Michael Kinsley, a prolific liberal thinker now associated with The Los Angeles Times, is a writer with whom I rarely agree. He’s smart and articulate (he was the founding editor of Slate magazine), but he can also be infuriating.

The Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader relates an almost unbelievable account of a visit to Lexington by the national chaplain for Planned Parenthood. According to the paper, Planned Parenthood officials were shocked when very few ministers would agree to meet with the organization’s chaplain.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported Thursday that doctors have developed a test that will screen for Down’s syndrome as early as the first trimester of pregnancy.

Columnist Richard Cohen of The Washington Post now admits that he has grave doubts about abortion. In a fascinating opinion column published in today’s edition of the Post, Cohen recounts his experience of arranging an abortion for a friend of a friend who had become pregnant. “With little thought, I did so,” he explains. “She went home to Germany and I never saw her again.”

Patricia E. Bauer, a former reporter and bureau chief for The Washington Post, warns that prenatal testing techniques have shifted the medical question from an ability to abort babies judged to be defective to a duty to abort. She’s right of course, and the shift in this logic is inevitable. Once human dignity is redefined in terms of “acceptable” and ‘unacceptable” babies, it is only a short jump to the argument that no one should be allowed to impose a “defective” baby on the society.

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle has vetoed a bill that would have expanded that state’s medical conscience clause to allow medical professionals to “opt out” of participating in certain medical procedures such as removing a patient’s feeding tube or using technologies that involve the destruction of a human embryo.

Just a couple of weeks ago, David Savage of The Los Angeles Times wrote a most interesting article on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand. The article seems to have attracted little attention, and that is a shame.