced was between two bills that both required:

• that a woman seeking an abortion come in on two separate days, first to be informed of the risks and then to receive the abortion
• that professionals working in abortion clinics lie to patients about the possible effects of abortion.

Both bills required that women be warned they would face certain psychological consequences, but that information is based on junk science. True, the claims were printed in reputable journals, but that doesn’t make them credible:

The articles, filled with ersatz science, are indeed printed in respected journals. That’s because such journals take a few articles on controversial topics, knowing that the peer review process will reveal them to be full of holes. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff. The Elliot Institute [an anti-abortion group] lies, in effect, when it pretends its claims are wheat, not chaff.

You might think that such discredited information could be successfully challenged in court, but you would be wrong. Senator Jolie Justus, D-Kansas City, and Senator Joan Bray, D-St. Louis, were in touch with litigators at the national offices of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, who told them that such provisions had been upheld in legal challenges elsewhere in the country. Furthermore, the Missouri 8th Circuit has proven hostile to challenges to the anti-abortion laws passed by Republicans.

It was obvious, then, that pro-choicers were going to have to swallow a bitter pill and vote for the lesser of two evils. Although the differences in the two bills Democrats faced look small, they matter. As Justus put it, it’s the difference between being kneecapped and having your head shot off. Fortunately for the pro-choice camp, the Republicans preferred to offer something they could pass without having to move the previous question. They had the votes to pass either version, but they’d have had to PQ Democrats on the more draconian one, a move they’re loath to employ.

So, what were the differences?

• The milder version would have exempted the Columbia abortion clinic for three years from the new requirement that a patient be at the clinic in person to receive the medical warnings. If she doesn’t live in Columbia, that would necessitate two trips or two days in the city–a hardship for many women seeking abortion. Justus pointed out to me that the Republican senators offered this provision in order to make the bill more palatable.
• The milder version didn’t require that the false information be dispensed by a doctor. It could be given to patients by any qualified medical professional. It would have been economically impractical for abortion clinics to pay a doctor to be on the premises to give out the information and then to return 24 hours later (because of the mandatory waiting period) to perform the abortion.
• The milder version said that the information offered in the informed consent sessions had to be “medically accurate.” With Margaret Donnelly heading the Department of Health and Senior Services, believe it: that provision would have been enforced.

Pro-choice senators voted for the bad, but less onerous, version–though not before Bray reamed out Republicans. (If you didn’t read about it, treat yourself to some red meat.)

And the hotheads in the House blew their top that their precious coercion nonsense had evaporated and that Columbia was getting a three year reprieve. There was talk in the hallways about how the Senate version had been written by ACLU lawyers! House anti-abortionists refused to vote for it, so the whole hoopla ended up being moot for another year.

The only people who breathed a sigh of relief were the pro-choicers and, oddly enough, the people on the pro-abortion side who make their living working on this issue. As Justus pointed out, there are more than sixty anti-abortion laws on the Missouri books, forty of them passed since 2000. Unless Roe is overturned, pretty much everything that can be done to put up barriers to abortion has been done. But those folks making their living off of the quarrel don’t want to lose their livelihoods. It’s a cottage industry that is working very hard to perpetuate itself.

So they’ll be back, come January. And this year’s sparring was, what?, round nine of a fight that could go past fifteen rounds. See you next year for round ten.