Learning Experience

I'm reluctant to get all moralistic with people who choose things for themselves that I would not choose for them. As a concept, I'm in favor of legal abortion, and would never want to see it outlawed. But I'm often disappointed with pro-choice activists because I believe they lose sight of the goal we all share, when you really get down to it: fewer abortions performed.

We all want the same thing, pro-choice or pro-life though we may be, or even just disinterested. Nobody wants it to be just another form of birth control. But in the effort to defend what they believe is eternally threatened, pro-choice advocates seem unwilling to concede anything, to even appear to be retreating on any front, and in the end it hurts their arguments. For example:

At a pivotal time in the abortion debate, Ms. magazine is releasing its fall issue next week with a cover story titled "We Had Abortions," accompanied by the names of thousands of women nationwide who signed a petition making that declaration.

...

Tyffine Jones, 27, of Jackson, Miss., said she had no hesitation about
signing - although she lives in a state where restrictions on abortion are
tough and all but one abortion clinic has been closed. Jones said she got an abortion 10 years ago - enduring harassment from protesters when she entered the
clinic - in order to finish high school. She went on to become the first member
of her family to graduate from college, and hopes at some point to attend law
school.

"I wanted to do something bigger with myself - I didn't want to be
stopped by anything," she said in a telephone interview.

(emphasis mine)

I have to wonder if the reporter who wrote this story realized what an unfortunate quote Ms. Jones gave there, and if not it's a measure of how deranged-sounding parts of the pro-choice argument can sound to the average person. Because if having a child is something that "stops" you, if it's not something "bigger than" yourself, then I don't want you to have a child. But that's not the same as saying I think killing fetuses is a solution to poor reproductive judgment. Isn't it odd that the one kind of empowerment pro-choice activists absolutely refuse to advocate is the kind that would keep you from getting pregnant in the first place? I think it takes a hell of a lot more "empowerment" to get you ready for an abortion than to get you ready to say no to sex, but the latter is deemed impossible by some, to the point that it's not worth talking about in their eyes. Odd.