Letters to the Editor
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But lots of us *do* feel abortion is the lesser of evils.
I don't think abortion is a good idea. I just think it's a much, much better idea than giving your body over to a parasitic invasion for nine months. A wanted baby is a symbiote; the health problems it causes are usually made up for by the intense positive emotions created by a wanted baby. But an unwanted baby gives none of those emotional benefits, and all of the negative health effects; therefore it's a parasite.
I believe the logic of "abortion should be safe, legal and rare" can be used to hit the religious right over the head with a stick. Because, if you are really against abortion on the grounds that you think it is murder, then you would support policies that prevent abortion. Not prevent *legal* abortion, prevent *abortion.* And the only way to prevent abortion at all, given that you can't outlaw coathangers, is to make it so women have fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer economic reasons to not be able to undergo a pregnancy, to wit:
- Better access to birth control for both men and women would prevent unwanted pregnancies
- Better maternity leave would ensure women could afford to leave their jobs at the end of their pregnancies and not lose wages for it
- Universal health care, at least for all pregnant women and children, would ensure that women who are uninsured are not faced with the choice between a $280 abortion and a $4,000 pregnancy
- High-quality nationally funded day care would make sure that a woman who is working hard and stretched to her limit financially could afford to keep both her child and her job
Funny thing, the religious right/Republicans are against *all* of these things. Which proves that they are not, in fact, against abortion at all. They are pro-punishing women for having sex. As soon as you make it clear that there's a pro-life position, which is that pregnant women should be given every possible societal support in the choice to *have* a baby, and an anti-woman position, which is that only women who are stay-at-home wives married to men of means should be having sex at all and everyone else, including hard-working women married to hard-working men who need both salaries to stay afloat, is a dirty slut who should be punished if she has sex... well, it gets harder for the religious right to get traction if you make it clear that that's what the Republican platform adds up to, doesn't it?
Democrats *should* be able to peel off any genuinely pro-life people out there by promoting policies which prevent abortion by making it easier to avoid unwanted pregnancy and easier to want accidental pregnancies. We should be talking about women who are forced to get abortions for the economic survival of their families, because they are uninsured and cannot afford the hospital bills or because they cannot afford unpaid family leave and their employer won't give it to them paid. These women might *want* to keep their babies but can't afford to. Vote for Democrats, we'll promote universal health care and good family-friendly workplace policies so any woman who wants to have a baby can afford to! Then you put Republican religious nuts in the position of having to argue that it's a good idea to make women choose between putting food on the table and having their baby because they should have known better than to have sex... and since most people like sex, this would be an absurd argument and most people know it.
Arguing that abortion is unilaterally a good thing is a *loser*. Because most Americans don't think it is. Most Americans support the right to have an abortion, with some restrictions, because most Americans understand it to be the lesser of two evils. And if Democrats would stake out the territory of "Republican policies force women to have abortions they might otherwise not want", we can lose the "baby-killer" image and make Republicans defend their cruel, anti-family policies, while at the same time making it clear that the women who get abortions are not irresponsible sluts who scheduled an abortion for fun after their hair appointment and their latte, but people making a hard choice in a hard world. And when we go all "slippery slope" and anything we do to protect a fetus is a bad thing and they're not human and blah blah blah, we turn off women who've had miscarriages, we let the *right* drum up sympathy for the women who are beaten into losing wanted babies by violent partners (why the hell have we conceded that ground to the right?), we make anyone who feels that her fetus is a baby feel that we are marginalizing her experience. Which is a lot of women. Women make up slightly more of the anti-abortion movement than men do, I believe, and the reason isn't that they're self-hating masochists who want to be barefoot, pregnant and chained to a stove, it's because they had a wanted baby and they can't imagine not wanting or loving your unborn child. Make women understand that other women choose abortion, not because they are heartless bitches, but because they are often in positions where that is the *only* good choice they can make to survive, and we can splinter a large number of pro-lifers off from the Republicans.
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The abortion morality question
I support a women’s right to choice, but I also believe abortion is wrong. If allowed to, a fetus can become the most amazing thing in the universe as we know it: a self-aware being capable of perceiving the universe from it's distant edge, understand its origin in the distant past and inspect its structure at the subatomic scale. We have exploded life’s ability to interact with its surroundings by about 20 orders of magnitude greater than any other life form. If this doesn't leave you awestruck I don't know what will. And the beings capable of these wonders virtually grow themselves! It is sad to destroy one of these before their time.
The answer is to reduce unwanted pregnancies to the absolute minimum through sex education, widely available birth control, emergency contraception and adoption. The rub of course is that the same people that are against abortion are against most of these measures that would greatly reduce the incidents of abortion. For that reason I consider the likes of the Catholic Church and other contraception and sex education foes to be responsible for more abortions that all of Planned Parenthood. They must be made to understand that they, and no one else, are the biggest obstacle to reduced abortion numbers.