(Dear Fellow Kossacks: This article is addressed to those of us who strongly feel that restricting access to abortion is a very bad idea, and are willing to spend some time and effort in persuading more and more people that it is vitally important to women's rights to preserve the availability of abortion. If there are enough drops in the bucket, the bucket will fill.
In this article parts 1 and 2 I am trying to summarize arguments intended for you to persuade people who want to make abortion illegal or restrict access to abortion that a better way forwards, that will result in fewer abortions than obstructing access to legal abortion providers, is the approach described below, namely to persuade couples to use effective contraception at all times except when they want a conception. It is very clear that banning abortion or making it difficult to find an abortion provider is government interference in the private lives of individuals, and will have the perverse effect of driving abortion underground, and making criminals of otherwise law abiding women.
If you have any close friend or relative who feels access to abortion should be restricted or made illegal, and feel comfortable to discussing the subject with them, I would ask you either to forward a link to this article, or else at some point in conversation raise any of the points made in the article that you think might be effective in changing the person's attitude from opposition to tolerance. The article has many shortcomings, but I think it does give an okay summary of some of the arguments for keeping abortion legal.)
Also, I would ask fellow Kossacks to write their blogs or their local newspapers making any of the arguments that they think might be effective in changing attitudes toward abortion from outright opposition to all abortions to the more rational approach of reducing the need for abortion via better contraceptive utilization and better sexual responsibility education in the schools.
Oh. One last thought. The reasons a lot of people vote for Republicans is they are comfortable with restricting or banning abortion. Persuading people that abortion should be legal should help elect Democrats. And let's face it, for all its faults, the Democratic party has refused to back down on its support for abortion rights.
Criminalizing abortion is an extremely stupid idea devised by cynical
political strategists pandering to the darker side of the American
psyche, the side that likes to punish rather than prevent, pandering
also to citizens who lack a deep understanding of the needs of women,
and who oppose abortion because they have not thought long and hard
about the realities facing women and families.
Criminalizing abortion is a monstrously stupid idea because for the most part it will force abortion underground and overseas. Affluent women will fly to other countries or other states. Poor women are the ones who will suffer most: either they will have unwanted children or run the risk of having an unsafe abortion done by an incompetent provider.
Restricting poor people's access to abortion is a morally deplorable idea that has infected many Republican state legislatures, closing clinics through inventing all kinds of rules and regulations that make it impossible for the clinics to continue operating, in states like Texas and Alabama and many others.
The real way forward to reaching the goal of reducing abortions to a very low level in a humane and intelligent way is very simple.
First, provide access to effective contraceptives at an affordable cost: this is especially important people with low incomes, including teenagers and adults in low wage jobs.
Second, exert strong pressure on sexually active couples to use strong contraception unless they want a child in the very near future. Germany has very few abortions largely because they are efficient users of contraception and are good at avoiding unwanted conceptions. The term "sex education" has too many negatives: it should be reframed as "family life education", and train teenagers to act responsibly and intelligently when they enter sexual relationships. I don't care if the "family life education" program has a component that urges abstinence until marriage. What I do care about is that our children be very thoroughly educated in the theory and practice of responsible sexual behavior, including detailed and accurate knowledge about contraception.
Of course this way forward would deprive the Republican party of one of its principal campaign weapons -- namely promises to prevent abortion through making it a criminal offense. Much more dramatic to lock people up for aborting than to help them avoid unwanted pregnancies.
And this is what really makes me humongously disgusted with the cynical political calculations of certain very ruthless and influential Republican strategists, who should be indicted, convicted, and exiled to some island paradise where they can do no harm, sipping margaritas in the sun.
Indictment One: The strategists looked at the surveys and the focus group research and found it will be popular to defund Planned Parenthood and to close family planning clinics, because some people don't like to pay taxes to help anyone else, and because others believe God dislikes contraception, or think the U.S. population is too small, or think it is not the proper function of government to improve access to contraceptives.
Indictment Two: The self-same strategists looked at the data and found that the groups whose votes they want are mostly against aid to low income families, either because they think the poor are lazy, or that the poor will never rise out of poverty if they become dependent on government aid.
The upshot of all this hardball strategizing is that poor women are being deprived of contraceptive access, then prevented from having abortions and then forced to have unwanted children, while at the same time experiencing cutbacks in income supplements like the earned income tax credit, housing subsidies, food stamps, and in some particularly odious states, access to Medicaid.
This is not the Republican party of Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Nixon or Ford. Instead the party has drifted away from generosity of spirit, and towards grudging meanness.