I’m not an expert in anything, but it seems to me that there’s enough medical and religious knowledge involved here that accomodations can be reached that don’t cross people’s lines in the sand. I’m not an expert but I would be interested to hear Nielsen’s reasoning as to why Romney should have reversed his stance. Obviously it was a persuasive argument, and I’ll guess – just a guess – that it wasn’t some trifling or absurd example of legal reasoning. Given my experience here in the Commonwealth, it was probably well thought out and persuasive.

Now, Romney saying that it was always “optional” or “discretionary” is a clear misstatement on his part. I’ll agree with that much. It could be that in his “heart of hearts” he really does believe that women who are raped should have access to Plan B. I’m one of the people who agrees with that in general terms.

I have to say also at this point that just as a practical matter, women who want to abort a pregnancy have a lot of other options than just going to a hospital. With a little internet searching, any woman can find websites that offer advice about “traditional” abortifacients and techniques for inducing abortion in a recent pregnancy. Lots of fertilized embryos never implant because of what the mother/parents ate the night before or the night after.

God is going to judge them, too. And He will judge me. More surely than any doctor, lawyer or indian chief – or politician – will.

But what do you tell a 15 year old girl who was raped in the back seat of a car driven by her gangbanger boyfriend (or even better, by her uncle) when she comes to the hospital and requests Plan B? “No, sorry, you have to carry the child because we won’t give you because of Catholic doctrine. We’ll fix up your bruises give you something for the black eye, but you’re going to have that baby, miss.”

I can’t believe that’s what God would want.

I’m neither a chauvinist for my Roman Catholic background nor am I a denier of it. In fact I enjoyed my religious background and later in life when secular education told me it was time to repudiate it, I reached more deeply for it. That doesn’t mean I can’t criticize it or state my opinions based on what I’ve really seen. And examples like the two I cited above with the gangbanger and the uncle aren’t figments of my imagination: they are real cases.

The real world is not an abstraction.

And I really mean that but under exactly the same conditions, physiology does this to people every day: it causes fertilized embryos not to implant and it also, on almost a random basis, causes embryos that might be fertilized not to be fertilized. I don’t have any troubles with my conscience.

Improving the chances of embryo implantation is a well-established branch of medicine. They’re doing that because they know a lot of them don’t. My conscience doesn’t struggle with that at all.

My conscience struggles with people who advocate that people don’t have control over their reproductive organs. They most certainly do.

At all. The fact is that lots of viable embryos – human lives, natch – don’t ever begin to grow because they fail to implant for a large number of reasons. Who knows which Mozarts and von Neumanns we’ve lost? Nobody. God knows. And God knows there are a lot of them.

Is a little bit more of a respectful discussion of what the realities in reproductive options are at this point in time vis-a-vis our religious obligations.

If we have medical techniques that improve the ratio of embryo implantation it’s clearly an act of human intervention to preserve an embryo that would otherwise have been destroyed.

We also have medical techniques that are designed specifically to prevent an implanted embryo from developing to term.

In each case, they are interventions – specific and clearly premeditated interventions – on what would have happened as the result of “accident” or as the result of God’s Will.

We don’t consider both sides of the problem even though we clearly act on both sides of the problem. Isn’t helping an embryo implant that would have been naturally destroyed absent intervention an affront in some way to God’s will? You cannot say that God wanted that embryo to live a-priori because you simply don’t know. In that case the doctors who improve embryo implantation rates are just as guilty of violating God’s will as those who provide Plan B.

There are a lot of people who read this blog who would look at the perpetrator of a rape (and especially one of the really egregious cases we don’t have to fully describe) who would say, with a completely straight face:

“The State should impose the Death Penalty. Kill that person.”

Which is the ultimate form of State power over life and death.

And in the same breath, they would say: “But the fertilized embryo cannot be subjected to Plan B.”

Which leaves us with the absurd result that we kill the individual who created the living embryo we are forced by religious conscience to preserve at all costs.