These weeks on the abortion front have been stranger than ever, and may be about to get worse. Todd Akin dropped the R-bomb into the argument, causing the Republicans to separate themselves from him and their own party’s platform, and the Democrats to open new fronts in the War Against Women, threatening to unleash Sandra Fluke and an army of feminists on a indifferent public until it nods off in ennui.

Concurrently, Ruth Marcus and Jeffrey Toobin in the Washington Post and in the New Yorker lament the fact that the Akin flap has forced the Democrats to distance themselves from their party platform and fight on “Republican” terms. Again in the Post, Ann Gerhart laments that the pro-choice Republican Party of 1972, whose abortion rights platform was endorsed by Senate candidate Lenore Romney, has become the pro-life Republican Party of 2012, whose platform has been semi-endorsed by her son. Gerhart is distressed that abortion on demand is not yet embraced, and perplexed how this happened, ignoring polls showing that the public — women included — self-define as pro-life by a widening margin and — women included — want more abortion restrictions, not fewer.