Thomas Jefferson Street

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

There's an interesting new study reported in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior showing that unwed pregnant teenagers and women in their 20s who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to have abortions than young women who go to public schools:

Researchers studied some 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women ages 26 and younger from 125 schools. The women were as young as 14 and as old as 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Some one quarter admitted having abortions, which researchers say is probably an underreported percentage:

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotion and abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

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By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

My colleagues Bonnie Erbe and Peter Roff wrote earlier about abortion doctor George Tiller's murder, and I've been reading a lot of similar commentary for the last day or so. The best reader comment I've seen so far was on Andrew Sullivan's website, from a Kansas City woman who had been a protestor outside Tiller's clinic, but who had stopped when she realized how radical the group was becoming: "Sometimes I wonder if I need to come up with a new label for myself other than 'pro life' just to distance myself from them." You might recall that I wrote a few weeks ago that we need a new name for the majority of Americans who are in favor of more restrictions on abortion but who are not pro-life extremists. This case makes a good argument for doing that.

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By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I wish that the vaunted titans of American finance and industry had not screwed up so badly.    

I don't like spending money to bail out inept CEOs and corporate greedheads.

And it's certainly regrettable that my own beloved newspaper industry was no good match for a federal handout.

But once one has accepted the logic that decided action by the federal government is needed to save the U.S. from a rerun of the Great Depression (as was accepted by leaders of both political parties last fall), I don't see much difference in loaning my tax money to General Motors, as opposed to loaning it to Goldman, Sachs or AIG or Fannie Mae.

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By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

It's perhaps not surprising that President Obama, a community advocate, liberal hero, and lawyer from Chicago, should list "empathy" as an essential quality for a Supreme Court justice. The president's Hyde Park neighborhood is soaked in the spirit of America's greatest defense attorney, Clarence Darrow—a man whose character was defined by empathy.

Were he alive today, Darrow would endorse Obama's call for justices who empathize with their fellow human beings. And he would vehemently contest the conservative argument that, as columnist Charles Krauthammer puts it, empathy "stops at the courthouse door."

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