Tuesday, April 17, 2012

A 72-Hour Wait for Santorum

This past weekend, a student sent me an email with a question about the "Born Alive Infant Bill" (the bill that Obama's opposition to when he was still a Senator had him slapped with accusations of supporting "infanticide") and I found myself writing back a 500+ word response about fetal pain laws, how gestational age affects legislation around abortion, and pro-life politics/policies while simultaneously trying to temper my response so that I wouldn't scare my student off.

(I don't think that politics of this type really have a place in the classroom; it's my job to make my students think and learn how to ask difficult questions, not to preach or "convert" them to my way of thinking--that never works, anyway.)

It turns out my student was appreciative of my, unnecessarily verbose, explanation and the whole back-and-forth got me thinking that I need/want to formulate a more extensive response to the state of the reproductive rights debate in America these days. That said, consider this blog post a placeholder for that analysis, as I have something like 75 papers to grade in the next week and should be focusing my efforts on that.

In the meantime, enjoy this related video made by Ashley Judd (my new hero) and a number of other recognizable faces. I'm not usually one to joke about reproductive rights, but in this case I'll make an exception because this video is amazing:


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