Good sentences: From A. Serwer of TAPPED

For some reason, a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is treated as amenable to compromise while the principles of people who oppose that right are inviolate. I think that’s part of why it took so long for Bart Stupak’s opposition to the current health-care bill to be unraveled for what it is: an attempt to force tougher restrictions on women’s rights.

Read the quote in context here.

The rest of his post, a discussion of anti-abortion menace Bart Stupak, is also worth a read.

If I was to attempt a gender-neutral guess for why abortion rights are held to be violable amenable to compromise it would be that abortions are generally contingent — a fallback required by the failure of something else such as the failure of contraception, the failure to obtain or use contraception, a failure of contraceptive availability or affordability or reliability, a failure to provide (or learn from) comprehensive sex education, a failure to acknowledge a woman’s decision to avoid pregnancy in the first place, and of course a failure to recognize a woman’s right to make choices prior to her becoming pregnant, a failure to recognize that women are self-interested human beings and not magical/mythical knockoffs of maternal ideals, and so on.

But that would be a big if. And I don’t like the framing in the first place! Instead the right to choose to terminate or keep a pregnancy is an inviolate human right of self-determination, which includes the right to reproductive self-determination. And that’s the difference between the lie of being “pro-life” (meaning only “anti-abortion” but not, say, anti-miscarriage, anti-stillbirth, anti-maternal-mortality etc.) and the truth of being authentically pro-choice. Abortion per se is actually a fairly component of the right to reproductive self-determination and autonomy.

Recognizing that greatly tempers the exclusivity of anti-abortion “inviolability.” Which is why, incidentally, the anti-abortion forces would prefer to retain their framing.