Dear Cicero,
"But apparently that second split infinitive bothered her at some unconscious level, so she used the word 'to' twice, thus commiting a grammatical solecisim, 'or to . . . to decide.'"
I thought the second "to" was part of the infinitive "to guarantee," which only has four words splitting it.
sitetest
Yes, you're absolutely right. I think I got lost in the wandering maze of her prose. I didn't even mention the mind-numbing effect of the first seven or eight words which open that sentence, a sentence that simultaneously shocks me with its inhuman brutality and puts me to sleep with its fuzzy banality:
"The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual women's right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion."