Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says in terms of Matt Yglesias’s somewhat thumb-fingered reframing of the abortion-legalization debate

One of the big time reasons [anti-abortion activists] make a lot of noise about babies (when they don’t give a fuck, really) and otherwise try to package their views as harm reduction (abstinence-only supposedly spares you from heartbreak, abstaining from contraceptions spares you from being called a “contracepting woman”, etc.) is because if they came straight out and admitted that they think people should just quit fucking is that being against sex outright is going to go over as well with people as trying to ban ice cream. We should put more effort into luring anti-choicers into debating on our terms, and force the issue to make them argue against frequent and fun sex.

Read the quote in context here.

She follows up with another point Yglesias brings up about the virtue of reducing the need for abortion through contraception vs. reducing the availability (but not the absolute rate) through legislation or terrorism.

That said, I don’t think of “reduce abortions” as something that’s strictly arguing on right wing turf, for a couple of major reasons. One, it shows that wingnuts are fucking liars and hypocrites—they say they hate abortion and want to stop it, but doggedly pursue policies (restricting contraception access, abstinence-only education, defunding Planned Parenthood) that will increase the abortion rate. So this study can and will be used to point out that it’s not abortion that’s the motivation for anti-choicers, but their hostility to sex. Which puts the debate on our turf—why do they hate sex so much that they wish to punish women with dirty abortions that will maim and kill them for fucking, which is not only not a crime but a pleasant past time.

The other reason is that “reduce abortions” is a pro-choice, pro-sex frame in the personal lives of many women. Like me—I personally wish to reduce my own abortions because abortions suck. They are painful and expensive and you can’t have sex for weeks afterwards. I’ve had to consider this in a way that someone like Matt hasn’t, because having an abortion in my lifetime is a distinct possibility. For a lot of sexually active pro-choice straight women, an abortion is upsetting not because of the right wing “life” frame, but because it fucks with their own sense of control over their bodies and makes them feel like they fucked up what should be relatively simple, using contraception right. Now, a lot of women are way too hard on themselves—I bet most of us have better track records at avoiding unplanned pregnancy than at not locking our keys in the car—but the point still stands. For a huge percentage of Americans, especially women of child-bearing age, the idea of reducing abortions invokes not having more babies but less unplanned pregnancies.

I love this! Reducing abortions through contraception doesn’t have to have anything to do at all with about avoiding abstract, pin-head dancing exercises in “morality.” At all. It can be about further reducing risk down the pregnancy-to-term -> late-term abortion -> 2nd trimester -> 1st trimester -> hormonal contraception -> other contraception continuum for women. It can be about eliminating the cost, disruption, time, and lost opportunities of unplanned, unwanted pregnancy. In other words, as Marcotte clearly intends (if Yglesias didn’t quite), the debate can occur inside our frame instead of the ‘nutter frame.