We all make a choice at the ballot
Unless you’re going to lock pregnant women up like a calf doomed-to-become-veal and investigate every miscarriage as a murder, abortions will always happen — and probably even then.
The fact is: even making abortion illegal won’t make it go away. At least one study has shown abortion rates are higher in countries where the procedure is banned. They’re also more cruel and dangerous.
The GOP’s fondness for birth and indifference to actual children is so transparent and callous that it has become a cliche. Rick Perry and the Texas GOP are getting a lot of attention for their recent forays into limiting women’s choices but their effort to maim the bare infrastructure that offers poor women health care has been going on for years.
Some posit that there are financial motives — like profiting off the adoption industry — to the anti-choice movement that make what they’re doing more invidious. But I do believe there are a small group of Americans who generally believe in the sanctity of every life and for whatever psychological reason they’re able to separate that life from the women who sustains it. These true “pro-lifers” often adopt and foster multiple children, even though they often — for religious reasons — can’t or won’t take the steps to prevent unintended pregnancies. They are only aligned with the men who want to punish women for having sex out of necessity, I hope.
The people who actually oppose all abortions — even in cases of rape, incest or when it risks the life of the mother — are a small and noisy minority in America:
Tom W. Smith … has studied public opinion on abortion since 1972, the year before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.His research suggests that only 7 percent of the public rejects abortion under any circumstances. About 31 percent think it should be available to whoever wants one. And the vast majority — nearly 62 percent — supports abortion in some circumstances, while opposing it in others.
This divide is why the anti-choice movement has decided to focus on 20-week bans and closing clinics. They make the argument “about the child.” It can feel pain! they claim though the evidence of that is rejected by medical professionals. And when you’re say you’re making clinics safer, you’re showing — or feigning — care for the woman.
What anti-choicers don’t point out is abortions after the 20th week are rare and the result of dire circumstances, which may include not being able to get to a clinic before that point due to a lack of time, resources and the fact the millions and millions of American women don’t live within a few hundred miles of a clinic that offers abortion, thanks to Republican restrictions.
Closing clinics not only increases unintended pregnancies — for these clinics are often a woman’s only source of birth control — it makes abortion, which is an incredibly safe procedure, more dangerous.
Democrats, as the party that respects women, know that women do not want abortions, they need them. And while that need will never be erased it can be reduced.
Universal birth control, access to Plan B on-demand, sex education, a thriving public education system, and basic health care for all are the answers to reducing abortions and making them safe when necessary.
They are all Democratic policies. And anyone who opposes them should be ashamed to call themselves pro-life.
