Seriously, that really does make my heart hurt for women religious. This is their whole life -- they've given their whole selves to fulfilling Christ's mission, and they're DOING IT, and they're getting smacked down in a huge way and being told that they're committing spiritual wrongs.

This! The nuns I knew in school would be vocally outraged about this. I hope that there is a seriously widespread response to this ridiculousness.

Is "women religious" what you're supposed to say? I never knew that.

Or that whole thing about counting last period as time so your window for abortion is shorter.

That's been the accepted way to calculate pregnancy dates for a long time, but yeah, it doesn't mean that anything is actually *in* there until the date of conception. It's just that that date is almost impossible to know, unless you're charting, in which case you're probably not getting an abortion.

All of it is really frightening. Death throes would be a more comforting thought if I didn't believe it was going to make a huge mess first.

Or that whole thing about counting last period as time so your window for abortion is shorter. So, you have to count the age of an egg that hasn't yet dropped into account.

Not to beat a dead horse, but this is how doctors calculate gestational age. It's not something Jan Brewer made up to trick women into being legally pregnant an extra two weeks.

"Gestational age" is defined twice in the bill. The first is the standard "two weeks past the first day of the woman's last period, and the second, which is the one used to determine whether or not an abortion is legal, reads:

"PROBABLE GESTATIONAL AGE" MEANS THE GESTATIONAL AGE OF THE UNBORN CHILD AT THE TIME THE ABORTION IS PLANNED TO BE PERFORMED AND AS DETERMINED WITH REASONABLE PROBABILITY BY THE ATTENDING PHYSICIAN

Literally everything else about this bill is 100% pure unmitigated evil. It drives me nuts that the liberal blogosphere is focused on the one thing in the entire bill that's actually legitimate science.

Or that whole thing about counting last period as time so your window for abortion is shorter. So, you have to count the age of an egg that hasn't yet dropped into account.

I'm as pro-choice, and as horrified about the direction things are going for reproductive choice in this country, as anyone, but I want to clarify that this is not actually the big issue it's being touted as. Pregnancies are always dated by the woman's last menstrual period -- that's standard medical procedure, and has been for decades, because there's no way to pinpoint when conception actually happened. So the fact that a bill (I assume you're talking about the one in Arizona?) specifies that a fetus's gestational age is dated from the woman's last period doesn't actually make it any different from a bill that doesn't make that specification, because it's how the fetus's age would be determined anyway.

Edit: I knew that would be an x-post.

It drives me nuts that the liberal blogosphere is focused on the one thing in the entire bill that's actually legitimate science.

I wasn't trying to be a dick, I was just ignorant of that. Now I am not.

a number of troubadours were Cathar or at least Cathar sympathetic

You know, troubadors might get me back to the church.

Is "women religious" what you're supposed to say? I never knew that.

I finally have something to say that's not "ARGHGOIH EE YO** ** *):SHD"SLKJ"AJF"SHIDO"ISDHG." My understanding is that women religious are the ones out in the world, nuns are the cloistered ones.

My understanding is that women religious are the ones out in the world, nuns are the cloistered ones.

See, I did not know that! So the woman I saw last night was a woman religious. Cool.

My understanding is that women religious are the ones out in the world, nuns are the cloistered ones.

IIRC, you can refer to women religious (the ones out in the world) as "sisters," as well.

And I always default to calling all of them "nuns," which I realize is incorrect.

Aww, RIP Barnabas Collins.

But not the Johnny Depp version .