In the age of skyrocketing unemployment, it is good to know that there are still jobs that are hard to fill.

Did you know that March 10th is National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers? It seems that the poor dears are very under appreciated these days. Katha Pollitt, writing at The Nation, laments that baby boomer baby killers are beginning to hang up their hangers and they are increasingly difficult to replace. In a stunning paragraph, even for these people, Pollitt manages some of the more gruesome callousness you are likely to see, at least until Obama does something else to legitimize baby killing. Anyway let’s look at this paragraph (emphases & comments mine)

… as Michael Winerip reported in an unusually thorough piece in Sunday’s New York Times (in the Style section, sigh, along with the rest of the girlynews), the women’s health activists who form the backbone of many clinic staffs are retiring and proving hard to replace in the more conservative and rural regions, like upstate New York, the South and Midwest. [Thank heaven for small favors. It it good to know there are still some places where people still feel squeamish about such things.] Doctors, nurses and technicians are reluctant to work in clinics in anti-choice places where they will be picketed, socially ostracized and forced to protect themselves daily against possible violence. [For twenty years now, the violence is all on their side. As for the other fears such as picketed and ostracized, well a civil society would have it no other way.] Low pay is another factor: anti-choicers love to talk about abortion as a business, but adjusted for inflation, the price of a first trimester abortion is about what it was thirty years ago, although security-related costs have skyrocketed — one reason why clinic staffers make about half what they would in another specialty. [Perhaps they need a bailout. It is just so hard to make a buck these days killing babies. It is more of a vocation, I suppose.

A more callous paragraph is hard to come by. It is good to know that jobs in abortuaries don’t have the same list of applicants as did this janitor job in Ohio. Pollitt suggests that baby killing has just been too easy for the last 36 years and as a result, people have lost the fire in the belly.

Will the next generation step up to the plate? Sally Burgess, head of the National Abortion Federation, thinks that growing up with legal abortion, too many lack “the fire in the belly.” Then too, med school policies mean only a small proportion of medical students are even learning how to perform this relatively simple procedure.

Fire in the belly. I cannot think of a more horrible yet apropos euphamism. Whadd’ya say, Ms. Pollitt, perhaps we can outlaw the procedure for the next 36 years and see if the youngins get back their joie de mort? At least this way there will actually be some young folk left to make the choice.