"The F.D.A. has now received reports that six women in the United States died after taking RU-486, or Mifeprex. A seventh died in Canada. The two most recent deaths and two of the previous four underwent their procedures at Planned Parenthood clinics, a spokeswoman said.

...Mifeprex has been used in more than 560,000 medical abortions in the United States and more than 1.5 million in Europe."

"I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life -- maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.

This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway. That shift in sentiment is not apparent in polls because they do not measure doubt, only position: for or against. But between one and the other, black or white, is a vast area of gray where up or down, yes or no, fades to questions about circumstance: Why, what month, etc.? Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision -- the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution -- strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy."

For decades, progressive thinkers have scoffed at traditional prohibitions against fornication, regarding adolescent sexual experimentation as completely normal and entirely healthy - so long as public health officials furnish teens with a reliable supply of contraceptives and sex educators provide instructions in their use. But a new study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by a team of researchers from Yale, Georgia State, and the Free University in the Netherlands strongly links adolescent sexual activity with serious psychological and social problems that no contraceptive will ever resolve.

Drawing on data collected in 1998 from 1,413 female students under the age of sixteen enrolled in public schools in New Haven, Connecticut, the authors of the new study investigate the relationship between sexual activity and several "global measures of psychosocial adaptation" - namely, depressive symptoms, future expectations, academic motivation, and academic achievement.  The results could hardly be clearer: Compared to "sexually naïve peers" (words like "chaste" and "abstinent" have disappeared from social scientists' lexicon), "sexually active adolescent girls fared significantly more poorly on all four measures of adaptation."  That is, compared to abstinent peers, young female students who are sexually active "endorsed significantly more symptoms of depression, had a more pessimistic outlook about their futures, felt less academically motivated, and did less well in school."

Only in the magical thinking of progressive theorists will passing out more contraceptives make everything better.