Need I say it again? I LOVE KATHA POLLITT. See how she takes on William “I’m pro-choice, but abortion is bad, sad, tragic, repent now!” Saletan here.
Saletan:
Take another look at that California poll I mentioned. Seventy-one percent of respondents don’t want Roe overturned. Seventy-six percent favor “the government providing funding to programs that provide teens with birth control methods or contraceptives.” Eighty-nine percent say it’s appropriate to tell high-school kids “how to use and where to get contraceptives”; 54 percent say it’s appropriate to tell middle-school kids the same thing. Yet 56 percent agree that “it would be a good thing to reduce the number of abortions.” And here’s the kicker: “Which of the following do you believe would be most effective in reducing the number of abortions?” Option 1: “Enacting more restrictive abortion laws.” Option 2: “Providing more access to contraception.” Five percent of respondents choose both. Twenty percent choose restrictive abortion laws. Sixty-six percent choose contraception.
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Don’t these numbers refute your conflation of opposition to abortion with opposition to sex? You say it’s impossible to make contraceptive diligence a moral issue because contraception comes from the “anti-Puritan side” of our culture, and people who oppose abortion, being Puritans, also oppose birth control. How, then, do you explain the 30 percent to 35 percent of respondents in this poll who joined the majority for reducing abortions but also joined the majorities for government-funded contraception and contraceptive education? Given that they control the majority on all three questions, wouldn’t you like to have them on your side?
Saying, “I’d like to prevent unintended pregnancies, and so we should make contraception more available” is a whole lot different than saying, “Abortion is awful, and that’s why we should make contraception more available.” Just because most people recognize that abortion is often a last-resort choice that no women want to be in a positition of having to make doesn’t mean that it’s inherently “bad.” No one wants to be in the position to have to amputate a limb, or have open-heart surgery, but that doesn’t make those things universally terrible. Further, abortion will always be necessary. Contraception will fail. Women will be raped. Fetal abnormalities will be discovered. Fetuses will die in utero. Pregnant women will have health- and life-threatening complications. No one wants these things to happen, but they do.
And the people who want to see a decrease in the unintended pregnancy rate, and therefore a decrease in the birth rate, by utilizing contraception and sex education are pro-choice. The mainstream “pro-life” groups are the ones hostile to this idea.
Anyway, I think you hit the nail on the head when you suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that the only way to move some people to support contraception is “by reminding them that it prevents something even worse.” That’s exactly what I’m proposing: to pit contraception squarely against abortion, not as an offstage concession but as our central message. A lot of people who yawn at contraception when it’s part of a campaign to reduce teen pregnancy will wake up in a hurry when it’s part of a campaign to reduce abortions.
…so we should shame women into using contraception, by telling them that if they don’t, they’ll have to have a terrible, awful abortion and aren’t they stupid. Sounds great. As usual, Pollitt responds much better than I ever could:
After I sent off my entry yesterday afternoon I asked myself: What exactly are Will and I arguing about? We both agree, after all, that it’s better not to have an unwanted pregnancy in the first place than to have an abortion, we both agree that America needs lots more birth control and lots more realistic sex education. We both want emergency contraception to be widely available over the counter. We both want men to take more responsibility—to use condoms, for example. If you and I were actually designing policy, I’m guessing we’d see the practical piece much the same way: Ramp up that funding! Build those clinics! Make health insurance companies pay for birth control like they pay for Viagra. We’d ask stern questions about how that male pill is coming along and about when we might see some new options for women. We’d look at the experience of countries with lower rates of unwanted pregnancy, teen births, and abortion (every other Western industrialized nation); we’d interview experts and study the literature, we’d set up a bunch of pilot programs to see what worked best with what sub-populations.
And then would come the ad campaign. Mine would have pictures of cheerful girls and women: “At my local Saletan clinic, the doctors are great and birth control is free! They really took time with me and answered all my questions. Best of all, I can call anytime and talk to a nurse in total privacy. Thanks to Saletan, I’ll have a baby when I’m ready—but not till then.” Yours would show a spiky-haired, pierced, and tattooed girl looking sullen and miserable: “I stayed out all night and forgot to take my Pill. Now I’m having an abortion and it’s totally my fault. Go on, hate me, I deserve it! If only I’d listened to the doctors at Saletan.” Or maybe you could have a picture of a stern-looking nun standing in front of an abortion clinic: “Birth Control: Because Purgatory’s better than Hell.”
Word, Katha.
When you, Will, think about preventing unwanted pregnancy, you think about how to sell contraception to a polling demographic that already supports it but for some reason I still don’t get, need the extra oomph of being able to make rather harsh judgments about women who have unwanted pregnancies and abortions. When I think about unwanted pregnancy I think about it as an issue in women’s lives. I think about what women need to control their fertility, to have the kids they want and not have the kids they don’t want. On that, there isn’t going to be one simple answer. Obviously, there’s the medical piece: For millions of women, affordable, easily accessible reproductive health care does not exist; they don’t get the individualized, consistent care those fortunate enough to have a personal gynecologist or the use of an excellent college health service take for granted. But there’s a social and economic piece, too: poverty, sexual violence, and coercion, family dysfunction, not thinking you have much of a future anyway, sexual Puritanism. Ideally, unmarried women are not supposed to have sex: Sex is bad. Teenage sex is doubly bad (but only for girls). That is why so many women who themselves had kids too soon and mourn their lost opportunities don’t talk to their daughters about sex except to say don’t have any; they may preach and plead and warn, but they don’t get them birth control, they don’t help them be both sexual and safe. Nor, since we need to keep men in the picture here, do they, or the men in their lives, talk to their sons about condoms. At the family level, there is just huge denial. I’ve met plenty of mothers in my own educated, urban, secular social class who will say things like, “I don’t think my kid is having sex,” or, “I think my kid may have started having sex,” and they kind of lower their voice, as if they’re afraid someone might overhear them. And the mothers are, in my experience, much more clued in than the dads, who hand off the whole area of sexuality to their wives.
And I feel the need to highlight her final paragraph, because it’s one of the best pro-choice statements I’ve ever read:
You ask what my own view of abortion is. I think the meaning of abortion is what the woman says it is: For a woman who wants a child but can’t have this one it can be sad; for a woman who doesn’t want a baby, it can feel like a huge relief, like having your whole life given back to you. Negative feelings—the sense of the road not taken, that maybe you would have wanted to take had life been different, the feeling that you chose yourself instead of the baby-to-be and maybe that means you are not a good woman, the feeling that you messed up somehow—are often confused with morality, but they are not the same. Morality has to do with rights and duties and obligations between people. So, no: I do not think terminating a pregnancy is wrong. A potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. I don’t think women should have to give birth just because a sperm met an egg. I think women have the right to consult their own wishes, needs, and capacities and produce only loved, wanted children they can care for—or even no children at all. I think we would all be better off as a society if we respected women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and concentrated on caring well for the born. There is certainly enough work there to keep us all very busy.