[This is a follow-up to my previous post. It’s also, I hope, a less incoherent reiteration. My first college writing instructor said that the more important the paper is the fewer mistakes you’re likely to make. I may need to add “...unless you feel extremely passionate about the issue you’re writing about, and especially if it’s about something you should have been writing frequent, smaller posts about all along. Oh well. I’ll resume posting more salacious material after I’ve settled down a bit. —fl]

Based on objections to Garance Franke-Ruta’s TNR article and follow-up post on Tapped I need to say I don’t think anyone on our side of the debate is questioning anyone’s right to have multiple abortions. I’m certainly not!

I do agree with Garance and almost anyone with a brain that if 50% of abortions are second or subsequent ones then something is wrong elsewhere in the system. (Considering the current political climate this is barkingly obvious but bears repeating over and over.)

Something is wrong in particular because, having escorted friends and strangers to have abortions since before Roe v. Wade, and having sat with my partner during an excruciating post-miscarriage D&E committed by an inept and clearly unpracticed pro-life ob/gyn, I’m aware by proxy that abortions are usually painful enough not to be the birth control method of choice. They’re also expensive, inconvenient, and while they’re by no means as risky as pregnancy to term they’re still far riskier than finding ways not to get pregnant in the first place.

So that 50% number bugs me not because abortions are intrinsically bad, immoral, unethical, or wrong (they’re not) but because a lot of women are being let down in way too many ways. I’ll enumerate three: 1) They aren’t receiving adequate education and/or 2) they don’t have access to affordable/followable/reliable contraception and/or 3) they aren’t receiving adequate social support (informal and institutional) to reliably use whatever education and contraception they do get. This isn’t necessarily surprising in a country that’s surpassed only by Iran in terms of barriers to contraception but it’s still problematic.

Having volunteered for NARAL back before they repurposed themselves as NARAL/Pro-choice America I’m comfortable with the point that they’re an advocacy group and not necessarily a contraception advocacy group. On the other hand I’m also aware that, at least into the 1990s (according to a Washington Monthly article on contraception I took notes on back then) Planned Parenthood contributed to a deadlock situation in Congress (at least the Senate and, I believe, the House) that effectively blocked all new appropriations and legislation linked to contraception. (The article named Planned Parenthood as one of a group of pro-choice advocates who refused to support initiatives that didn’t include funding for abortion while a group of anti-choice advocates including The Christian Coalition refused to support initiatives that did. With no support nothing happened for at least ten years. The subsequent Gingrich revolution of 1994 changed the dynamics somewhat but the article predated those changes.) The point being that while NARAL may not have any responsibility for the decades-long neglected state of contraception in America, other progressive, pro-choice groups certainly do.

I ought to add that contraception policy is not irrelevant in this debate. Having bitten the bullet, registered for TNR, and read Garance’s article I’d like to point out what seems to me to be the crux of her lead paragraph: “...when, after a condom failure…” Back in 1970 and 1971 when I was an active volunteer for a sex information and referral service that provided birth-control and abortion assistance we were told that the only form of birth control more useless than condoms was the rhythm method. It’s boggling that 35 years later people are still relying on the damn things. I appreciate that they’re helpful for limiting the spread of infectious disease but I really wonder if several billion dollars spent over the last 20-25 years might not have produced something more reliable with no more side effects had any major group with serious pro-choice credentials been seriously lobbying for it!

I can’t speak for any other middle-aged men, and I certainly don’t presume to speak for any women, but I would like to see the number of necessary abortions drop by at least half, and preferably by a factor of 10, and I see doing everything possible to help women avoid the need for additional abortions as a good place to start. Here’s why I’d like to reduce that number.

The current figure, “500,000 abortions performed a year,” has a galvanizing ring to it. This certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the troglodytes running their anti-choice scams. Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry is on record saying that birth control policies need to be curtailed to keep the number of abortions at an inflammatorily high level. His very well-founded (in my opinion) fear is that if safe, effective, and available contraception was widely accessible annual abortions would fall to a rate that most American would find acceptable — an eventuality that would (in Terry’s opinion) be a disaster for conservatives. Thus past our failure to address ways to reduce abortions on the demand side — for whatever historical reasons — aids and abets those would instead reduce it on the supply side.

Thus that 50% number really leaps out at me as an opportunity rather than an obstacle or scandal or an irrelevancy. No one I’m aware of sees abortion as an objective good. Instead we see it as an objective necessity that needs to remain an inalienable right. If by reducing that necessity through appropriate and accessible means we can undercut opponents of abortion, and if progressives are dithering about ways to reframe issues to take the pressure off of abortion rights, then we ought to look at this as a way to do it. If ‘wingers, framing the social conditions that produce unwanted pregnancies as an abortion issue are able to peel off moderates uneasy with abortion we have an obligation to reframe those conditions as a contraception and contraception availability issue and bring them back. (It should go without saying that we should be able to do this without in any way compromising abortion as a fundamental right for women who need, want, or even prefer it.)

To make a too-long story short I’m not saying that NARAL needs to tackle this issue. I’m not even saying Planned Parenthood should even though their mission does include contraception. Actually I think both those agencies are already filling critical abortion-related needs and putting the burden on them might not be productive. I am saying, though, that somebody needs to be willing to focus intensely on the issues of contraception, contraception education, and contraception availability.

Incidentally I can think of a whole mess of Democrats who are looking for better ways to distinguish their policies from those of their main political rivals. If I thought they were maxed out managing other pressing issues I’d be more reluctant to add another plank to their platform but actually I think they’ve got quite a lot of time on their hands since the current administration are having a bit of a train wreck and so I think they could easily do both. But if not them then who? That’s the whole problem because I don’t know. I don’t see anybody in the US who’s trying it. (Pro-Familia comes to mind — they’ve been pretty effective in other countries — but they don’t seem to have much presence here.)

Rather than take pot-shots at Garance or Kevin Drum [who was not associated with the Washington Monthly article I mention above] or others for their (mis)perceived softness on abortion (as some policy bloggers are choosing to do) I’d like to see a little more heat put on the bastards that are trying to shove abortion back into alleys and off-shore facilities and stuff women back into the home where they imagine they belong. Once again there’s a big, big difference between Bill Clinton’s wimpy and compromised “Let’s keep abortion safe, legal, and rare” and my preference which would be to say “Let’s make abortion safe, legal, and rarely necessary” and I’d like to hear someone with more brains, more heart, and more influence than I’ve got out there saying it.