Scenes from a slow civil war on women Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack. “The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities: The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses. They’re not just targeting legislation, but individual women—embedding themselves in hospitals, doctors’ offices and anywhere else patients might be getting bad news about their pregnancy. Worst of all, these groups are calling it “prenatal diagnosis counseling” and perinatal hospice care*—manipulating women in their most vulnerable life moments under the guise of offering real help. That characterization is also politically strategic: it means that when Democrats oppose funding to anti-abortion groups that lie to women about their fetal diagnoses, the GOP can claim that they’re actually callously refusing women counseling and care. Crisis pregnancy centers are going underground,…