While I’m not trying to hate on Hillary’s speech too much, I have to say that I really loved Ellen Goodman’s latest column, “Whose common ground?”
Check it:
Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?
If there is any shared turf in this debate it would be the one that both Clinton and Kennedy bid for: a flat-out campaign to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Yet at this moment, the FDA has once again delayed approval of putting Plan B, the after-the-act contraceptive, on the drug store shelf.
…Safe, legal, and rare. We're already at the meeting ground. The question is not how far we move but when the other side will get there.
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
Also, I keep trying to make sense of the fact that anti-choice states spend a whole lot less on child-related issues, likee foster care, infant health care, child welfare, etc. Seems to me that they are just bent on keeping the woman to be a child-bearing machine, because although their whole official stance on anti-abortion is teen promiscuity, teens are not the only ones doing abortions. Actually, does anyone have data on what percentage of all women who have abotions are teens? It can't be abnormally large, can it?
I know I managed to change my husband's stance on women's rights and abortions (he's from Texas and voted for Bush the first time around - before I got my hands on him ^_^) and that was because he listened, and I had facts. I keep hoping that maybe there's hope for other people, but I guess they need to at least try to listen...
Abortion statistics by age are at http://www.abortionfacts.com/statistics/age.asp and the majority of abortions are performed in the 20-24 age bracket, not on teenagers, who have about as many abortions as the 25-29 bracket.
Minor note on Plan B as well: as far it concerns much of the anti-abortion crowd, Plan B *is* an abortion (some of them object to birth control pills that rely on preventing implantation for the same reason). It's all part of the "life begins at conception" schtick.
*sigh*
I wonder how many people I could kill by apoplexy if I created a flash animation spoofing an anti-abortion advertisement by having them moving on from objecting to terminating zygotes to objecting to terminating cancer cells as well (after all, they're also living, replicating human tissue, right?).
Goodman doesn't go nearly far enough.
Nicole Colson at Dissident Voice does, though:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb05/Colson0203.htm