Sara Robinson has a thought-provoking post up at The Group News Blog about the shift from surgical to medical abortions, and how anti-choice activists/terrorists are likely to respond. Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
But, while most of the country was looking the other way, the entire abortion battlefield quietly, slowly, and irrevocably changed. Over the past seven years, medical technology has been gradually shifting the supply lines through which abortion is delivered. The change crept in so silently that, for a long time, very few people noticed. But suddenly, according to an article this week in the Washington Post, that one subtle change — in the form of mifepristone, aka RU-486 — is starting to make a fundamental difference in the way abortion happens — and is talked about — in this country.
According to the Post’s Rob Stein:
“At a time when the overall number of abortions has been steadily declining, a new survey reported that RU-486-induced abortions have been rising by 22 percent a year and now account for 14 percent of the total – and more than 1 in 5 of early abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.”
It’s not the actual numbers that are interesting here; it’s the trendline. RU-486 has been available in the US since 2000; and its use has been increasing at a slow but steady rate ever since. What’s new is that it’s finally approaching critical mass, gaining acceptance with the vast numbers of doctors who’ve wanted to offer their patients the option of a safe early abortion, but simply couldn’t take on the daunting social, financial, or physical risks of performing the operation themselves. Increasingly, year by year, drug has allowed more and more of these doctors and their patients to do a complete end-run around the crazies at the clinic door. And this has gone on long enough now that it’s starting to change the way we approach the whole issue, on several fronts.
Assuming every woman who went through the doors at a Planned Parenthood clinic was there for an abortion was always the same flavor of stupid as assuming that that everyone who goes into Safeway must be buying beer. Even so: as RU-486 becomes The Way It’s Done, those women aren’t easy pickings any more. You can’t just hang out in front of the clinic on Tuesdays and Thursdays and assume everyone coming up the sidewalk is a slutty, bamboozled, innocent, callous-hearted baby-killing bitch who just doesn’t understand that it’s a baaayyybbeee, that she has Options, and how much Jesus loves her.
That era, as I said, is coming to an end. Increasingly, those women are bypassing the clinic entirely. Instead, they’re showing up for regular appointments, on all days of the week, at doctors’ offices all over town. Which makes it hard on the berzerkers: after all, there’s no legitimate way of knowing which doctors are in the abortion business now, or why any individual woman is seeing any given doctor on any given day. Our culture has strong, long-standing customs protecting discussions between doctors and patients; and as abortion increasingly slips behind that shady wall, that decision is finally ending up exactly where we’ve always argued it should be — as a private matter between a woman and her doctor.
Over the long haul, making early pregnancy termination a common piece of most doctors’ everyday medical practice will be the final step in normalizing abortion, removing its stigma, and ensuring that it will eventually be accepted as an unquestioned and relatively uncontroversial right.
What’s likely to happen — because it’s what usually happens when radical groups are driven to the fringes — is that the moderate members who make up the bulk of the movement let go and move on, leaving a much smaller fanatical core to carry on. Without that moderate influence to provide a constant, tempering reality check, the craziness level heats up and becomes concentrated. The remaining True Believers have wrapped up their lives and careers and (in some sad cases) their entire reason for being in the fight. For these professional warriors, losing control of the battlefield — in this case, losing control of women, and the presumed male prerogative to control women’s fertility — may prove to be a fate too shattering to contemplate.
When this kind of defeat and isolation happens, we’re usually wise to expect trouble. As abortion moves from the public battlefield to the privacy of homes and offices over the next decade or so, the sheer frustration over losing so much ground could very well drive an angry remnant of fanatics toward a final frenzy of unprecedented and spectacular terrorist violence.
But in medical abortion, the agent of termination is not surgical instruments in the hands of the doctor in an office, but drugs in the hands of the patient at home. That fact literally puts the event far more directly under women’s control — a shift that may finally force them to fully reckon with the fact that women are ultimately the responsible moral agents in every abortion decision. And if they do make this leap, we can expect it to get very nasty indeed as the personal becomes political on a whole new level. Our increased privacy will be met with overwhelming publicity: websites, public flyers, picketing in front of our houses, harassing phone calls to employers and family members. The more private the choice becomes, the harder they will fight back by trying to make it as public as possible.
From there, it’s easy to step off into truly frightening images culled from The Handmaid’s Tale. That’s one possible outcome to be aware of; but it’s far from the most likely one. More likely, public revulsion at these outrageous privacy invasions and violent tactics will be their undoing — putting the anti-choice movement in such bad odor that it will lose all of its credibility, and most of its cultural support. We’ll know we’re getting close when the conventional wisdom accepts that “anti-abortionists” are out to do to our families what they did to Terry Schiavo’s; that “pro-life” is exactly equivalent with “pro- snooping- in- your- family’s- business”; that “saving babies” is usually a self-righteous bully’s excuse for harassing and assaulting women; and that “anti-abortion violence” is, precisely, the modern definition of “domestic terrorism.”