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While discussing the… problematic issue of an alt-religious cult insisting that certain of its members have abortions Jos of Feministing illustrates the difference between being “pro-abortion” and being pro-choice.

Abortion should always be an available option, but how someone acts on their own pregnancy must be their decision. To coerce someone to have an abortion, to take away that decision, is the very definition of anti-choice.

She said it here.

When you’re pro-choice it’s all about supporting choice! If one was merely pro-abortion one would be indifferent when someone’s decision to continue her pregnancy isn’t respected.

Abortion services really should always be an available option because not everyone wishes to remain pregnant, nor is everyone medically able to safely remain pregnant. But that’s just one part of being pro-choice.

Summary: The way “reducing abortions” is almost always framed distracts us from the more legitimate, and legitimately pro-choice issue of reducing the number of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. Here’s what we should be doing instead. And why. And why.

Silvana Naguib, who’s now blogging at TAPPED says…

Ever since President Bill Clinton introduced his succinct position on abortion: “safe, legal, and rare,” the goal of reducing the number of abortions has been a stated aim of abortion rights as well as anti-abortion groups. Last year, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama promised the pope that he would make efforts to reduce the number of abortions in the United States.

But should decreasing abortion rates be a stated goal of the reproductive-justice movement? Aimée Thorne-Thomsen says no. She makes the case that we should instead focus on increasing all options for women, expanding their liberty to make the right choice for them.

She said it here.

I say no too, for basically the same reasons. Framing the issue in terms of numbers of abortions avoided is going about it completely backwards.

Back before Roe was handed down our argument was that abortion was necessary as a fallback for contraceptive failure and/or failure of personal autonomy and/or failure to use contraception due to lack of education, access, affordability, safety, or usability of contraception.

And the reason we framed it that way back then is that we knew that even when it became legal, is that abortion is more expensive, more time-consuming, more uncomfortable, and medically more risky than any other method of avoiding unplanned, unwanted pregnancies.

Point being that making abortion “rare” should only be a highly-desirable outcome of making unwanted, unplanned pregancies rare.

And the obvious way to get there has no, zero, none relationship to restrictions on abortion. Instead it has everything to do with making a variety of contraception options safe, legal, available, reliable, usable, and affordable for women and men. It has everything to do with comprehensive sex education that includes not just “birds and bees” biology, anatomy, and technique but also appropriate modeling of negotiation and respect for decision-makers not just regarding sex but regarding relationships as well. Heck, for extra credit you can even toss abstinence advocacy on top of all that.

And the result of those policies (ok, except maybe the abstinence part) really would make abortion rare. But as a result, not a goal.

Of course no matter how well all of the above might work there will still always be a need for the fundamental right to fall back on abortion. So no matter how rare it becomes abortion will always need to be safe and legal and there.

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Can I just add one more thing about reframing the question away from abortion (where secular and lay opponents work hard to keep it) and towards preventing unplanned, unwanted pregnancy (where they really, really don’t want to go?)

When the issue is framed in terms of abortion then an increase in the raw numbers is considered a “failure” and a decrease is considered “success.” That’s great for Popes and the rest of the nopes, so you can see why they love that way of looking at it.

If instead you start looking at it in terms of education, autonomy, and in terms of safe, affordable, available, useable, and reliable birth control then an increase in the number of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies becomes the point of failure and a corresponding decrease becomes success. And an increase or decrease in abortion becomes a sideshow.

Popes and other nopes prefer to keep the focus on abortion rather than unplanned, unwanted pregnancies because with the former they can pretend they’re part of the solution. With the latter there’s no way they can pretend they’re not part of the problem.

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.

Sharon Johnson of WE.News says (bold and italics mine)

A bill under contention in Nebraska proposes joining 14 states and the District of Columbia in providing prenatal care for all pregnant, low-income women regardless of immigrant status under CHIP, the children’s health insurance program.

It is authored by Republican Sen. Kathy Campbell, a long-time advocate for women and children, who says the bill is “morally right because all children deserve to be born healthy.” Republican Gov. Dave Heineman opposes it, saying taxpayer-funded benefits should not reach people without legal citizenship.

Read the quote in context here.

Oddly, in 2006 the Nebraska Right to Life Political Action Committee aggressively endorsed Gov. Heineman’s reelection, saying abortion-rights opponents “got more action in 15 months from Heineman than we did out of [previous governor] Johanns in six years.”

And by “oddly,” in this case, I mean that the Nebraska Right to Life PAC steadfastedly supports the bill Heineman’s threatening to veto. In direct violation of blogger protocol (we’re supposed to just sit in our pajamas in our mom’s basements) I called them to ask. The woman who answered said NRTL believes strongly in prenatal care for everyone regardless of status.

Whatever else one might say about any organization opposed to reproductive rights one can say that at least on this issue NRTL has a consistent position. Whatever else one can say about Heineman, he clearly doesn’t.

And it’s not just about the choice issue that he’s being inconsistent by the way. He can’t claim this is about his nominal conservative principle of “States Rights.” The bill is a Nebraska initiative to restore a program that was cut from this year’s Medicare legislation. He can’t claim this is about his nominal conservative principle of “fiscal responsibility” either. By replacing Medicare funds with CHIP, which has more generous reimbursement rates, the bill would save Nebraska taxpayers almost $4 million a year.

Instead, like Congressman Bart Stupak, Heineman’s position is pure, gratuitous Teabagging.

Via Matthew Yglesias,