dajafi wrote:That some (most?) Republicans are interested in severely restricting access to contraception pretty much gives away the game: they care less about reducing the incidence of unwanted pregnancies and abortions than they do about controlling women's sexual behavior.
At this point, I don't think even the most ardent pro-choicer is in any sense "pro-abortion." There should be universal interest in fewer unwanted pregnancies--many of which, when brought to term, lead to out of wedlock births which we know correlate to a whole bunch of bad outcomes--and fewer terminated pregnancies. There should be close to universal agreement on how we do that: intensive and consistent messaging about the emotional, and "lifestyle" risks of irresponsible sexual behavior. Sexuality is complicated because relationships are complicated: saying to teenagers that "you probably shouldn't have sex, but if you do, you definitely should use protection" isn't too much for their wee little brains to handle. Probably most teens from middle-class and wealthier circumstances do exactly that.
But it's a lot easier, and certainly better for fundraising, to try to ban contraception and then point to the moral failings of "those people."
Of course, I agree with all of this. If I ran the world, birth control pills would be available for free on every street corners from those machines you used to put a quarter into, turn the crank, and get a handful of M & Ms. I just wouldn't charge the quarter.
Until we reach the point where birth control for women is both widely AND FREELY available, it's hard to take an "abortion should be illegal" stance. And there is little doubt in my mind that the more instances of unwanted pregnancy a society sees, the more children will grow up in circumstances ranging from the merely bad to the unspeakable.
But the individual act of aborting a fetus still troubles me. As my Mom says, notice how for anyone who gets pregnant because she wanted to, the "fetus" is a "baby" from the first. When we call it a fetus, we're trying to put distance between it and what we are willing to recognize as human, because most of us don't like to think of ourselves as murderers.
