Welcome to Woman Up

Greetings, and welcome to Woman Up, where we'll weigh in on politics, culture, parenting (or not) and any other darn thing that occurs to us. When I told our ace executive producer Michael Kraskin how excited I was about the awesome diversity of this all-girl group, he said, 'How 80s of you.' (Dude, you have no idea.) I didn't just mean diverse in terms of the three Rs (race, religion and region) but of life experience, too; I love that a therapist who works with extremely low-income families in Kentucky is going to be part of the conversation, along with a poet from Kansas City, a woman who probably knows more about the Vatican's art collection than anyone alive, and the former mayor of Dallas, who used to tell me about her secret political ambitions when we were baby reporters together, running around White Rock Lake. (At least, she was running.)

I don't much care if we ever agree on anything in this space, but am determined that it's going to be one place where people can differ as passionately as they like – safe in the knowledge that none of the rest of us is going to respond with blunt trauma to the head; there is no end to the places you can take a discussion with that threat off the table.

Bonnie G and I have been joking about how our motto should be, "Where big-girl panties (helllllo, mummy) are always a fit." (And can we get Spanx to sponsor?) Since I left Slate's XX Factor for this PoliticsDaily.com job a few months ago, my feelings of blogging deprivation have been so acute that I'm even tempted to talk about Bea Arthur, Michelle – despite the obvious handicap of having spent the 70s reading or something; I'm not sure I ever saw any of the iconic shows she was in. (And Lori, are you sure you know what you're doing, depriving Kyra of all but the most intelligent possible TV?) I've been catching up on my pop culture – that's a nice way to put it – ever since, however, and do know that Bea Arthur had nothing on Susan Lucci, whose Erica Kane character on the ABC soap All My Children also had an abortion about the same time as the Roe v Wade ruling, only to learn years later that the doctor had only pretended to go through with the procedure and had somehow raised the child as his own. I'm more curious, though, about what you guys thought about Steve Waldman's piece proposing a complete rethinking of the abortion issue. (Abortion? Yes, he argues. And early and maybe more often beats fewer later.) What say you?