More on abortion

Three Decades After Roe, a War We Can All Support - New York Times

By a further co-incidence to my recently posting about abortion, William Saletan (who writes for Slate and has written a book on the abortion issue in America) has written a piece in the New York Times (linked above) with which I can pretty much agree.

An extract:

"The problem is abortion - the word that's missing from all the checks you've written to Planned Parenthood, Naral Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Organization for Women. Fetal pictures propelled the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act through Congress. And most Americans supported both bills, because they agree with your opponents about the simplest thing: It's bad to kill a fetus.

They're right. It is bad. I know many women who decided, in the face of unintended pregnancy, that abortion was less bad than the alternatives. But I've never met a woman who wouldn't rather have avoided the pregnancy in the first place.

This is why the issue hasn't gone away. Abortion, like race-conscious hiring, generates moral friction. Most people will tolerate it as a lesser evil or a temporary measure, but they'll never fully accept it. They want a world in which it's less necessary. If you grow complacent or try to institutionalize it, they'll run out of patience. That's what happened to affirmative action. And it'll happen to abortion, if you stay hunkered down behind Roe."

This is not a million miles from what I said towards the end of my previous post.

He goes on to say (to the "pro choice" side):

"....you can't eliminate the moral question by ignoring it. To eliminate it, you have to agree on it: Abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero. But by conceding that, you don't end the debate, you narrow it. Once you agree that the goal is fewer abortions, the only thing left to debate is how to get there."

And the idea is as follows:

"The pro-choice path to those results is simple. Help every woman when she doesn't want an abortion: before she's pregnant. That means abstinence for those who can practice it, and contraception for everybody else. Nearly half of the unintended pregnancies in this country result in abortions, and at least half of our unintended pregnancies are attributable to women who didn't use contraception. The pregnancy rate among these women astronomically exceeds the pregnancy rate among women who use contraception. The No. 1 threat to the unborn isn't the unchurched. It's the unprotected."

This makes a lot of sense. It is also why I could not wholeheartedly support the Right to Life movement, if it is still (as it was many years ago at least) dominated by those who take Catholic teaching against all contraception seriously.

I think Saletan is really spot on in showing a way forward here.

Update: I have corrected my initial mis-spelling of Saletan. I often go back and correct typos and my english after my initial post, and hope no one has noticed before I get to do the correction!