Really. I'm getting tired of this. Haven't we heard from enough women who were relieved to have had an abortion, who felt, once again, like they and not biology were in control of their lives?

Abortion is a medical procedure, like the removal of a tumor or an appendectomy. That's all it is. It is neither good nor bad. It is simply a medical procedure. Don't give me sanctimonious mealymouthing about how it stops a beating heart. So do bullets and bombs and deadly viruses and famines and genocides and the kinds of diseases and dehydration that come from being trapped in a hurricane shelter for weeks without adequate food, water, or services, and I don't see the neocons wringing their hands about all those poor dead children, all those poor wasted little souls, in Iraq and Palestine and the Congo and the West Side neighborhoods of Chicago.

No, it takes no effort whatever to lament the fate of theoretical people, with whose flesh-and-blood existence--and religious and cultural differences, and poverty, and actual need--the anti-abortion crowd is not faced. We need to ask this question over and over again: if you don't give a damn about the children now here on earth, how can you pretend to care about the souls of those who have not yet arrived? Go wave bloody pictures of children's bodies stacked like dolls in trucks in front of the White House and leave the abortion clinics alone.

I'll probably draw all kinds of fire here, but I don't think the decision to abort a pregnancy where the fetus was female is necessarily immoral. A culture in which girls are devalued *is* immoral...and it's possible that a woman who decided to terminate such a pregnancy may actually be acting for what she feels are moral reasons...that life for a girl would be such a living hell that she cannnot bear to bring a daughter into the world.

There is no easy solution to this problem, which requires widespread social change to repair rather than draconian anti-abortion laws, but to condemn women for terminating the pregnancy rather than bring a child into the world who would be seen by her family (particularly her male relatives) as a burden and by her in-laws as an inconvenient but necessary breeding machine doesn't seem right.

It's the anti-sex league!

I thought this was going to be another article about how women were refusing to look at plumbers as marriage material...

You guys deride Broadsheet because of all the pink, light, fluffy content. But when posts on women of substance shows up here, you complain because it's in a section that's usually full of light, fluffy content?

My head hurts.

If it's on Crooks and Liars, you know it's getting lots of play all over the blogosphere. Salon's not the only vector for this kind of stuff, you know.

Douglas,

Oddly, no one complains about this sort of thing when serious interviews appear in magazines like GQ and Playboy, as they have for years and years. I'd prefer not to have to flip through pages of naked or scantily clad women and obnoxious liquor and car ads in order to read an interview with Jimmy Carter or Hunter S. Thompson. Men's traditional side interests (naked women, cars, sports, cigars, whatever) have always been considered normal and mainstream, and we've been dealing with seeing those things juxtaposed with issues that matter to both women and men for decades.

So if I can deal with scantily clad bimbos in the pages of men's magazines, you can deal with a little fluff now and then, no?

Douglas,

Are you objecting to Helen Thomas being shunted off to a side pocket of Salon, or are you objecting to Broadsheet's offending of your sensibilities by forcing you to come here and actually read content that would ordinarily only be read by women? God forbid! In any case, it seems to have worked, and, despite the occasional idiot male troll, I hope they continue this strategy. You might be forced, at some point, to see something from our perspective.

You see, this is how it begins. It's always a bit of a risk. A blogger departs the safe confines of the predominantly male mainstream for what appears to be a candy-striped female ghetto. People complain. Sometimes the venture does fail because the substance is unable to overcome the ghetto, but that's a risk a feminist blogger has to take. At some point, thinking male readers such as yourself will begin, as I already do, to filter out the Dita von Teese postings as occasional idiosyncracies and see that our concerns really are yours as well. Just wait and see.

I began to believe that Broadsheet would succeed as soon as I saw all the vindictive male whining in the comments and realized that it had indeed struck a nerve, and I do believe that it is getting better by the day.

I'm speaking as a concerned aunt whose four-year-old niece came down with a nice case of mono, maybe from physical contact with other kids at her preschool, maybe from a drinking fountain or a doorknob or a hundred other things that kids that age are always licking or putting in their mouths. She's absolutely fine now, but it brought home to me just what a misnomer "the kissing disease" is for mono.

Seems to me that teaching kids to WASH THEIR HANDS and KEEP THEM AWAY FROM THEIR MOUTHS and other orifices would do a great deal more to prevent menningitis and other nasty communicables than focusing on keeping them from swapping spit. After all, unless they currently go to Stuyvesant High School, most teenagers probably are a bit more discriminating than the British medical authorities assume.