I'm Not the First Guy to Observe This

Someone posted a link to this video clip by Bill Nye the Science Guy, allegedly "bring[ing] science to bear on the abortion debate."

This reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of a business meeting, all men in suits except for one woman. The leader of the meeting is saying, "That's a very interesting suggestion, Miss Jones. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it." Nye isn't saying anything that women haven't said many times, but of course, being science-based, a male statement counts for more.  His bowtie alone inspires absolute confidence!  Science has been brought to bear on the abortion debate before, but of course Nye's fans are historically illiterate, so they can't be expected to know that.

I like the "He tends to prefer facts" bit. Well, let's look at some facts. Nye alludes to "'men of European descent' having their own interpretation of 'a book written 5,000 years ago' and then deciding that abortion should be illegal." What book could he be talking about? The Bible was written less than 3,000 years ago, parts of it less than 2,000, by men of West Asian descent; many of its present-day fans are of African and East Asian descent. Further, the Bible doesn't say anything about abortion. So, those -- whatever their descent may be -- who oppose abortion aren't basing it on the Bible.

Another science-based writer who sought to shed scientific light on reproductive issues reported that "among women between the age of fifteen and forty-nine in the United States, 70 percent of Catholic women were using some form of contraception in 1995, about the same percentage of all women in that age group. ... The data are quite clear: the Catholic Church has very limited moral authority with Catholic laity in matters of sexual behavior and reproductive health."  In fact, Catholic women are more likely to get an abortion than Protestants. So, even people who officially accept the authority of that five-thousand-year-old book nevertheless do what they want to do.  That's at least partly because the Church no longer has the power to punish them; as the composer Hector Berlioz observed of the Roman Catholic Church more than a century ago, "Since she has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, her creeds are charming."

The "science" Nye cites has little, maybe nothing to do with the issue. One could accept his every claim yet still oppose abortion, perhaps out of a desire to control women that doesn't come from religion but uses religion to give more authority to policies that wouldn't otherwise have any. Many atheist, pro-science males still want to control women. Religion has no inherent moral content: people put their wishes and prejudices into the religons they invent. But then science has no inherent moral content either, apart from the professional ethics that govern scientists' work internally.  And alas, when scientists who don't know very much outside their specialties try to address social or political issues, they generally make fools of themselves. Well-intentioned fools, often, but fools nonetheless.

The Question Is Who Is To Be Master

I just read Katha Pollitt's new book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador), and I recommend it strongly to anyone who's concerned about reproductive justice.  It's Pollitt at her best: lucid, rational, informed.  Since I've so often criticized her when she wasn't at her best, I'm glad to see her back in form.

Since I largely agree with her arguments, I'm not going to say much here.   This passage caught my attention because of what she didn't say:

Anti-abortion conservatives cannot admit out loud that they have basically abandoned mothers and children.  Churches and charities, they claim, will get them on their feet, with no red tape and no burden on the on the taxpayer [159].

If anti-abortion conservatives really felt this way (and I agree that they do say some version of it), then why was there a fad under Republican administrations, including Republicans-Except-In-Name like Barack Obama, for government support of "faith-based" charities?  This wasn't universal, to be sure; I believe that Pat Robertson himself warned that taking government money would open churches to government surveillance and interference.  But a believer who argues against government social programs on the ground that churches and charities can take their place should oppose faith-based charities on principle.

Pollitt falls into a familiar secularist mistake, unfortunately:

Secular people may believe abortion is wrong, they may even think women who have abortions are sluts and worse, but they don't have a divinely approved worldview that officially defines women in terms of wifely, domestic, and maternal duties and makes abortion the key to modern downfall and depravity.

Perhaps this is a good place to point out that most mainstream Protestant denominations, as well as reform and conservative Judaism, are at least moderately pro-choice, although they hardly shout their position from the rooftops.  Their quiet on the subject gives the misleading impression that "faith" itself is hostile to reproductive rights.  Be that as it may, if you want to understand why there is so little significant organized resistance to legal abortion in France, Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia, the lower level of religiosity, and the much smaller role religion plays in national life, is much of the answer [169].

Wow, "divinely approved"?  Really?  If that were true, that worldview would have to be taken at least a little more seriously than Pollitt does, or I do.  And I know that Pollitt, who like me is an atheist, doesn't really think that the male-supremacist worldview is divinely approved; I presume she was being snarky here.  But she repeats the blunder more seriously, when she asserts that there's less organized resistance to legal abortion in certain other countries because of "the lower level of religiosity, and the much smaller role religion plays in national life" there.

I think she has it backwards, as so many of my fellow atheists do.  Why is there a lower level of religiosity in those countries?  Why is there an association -- and I agree that there is -- between male supremacy and reactionary religion?  But it's not always so; there's also an association between Western science and male supremacy, both historically and in the present.  In both cases, I think that men who want rigid sex/gender differentiation will create rigid, patriarchal "worldviews."  Pollitt is not unaware of this, since she spends some time on eugenics and its role in twentieth century efforts to keep middle-class white women well-shod but pregnant, and dedicated to the service of the male.   She's also aware of the male atheists who continue that tradition to the present day.  (The title of that column focuses on the leadership, but Pollitt acknowledges the "grassroots" misogyny that female atheists contend with.)  But she's a devout believer in the power of Science to make sense of the world, and I think that's why she finds it convenient to put the primary blame on Religion.

As for "divinely approved," Pollitt shows that the Jewish/Christian Bible doesn't actually forbid abortion or say anything about it, and that even such reactionary churches as the Southern Baptist Convention came to oppose abortion only relatively recently.  I was wasting time the other night looking at some old blog posts, and came across a debate in which I disagreed with someone who claimed that "Religion starts from the assumption that an ancient text or tradition is true, and seeks to reconcile observed reality with the text."  When I pointed out that this was not in fact the case, that most religions historically have not had sacred texts and that Christianity for example began with the cult of Jesus and only produced its scriptures later on, my opposite number protested that she'd meant that religion today starts from the assumption that an ancient text etc.  That's not true either.  Texts play only a limited role in American Christianity; people who are drawn to religion are looking for something else, though the illusion of ancient tradition no doubt has some appeal.  They feel "the attraction of religious services and styles of worship (74%), having been spiritually unfulfilled while unaffiliated (51%) or feeling called by God (55%)."  "Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship."  And, as we all know, most Christians are biblically illiterate.  Believers don't submit to Scripture, they read their opinions and prejudices into the text and get them back endowed with authority.  The question is who is to be master, that's all -- and the answer is not Scripture, but the interpreter.

If it seems that I'm nitpicking, I reply that if we want to know how to change people's minds, if we want to know how to address people with opinions we dislike, then we're not going to get very far by supposing them to be servants of a god we don't even believe in ourselves.  Religious opponents of abortion (or of gay people, or of women's autonomy generally) don't hold their positions because their sect or its sacred text tells them to. They ignore the parts of the Bible that don't suit them, and interpret the rest so as to conform to their prejudices.  If their pastor or priest is too liberal or too conservative, they'll pick up and find one who suits them better.  Christians in those European countries Pollitt mentioned have the same sacred text as American Christians do; why don't they have the same attitudes to abortion?  Why does religion play a lesser role in their national life than in ours?  Divine approval can hardly be the answer.

Oh, How Can You Say Such Awful Things?

I'm reading Gary C. Thomas's essay "'Was George Frederic Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics" in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, & Gary C. Thomas; 2nd edition, Routledge, 2006).  Thomas does a beautiful job showing how Handel's virtue has been defended fiercely by his biographers for the past three centuries, without any evidence to support a claim of heterosexuality.  Often they have simply made stuff up: Thomas quotes a late twentieth century biographer who confidently asserts that Handel wasn't homosexual because "in an eighteenth-century context the vagabond life of musicians made marriage a distinct hindrance" (170).  You mean like Haydn?  Or Mozart?  (Even if marriage was a hindrance to musicians, it doesn't seem to have deterred them from marrying.)  Oddly, Thomas counters this claim by pointing out that "gay men from Handel's time through Stonewall (but especially in the eighteenth century) married more often than not, and for a variety of reasons"; a really determined apologist would use that as evidence that Handel wasn't gay, or he would have married.  More germane, and Thomas spends a good deal more space showing this, is that the evidence we have (including from his contemporaries) is that Handel didn't have any erotic liaisons with women at all, unlike many of his artistic bachelor contemporaries.  That's not proof that he was gay either; but it argues against any confident assertion that he was heterosexual.

But I'm digressing; what got me started on this post was Thomas's partly rhetorical question on the same page: "Why in an enlightened age wouldn't the possibility of a gay Handel be greeted if not with enthusiasm, then with a 'modicum of dispassionate objectivity'?"  It's understandable why Handel's contemporaries would have reacted with horror to the suggestion that the great man was a Sodomite; but not in our supposedly "enlightened age," when we know that earthquakes aren't caused by buggery.  One of the virtues of the first edition of Queering the Pitch (1994) was that the more intemperate reactions to it cast doubt on the widespread fantasy that the world of classical music is a tolerant, accepting, even welcoming haven for homos.  If the suggestion that Handel (or Schubert, or whoever) may have liked men is so absurd, why not simply refute it with evidence and reason?  Why do so many highly educated and worldly people react instead with illogic and fantasy?

I can now segue to the main topic of this post, namely Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri who uttered these now-notorious words in an interview on a St. Louis TV station:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's claim is ludicrous, of course, but people reacted to it almost as ludicrously.  This Kansas City Star article, for example, quotes an emergency-room doctor as saying, "To try to be able to say that anyone’s going to respond in a consistent pattern that’s going to limit their probability of becoming pregnant is ridiculous."  The doctor seems to be thinking in terms of medical procedures, like a morning-after pill or a medical abortion; what Akin evidently had in mind was an automatic physiological response of a woman's body to forced copulation.  I'm referring to the Star article because it explains where Akin probably got his belief:

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon referred to an article by physician John Willke, president of the Life Issues Institute — a nonprofit anti-abortion group — and former president of the National Right to Life Committee. In that article, titled “Rape Pregnancies are Rare” and published in April 1999, Willke wrote that one of the most important factors to consider is that a rape victim’s hormone production during such trauma may be “upset,” resulting in a possible pregnancy being compromised.

“There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape,” the article reads. “This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.”

Leading experts on reproductive health, however, dismissed this logic...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

(Newsweek's Michele Goldberg, on Democracy Now yesterday, also cited Willke.)  This is what I'd consider the proper response to someone like Akin: Oh, really?  Which doctors?  Can you point me to a source?  What do most doctors say about this?  The struggle for women's reproductive autonomy has been going on for quite some time now, much like the struggle for racial equality or the struggle for the equality of sexual minorities.  Yet every time some bigoted fool says something absurd, the typical liberal response is to freak out (Oh, how can you say such awful things?) and vilify the person rather than his or her words, despite the liberal claim that liberals and especially liberal Democrats are sane rational people while conservative Republicans are irrational wackjobs.  Which isn't to say that Akin shouldn't be vilified, but so should many Democrats.  People who haven't learn to think or debate rationally are not people I trust with a movement for social justice.

The focus has been on Akin's fantasy about the wonderful, no doubt God-given, powers of the female body to protect itself against invasion.  (While he was at it, he should have mentioned the tiny but sharp little teeth that come out of the vagina to chomp up the membrum virile of a dirty rapist, praise Jesus!  That would be a fantasy too, but why stick with half-measures when you're talking about a serious issue?  The more serious, the more important it is to make stuff up.  It's okay, because it's in a good cause.)  I can't help wondering, though: if a woman's body blocks pregnancy after a rape, isn't that like natural abortion?  Should a woman be allowed to punish a zygote, or even a sperm cell, just because she was raped?  That is, I hope you noticed, Akin's rationale for disallowing a medical abortion in cases of rape: punish the rapist, not the "baby" -- once the sperm is in the vagina, it's a potential baby.

It isn't actually irrational to believe that women's bodies could reject unwanted sperm.  Such things happen in nature.  Among zebra finches, females do not conceive after forced copulations, and females of some other species have been observed ejecting sperm after copulation; see Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections [California. 2002], 84-85.  Women aren't birds, unfortunately, and if Todd Akin wants to build social policy on the assumption that they are, he needs better evidence than one speculative paper by one anti-choice doctor.

Fussing about the definition of rape, as many of Akin's liberal critics have been doing, is really beside the point.  Some have looked past it, pointing out that his fantasy about women's power is an attempt to justify his denial of an exception for abortion in the case of rape, which is the current Republican Party stance on abortion.  The issue is not the definition of rape, but that women's right to make decisions about their own bodies has been whittled away that far.  Roe v. Wade asserted a woman's freedom to decide whether to have an abortion without qualification in the first trimester of pregnancy, whether she has been raped or not.  But focusing on the definition of rape allowed President Obama, for example, to pontificate:

Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So, what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making healthcare decisions on behalf of women.

Obama's own record, however, is dodgier than these tough words would suggest.  As this blogger points out, the Affordable Care Act (conforming with the Hyde Amendment) forbids the use of federal funds for abortion, "except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered," as well as other amendments which "prohibit discrimination" (!) against health care providers whose religious "conscience" forbids them to provide abortion services.  Sounds like male politicians making healthcare decisions on behalf of women to me.

It's worth looking at Akin's "apology," too.  Does he apologize for his determined, longstanding opposition to women's reproductive freedom?  Of course not:

I’ve really made a couple of serious mistakes here that were just wrong, and I need to apologize for those. First, I might say that I’ve always been committed to pro-life, and it was because I didn’t want to harm the most vulnerable. But likewise, I care deeply, you know, for the victims of people who have been raped, and they’re equally vulnerable. And a rape is equally tragic. And I made that statement in error. Let me be clear: rape is never legitimate. It’s an evil act that’s committed by violent predators. I used the wrong words in the wrong way. What I said was ill-conceived, and it was wrong. And for that, I apologize.

It's a typical politician's apology.  Which is why rape survivor and author of the Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler missed the point in her HuffPost response to Akin.  Ensler invited Akin to imagine a violent, stinking stranger breaking into his house in the night and forcing him to submit to his vile appetites -- but stranger rape, preferably by unwashed derelicts of color, is the paradigm of rape that the Religious Right accepts.  (At least in theory: in practice, the victim had better be a white blonde virgin, whose flimsy feminine garments are rent by the brute's grubby paws, and even then they'll never quite believe she didn't ask for it.)  The Republican National Committee didn't cut off their funding of Akin, nor did Romney denounce him and call for him to withdraw from the race, because they've suddenly become pro-choice.  (As usual, the Onion got it right.)

I got into a verbal tussle with the blogger Vast Left on Facebook yesterday, because he blamed Akin's view on the Bible, and invited his commenters to cite cases from the Bible where rape resulted in pregnancy.  His own example was that of Lot and his daughters.  Faithful Bible readers will recall that after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which also resulted in Lot's wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters got him drunk on successive nights and copulated with him in turn.  They both became pregnant as a result.  I pointed out that if anyone was raped in this story, it was Lot; Akin's fantasy wouldn't apply to him.  Vast Left didn't seem bothered by the distinction, but of course we're going after Republicans here, and Christians to boot, so all's fair.  More cases were mentioned, such as slaves being used sexually (which, as I've pointed out, doesn't seem to bother gay Christians as long as master and slave are both male), of concubinage and the like.  I pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, brides were routinely purchased, so it would seem that all Biblical women were raped (except possibly Ruth).  The concept of "consent," so important in liberal discourse on sex, is a legal fiction: in America in the recent past, white women could not consent to copulate with non-white males, wives could not withhold consent to copulate with their husbands ("I do" amounting to consent while the marriage continued), and of course no one of either sex could consent to be penetrated anally.  Legal consent, enshrined in the cliche "consenting adults," is very different from commonsense notions of consent, which have their own problems.

Vast Left offered a nice platitude: Sexual attitudes in the past sucked, and so do some today, but consent is important.  And religion is okay as long as believers extract whatever good they can from it.  Who gets to decide that what is extracted is good? I asked.  Atheists haven't done better than theists where ethics and morality are concerned, as far as I can tell, particularly on questions of sex and gender.

Wherever Akin and Willke got their fantasy about the abortifacient powers of the womb, they didn't get it from the Bible.  Indeed, Willke is a doctor, and they were both appealing to the authority of science, not religion.  Where consent is concerned, atheists -- especially male ones -- have not distinguished themselves.  Remember the proudly atheist and pro-science philosopher Michael Ruse, who confused sex with a woman and defecating on a Persian rug: his rationalist exploration of rape delved into whether he should clear a potential copulation with another male, and the woman's opinion didn't enter into it at all.  (He did lament that human females don't go into heat, because then rape somehow wouldn't be an issue, but again, he was addressing other men's judgment of his behavior, not the woman's wishes.)  "Scientific" discussions of rape have been no better, such as Thornhill and Palmer's recommendation that teenagers be required to take classes on rape prevention before being issued a driver's license: boys would learn the evolutionary issues involved, while girls would be taught not to dress "provocatively" -- any Taliban mullah would surely agree.  Or the whole "evolutionary psychology" approach: rape is awful, terrible, horrible, and maybe someday we'll find a way to alter the genome so men won't do it, without losing their manliness.  Meanwhile, according to the evolutionary psychologists, women will just have to learn not to blame Nature if her sons are sexist; it's nobody's fault.

This is one reason I don't blame religion for bad things in human society (or give religion credit for the good things).  People use religion to ratify what they already want or believe, which is why when many people reject religion, they tend to keep the teachings they like.  Sex and gender are topics that seem especially tenacious.  But again, all this is a distraction from the crucial issue of women's right to make decisions over their own bodies.

That was all I had in mind to say, but just now another friend posted a meme on Facebook to the effect that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  It's a familiar gag; one version went, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."  The point is a good one, but I don't think I agree.  Patriarchy regulates men's sexual behavior pretty strictly too: consider the story of Onan (Genesis 38), struck dead by Yahweh for spilling his semen on the ground instead of siring a child on his widowed sister-in-law.  Masturbation, called onanism, was ginned up into a major source of hysteria by the medical profession, more than it ever had been by religion.  Men are supposed to respect each other's property rights over women, though of course they constantly cheat.  And male homosexuality, conflated with the regulation of styles of manhood, is a major arena of anxiety and discipline; men who fail to conform pay a heavy price.  Which brings me full circle to the question at the beginning of this post, and good night.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Every Zygote is Sacred

Doonesbury has been in the news again, as various newspapers around the country refused to run a sequence on abortion -- specifically on legal requirements that a woman seeking an abortion must submit to a transvaginal ultrasound procedure.

This morning I looked at some of the entries in the "Blowback" department, where readers comment. This one, from a guy in El Dorado, Arkansas, caught my eye:

A woman who aborts is going against the evolutionary imperative of millions of years. But she is improving the human gene pool, in a Darwinian sense. It is not the government's business one way or another, unless you believe that life begins at some arbitrary point, after which it would be manslaughter. I suspect there will be no end to this controversy.

Ah, pop Darwinism; he might as well have said that abortion goes against the will of God. The closest this comes to reality is that Darwin himself opposed birth control (as well as the English poor-relief laws), but since Darwin wasn't God or the Voice of Nature, that's unimportant. Not that it would matter if he were.

The notion that abortion (or anything else) is in conflict with an "evolutionary imperative of millions of years" (which has an intriguing formal resemblance to claims about "the five thousand year old definition of marriage") is ridiculous, however often people say such things. Natural selection has no more moral authority than, say, the Bible.

It's especially curious that people should talk as though preserving every individual life is an evolutionary necessity, given the popularity of self-congratulatory memes like The Darwin Awards, which eke comedy from the notion that some people are too dumb to reproduce, or even to live. Half of the theory of natural selection is that some individuals are removed from the playing field. (Notice too the commenter's claim that a woman who gets an abortion is "improving the human gene pool, in the Darwinian sense", presumably forgetting that women who get abortions are usually mothers and already have done their Darwinian duty. Those who aren't already mothers will have children in the future.)

In "Nature," infanticide is far from unknown. And this may be a good time to quote again an excerpt from Marlene Zuk's Sexual Selections (California, 2002) about the results of forced copulation among zebra finches:

These matings never resulted in any offspring, which is interesting by itself. Even more interesting, though, was that 28 percent of chicks in the aviaries were from the remaining 20 percent of EPCs that were not forced, an astounding success rate. What were the females doing to influence the fate of sperm from different males? No one knows. The cloaca of female birds is clearly capable of some sophisticated maneuvering; in several species, females have been observed ejecting sperm after a copulation. The organ’s structure and function has, however, been relatively little studied by scientists [84-5]

Females in any species are not obligated by evolution or nature to accept insemination, carry offspring to term, or allow their offspring to survive infancy. Their refusal to do any of these things is part of the "evolutionary imperative," not defiance of it.

Taking a Wide Stance on Abortion

After an AP story about President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame University mentioned that a new Gallup Poll shows a (bare) majority of Americans call themselves "pro-life," I took a quick look at the Gallup webpage. I've often talked to people, including women, who called themselves "pro-life," but say that they believe the decision should be between a woman and her doctor, not made by the law. This shows the weakness of such labeling, and the probable pointlessness of posing the question as Gallup did. As far as I know, the position that decisions about terminating pregnancy should be between women and their doctors is exactly what "pro-choice" means. (If Obama wants to get the opposed sides to stop demonizing each other, he could try pointing this out. Not that I'm holding my breath.)

Just for fun, let's call this "taking a wide stance on abortion." Like people who insist that they aren't gay or bisexual while carrying on an active sex life with members of their own sex and condemning more honest gay people, a Wide Stance Pro-lifer gets to put on a show of morality, condemning immoral pro-abortion radical feminists, while tacitly adopting their anti-life position.

And just as I suspected, a good many of the Gallup Poll's "pro-life" respondents turn out to be taking a Wide Stance. Yes, Gallup found "51% of Americans calling themselves 'pro-life' on the issue of abortion and 42% 'pro-choice.' This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

However, "about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%)", with 53% saying that the law should permit it under certain conditions (presumably the classic exceptions of rape, incest, or to save the mother's life, but the fact that the question wasn't worded that way leaves the door open to other options as well). This means that at least some, and probably a good many of those who called themselves "pro-life" were willing to kill babies some of the time. (Do I need to close-caption this for the Irony-Impaired? If so, consider it captioned.) So there are a lot of Wide Stance Pro-lifers out there.

An aside. I could have sworn I'd heard somewhere that Nancy Reagan was a Wide Stance Pro-Lifer, saying the decision should be between a woman and her doctor, but I couldn't find anything to that effect on Google. I did find her notorious remark "I believe that if you have an abortion you are committing murder," but I also found this delicious passage from Lou Cannon's book Governor Reagan. "In an agony of indecision, Reagan lied to reporters, a sure sign he was under stress." Come now -- Reagan lying to reporters or to the nation was a sure sign his lips were moving.