“And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through child-bearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (1 Timothy 2:14-15… As a good Christian woman, the last thing I wanted was to be accused of having a “Jezebel Spirit”!! Jezebel is the bossy, bold and dominating woman, who ‘wears the pants’ in the family, and in the Bible account, things ended badly for her: “’Throw her down’Jehu said. So they threw her down and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot.” (2 Kings 9:33)

"Are We All Socialists Now?" That was the plaintive title of a panel discussion at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The word "socialist" is being heard all over America these days as the federal government takes over banks, tells automakers what to do and tightens regulations in an effort to pull our economy out of its current tailspin. The label is not generally intended as a compliment. To many Americans, socialism means being governed by the government - suffocating under layers of bureaucracy that sop up tax dollars and smother individual initiative.

And that's the positive view. Some critics carelessly lump socialism together with anarchism or even communism. After invoking the "s" word at the recent conservative conference, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said, "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff." He conveniently forgot, or perhaps never knew, that most American socialists were sworn enemies of Soviet Communism.


The view from Milwaukee is radically different. I'm not a socialist and never have been, but I can testify that Socialism - with a capital "S"- was one of the best things that ever happened to this city. Without realizing it, even the most red-blooded capitalists are enjoying the fruits of their efforts, from spacious parks to clean streets and from a working infrastructure to an expectation, however frequently disappointed, of honest government.

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Underlying their notion of public enterprise was an abiding faith - curiously antique by today's standards - in the goodness of government, especially local government. The Socialists believed that government was the locus of our common wealth - the resources that belong to all of us and each of us - and they worked to build a community of interest around a deeply shared belief in the common good.

The results were plain to see. After years in the political sewer, Milwaukee became, under "sewer Socialists" Seidel, Hoan and Zeidler, a model of civic virtue. Time Magazine called Milwaukee "perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S." in 1936, and the community won trophy after trophy for public health, traffic safety and fire prevention. The health prize came home so often that Milwaukee had to be retired from competition to give other municipalities a chance.

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The Socialists governed well, and they did so without breaking the bank. Contrary to another popular myth, these were not tax-and-spend radicals intent on emptying the public coffers. They were, in fact, every bit as frugal as the most penny-pinching German hausfrau. The Socialists managed civic affairs on a pay-as-you-go basis, and in 1943, Milwaukee became the only big city in America whose amortization fund exceeded its outstanding bond obligations. It was, in other words, debt-free.

Nearly one in three American women will have an abortion by age 45. Why are we so afraid to talk about it—or to acknowledge that our lives would have been so much less than we hoped for without it? Why are we pressured to feel that we should regret our choice, and that there's something wrong with us if we don't?

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For a small segment of women—and the number is small, by any reasonably scientific account—abortion is indeed a tragedy, a trauma with long-lasting reverberations. But I want to tell a different story, the more common yet strangely hidden one, which is that I don't feel guilty and tortured about my abortion. Or rather, my abortions. There, I said it.

"Abortion. We need to talk about it," Pollitt beseeches in Pro. "We need to talk about it differently. Not as something we all agree is a bad thing about which we shake our heads sadly and then debate its precise degree of badness, preening ourselves on our judiciousness and moral seriousness as we argue about this or that restriction on this or that kind of woman. We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women."

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How normal? Nearly one in three American women will have terminated a pregnancy by age 45, and six in 10 abortions are performed on women who are already mothers. They're not—we're not—"other." Those numbers are from Pro, and when I call it "revelatory," I want to add, oddly so. You can't live in the abortion-is-murder culture for all of your adult life and not have it affect you, even if you're pro-choice. So while I already knew much of the basic information Pollitt imparts, I'd "forgotten" some facts, and lost track of how the facts informed my pro-choice convictions.

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In an interview with ELLE last month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that she thought that the country would "wake up" and realize that the state-by-state restrictions on abortion were untenable and that we "can never go back" to the situation before Roe, when abortions were only "for women who can afford to travel to a neighboring state." Yet it seems to me that we have gone back to that time; right now poor women are in effect being denied abortions because they can't afford them, or can't afford the gas to get to a clinic that is hundreds of miles away—or can't afford all that and to stay overnight in a hotel to comply with a 24-hour waiting period.