Agonist (Ian Welsh):
... (C)hoice is non-negotiable issue for me. I've been pro-choice ever since I first thought about the issue as a teenager.The reason is elemental, as it is on both sides. If I were a woman, I would want to have the choice available to me. I would want to control my body. Without that ability to control her own body, a woman loses a certain amount of freedom.
MyDD (Matt Stoller):
The right to an abortion is about the right for women to control their own lives, and I won't accept any arguments that suggest that women shouldn't have the right to make very personal decisions or should have to make them in some sort of legal jeopardy. That's just immoral. I'm all for legislation reducing the number of abortions through legal assistance, economic help, and sex education, though I would point out that these tend to decrease all social ills and so I would support them for other reasons as well. But anything that makes the state sanction abortion as anything but an intensely private choice by women (and men to a lesser extent) in a vulnerable and difficult position in their lives is wrong, wrong, wrong.
I come at it first from a fundamental belief in civil liberties. It's clear what the "right to life" agenda is and it has nothing to do with the fetus these people pretend to care so much for (until its born.) It has to do with sexual behavior. ... I'm a big believer in the fundamental argument which is that if women don't own their own bodies they are not free. It's just that simple.
My Left Wing (Lilian M. Friedberg):
When my mother was "forced"--not once, not twice, but three times at least--to bring a child into the world which she could not feed, there were no aspirations to be abandoned, no childhood dreams to be shattered, no adolescence or naiveté to be lost: that had already gone down the tubes when she became the primary breadwinner in the family as a teenager--waitressing and cleaning houses to feed and clothe her younger siblings.I was also the product of rape. Marital rape. It must have been a very difficult decision for my mother: this child, to keep or not to keep. She kept. Even though she could not afford it. Even though she must have known what she was keeping was a lifetime reminder of rape--and of her own inability to "provide"--for yet another "unwanted child".
We both bore the scars of that decision-and to this day, I cannot tell you whether her decision was right. I've written about it ; many a time.
Not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception? If you cruise around their web sites, you see that even those groups that don’t explicitly oppose the use of birth control don’t support it, either. For example, you can search the National Right to Life web site for a kind word on the responsible use of birth control until you turn purple; it isn’t there. But as Cristina Page documents, many state chapters have taken firms stands in opposition to any form of birth control.
Is there a corresponding degree of fanaticism on the pro-legality side? Not that I have found. No pro-legality association suggests that abortions should be forced on women who don’t want them. No pro-legality group I know of advocates abandoning the gestational limits on elective abortion set by Roe v. Wade. Not NARAL, not Planned Parenthood, not any of their affiliates. Instead, “legals” work to preserve the legal rights outlined in Roe v. Wade. And Roe v. Wade allows states to ban late-term elective abortions and place some restrictions on mid-term abortions. The notion that Roe v. Wade allows a woman to waltz into an abortion clinic and terminate a third-trimester pregnancy just because she feels like it is not, and never has been, true. Yet pro-legality organizations often are accused of being just as absolutist and extremist ...
Norbizness (from two years ago):
As a uterus-free person, this may be my first and last post on Roe v. Wade, but the disingenuous, historically fallacious, and insulting column by David Brooks (other comments here) required a little clean-up and attention. ...When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.
First of all, I live in Texas. In this, the year of our Lord 2005, we are trying to rip foster children from the loving homes that gay and bisexual couples are providing for them. I'm pretty sure that the 14 million women in this state would be enjoying no such right, nor would they be getting bus vouchers for the nearest state that would (California? Iowa?). The idea that the religious right would have never developed as a political force in the absence of Roe v. Wade is absolutely nuts; they were there all along and would have fought state-by-state to assert their political power.
Planned Parenthood's Lobby Day at the Texas Capitol is February 28.
