That's right -- Kelley's group of self-described progressive Catholics takes a position held by only a small minority, that the Catholic church is right to prohibit birth control. Were there no qualified religious experts who hold more mainstream views on family planning and abortion, views that are consistent with those of President Obama?

The HHS budget for family-planning services grants to faith-based and community groups is more than $20 million. Can pro-family-planning religious groups expect a fair deal from a director who believes that birth control, even for married couples, is immoral? Will programs that provide contraception to adolescents get funded? Obama's Feb. 5 Executive Order establishing a new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships gave the office and its 11 satellites in federal agencies a policy role on the issues that are at the core of HHS's sexual and reproductive health work: addressing teen pregnancy and reducing the need for abortion. How can an opponent of the single most effective way to do both -- contraception -- lead that effort in HHS enthusiastically and effectively?

Through Catholics in Alliance, Kelley has sought to narrow the interpretation of common ground on abortion to efforts to reduce the number of abortions by providing women who are already pregnant with economic support for continuing the pregnancy and making adoption easier. While pro-choice advocates have been in the forefront of efforts to increase funding for women and children and for pre- and postnatal care, few researchers believe that if pregnant women get the level of support common grounders are talking about, they will jump at the chance to have babies. If one is really serious about making it possible for women to avoid abortion, contraception is the single most important component of any program.

Kelley and other moderately progressive Catholic and evangelical groups owe their pull in the Democratic Party to the disappointment of 2004. They seized on the Democratic defeat in the 2004 elections as a means to push the party to the right on sex and reproduction. Democrats, stung by their near miss in Ohio, desperate to attract swing voters, eager to prove that they were "sensitive" to religion, took the bait.

If the Democrats need to sacrifice something on the alter of "bipartisanshipandcentrism" it's looking like they are prepared to negotiate away ever more pieces of the right to choose.They have decided that being pro-choice, despite being a majority position and one based on fundamental principles, is not "mainstream." It's now a bipartisan poker chip and NARAL is apparently willing to ante up.

If you want to see what's really up behind the scenes, check out the 95-10 plan which came out of the Third Way and Democrats for Life camp and is being endorsed by good guys like EJ Dionne. (This evangelical outreach plays into it too.)

The problem is that tucked in the details of their compromise plan that features all kinds of neat stuff about providing contraception for poor women and better sex education, there are a bunch of pernicious anti-choice and anti-science elements like federal money for ultrasounds in clinics and (incorrect) information about fetal pain among other things. (And you certainly see nothing about expanding beyond the 14% of American counties that now provide abortion services.)

There's no free lunch, right? Acces to birth control and sex ed comes at a price and that price is the idea that women can make this decision without first being forced to sit through a bunch of propaganda designed to make her feel ashamed and then being "offered" an ultrasound that shows the adorabletinybaby inside her tummy begging for its little life, after which they will also "offer" her some anesthetic for the poor little tyke before they go ahead and kill it. (If she's still selfish and cruel enough to go through with it, that is.)

What we are seeing is a new pincer strategy, with a slow, relentless mainstreaming of the liberal pro-life(and cowardly politicians') rhetoric which is intended to make abortion a source of shame and guilt so they can tut-tut about it in church --- and the ongoing onslaught of the conservative anti-choice agenda which is intended to enshrine the fetus as a full human with rights that trump the irrelevant vessel it lives inside of. The woman with an unwanted pregnancy is getting squeezed by everybody now.

Abortion is a messy fight, nobody disputes that. I'm all for contraception and sex education and all the other things that these abortion "reducers" are pushing. But it appears to me as if that's mainly a political ploy to appease the pro-choice crowd into believing that if they just give up a little here and there, the basic right will be preserved. It will not happen that way. With all this talk of "reducing," and "rare" and fetal pain and snowflake babies and all the rest, they are helping the right prepare the ground for a full outlawing of abortion if Roe is overturned. They aren't even trying to make the fundamental argument anymore.

I'm a good Democrat and I'm also someone who likes to think strategically. As I argued above, I think it's a huge mistake for advocacy groups that represent fundamental rights to ever negotiate (leave that to the politicians.) But I could theoretically support any strategy that would ensure a woman's right to choose. On the substance, however, this is no more subject to compromise to me than habeas corpus or torture or slavery. It defines what it is to be an autonomous human being. If every woman in this country doesn't own her own body then she is not free.