From Balloon Juice:

“A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key provisions of Texas’ new law requiring a doctor to perform a sonogram before an abortion, ruling the measure violates the free speech rights of both doctors and patients.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks upheld the requirement that sonograms be performed, but struck down the provisions requiring doctors to describe the images to their patients and requiring women to hear the descriptions.
The law made exceptions for women who were willing to sign statements saying they were pregnant as a result of rape or incest or that their fetus had an irreversible abnormality.”

(Italics mine)

So, this is good news from Texas, a place where good news seems to go to die. But the fact there is such a law in the first place, wow! This last part too, “an irreversible abnormality”, says something about where we’re at as a society I think. Carried to it’s extreme, which of course isn’t going to happen but nevertheless indicates the tendency toward an ideal and as such something of that ideal, this inclination toward normality, whatever that is, obliterates all that’s different and unique. These are the things that allow us to love, where would love be without qualitative difference? 

A quote from Lefebvre which expands this line of thought:

Today we see a worldwide tendency to uniformity. Rationality dominates, accompanied but not diversified by irrationality; signs, rational in their way, are attached to things in order to convey the prestige of their possessors and their place in the hierarchy.

from The Everyday and Everydayness

(Source: balloon-juice.com)