Health of the mother and late-term abortion

McCain is taking a lot of heat from left blogs for what they call "scoffing" at health-of-the-mother exceptions to bans on late-term abortions. I think we can afford to be fair to McCain given that he's going to lose - he's talking about mental health exceptions that could be so broad as to make the exception swallow the rule.

To be fair to Obama, though, he says he opposes a broad definition of mental health, and implies that clinically-defined mental health disease should be the litmus test. For voters who think that a late-term fetus is/may be a person, I doubt this balances out well, but that's a messier issue regarding abortion.

A tangent - I wrote in February that I thought Obama would win the nomination because "people tended to like Obama more as they heard him more and got used to him as presidential material." I thought that was clear for the Democratic voters, and voter reactions to the presidential debates seem to show the same on the national election level.

Egads, I'm inconsistent!

I have some trouble reconciling my attitude towards a post at Feministing, about the difficulties young people have in finding someone to sterilize them, with my attitude towards pharmacists who won't give the Plan B contraceptive pill, or with my attitude towards the Supreme Court decision on the "partial birth abortion" case.

The Feministing post and subsequent commentors talk about the great difficulty that young people under 30, including men but especially women, have in finding a doctor willing to perform sterilizations on them. The doctors always say "when you're older you might change your mind about having biological children" and refuse to do it. An occasional refusal by a doctor wouldn't affect people much for this non-urgent surgery, but because the vast majority of doctors refuse, it makes the whole process extremely difficult.

Most of the commentors have a problem with this. I don't.

But, I do have a problem with pharmacists who refuse to give the "morning after pill" out to women, and with Justice Kennedy's decision in the Gonzales v. Carhart case that because some women eventually regret their decision to have an abortion and suffer psychological harm, "the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice" (quote from the dissent).

So am I just as bad as Kennedy? A Feministing commenter notes that young people can get plastic surgery easily but not sterilization because plastic surgery is about conforming to societal expectations. Am I imposing my own views?

Maybe. There's a difference though between "difficult" (obtaining sterilization) on one side and "legally prohibited" (abortion ban) or "practically impossible" (pharmacists not giving urgently needed contraceptives) on the other side. If I'm imposing my views, at least there's a limit as to how far I'll go.

And as for the Feministing commentors who think they're consistent, I question whether they'd stay consistent if we talked about 18 year olds or 16 year olds requesting sterilization instead of twentysomethings.