I want to unpack some of the comments that came in responding to my post last week on MyDD about abortion. I had intended the post simply as a starting point for a discussion around the idea of making a better case for a liberal/progressive understanding of reproductive choice and many of the comments were, I thought, challenging and thought-provoking. A couple, in my estimation, perhaps over-read what I wrote as a criticism of women who get abortions, but I suspect that in large part that's my own fault. There were a few, though I think a minority, who seemed sympathetic to the idea that, as one commenter put it, the whole exercise amounted to "another round of tedious hand-wringing" that was not worthwhile because "Democrats are not losing elections" on the issue. I strongly disagree with that idea for a whole bunch of reasons. Most of them I'll have to save for another time.

But here's something that points to just one of them. The day after that post, I was reading Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi's book Linked on networks and connectivity and came across this passage on pro-choice and anti-choice websites. We might not want to talk about abortion, but the anti-choice folks sure do:

Lada Adamic, from Stanford University, recently investigated communities discovered by searching for the phrases "abortion--pro choice" and "abortion--pro life." The pro-life query resulted in a core of forty one-documents in which you could get from each page to the other ones. In contrast, the pro-choice movement was fragmented into many disconnected sites.

Such differences in the structure of competing communities have important consequences for their ability to market and organize themselves for a common cause. As Adamic notes, a campaign against the partial birth abortion bill launched from the middle of the pro-life cluster could easily reach other pro-life sites, since there are many links between them. Furthermore, due to the links on the pro-choice sites, the visitors of pro-choice sites would also learn about it. However, one would need to advertise at several disconnected pro-choice Websites to achieve an equally efficient campaign against the bill. Therefore, not only does the pro-life community have a better presence on the Web, it is also better organized -- its sites are more aware of each other. (emphasis added)